Today, we'll be talking about psychedelics and addiction psychiatry, what they are, how they

work, and what the research actually tells us.

We'll hear from Dr. Bott, Chief of Addiction Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, who's

been involved in some of the most closely watched psychedelic trials in recent years.

Welcome to the Carlat Psychiatry Podcast.

I'm Dr. Noah Caperso, the editor-in-chief of the Carlat Addiction Treatment Report,

Assistant Medical Director at Connecticut Valley Hospital, and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

How do you define the term psychedelic and how do they work in the brain? Yeah, so, you know, and that term has undergone quite an evolution, right?

I think back in the, as a medical student, you know, I read sort of books, textbooks that talk about, you know, psychotomimetics.

And the idea was that these are substances that mimic psychosis.

But I think they do a lot more than that, right?

So that's not such an accurate term.

I think on the other end of the spectrum, you hear the term anthologents, right, kind of generating

the God within.

And that's a term you hear quite a bit,

but not very scientific. So somewhere in between is this term hallucinogen, generating hallucinations,

but to me, that's also not very accurate. Because from what we see in clinical trials and,

you know, in human experience, hallucinations may be a small part of the

effect, but certainly don't capture everything. So I think the term psychedelic really,

really makes sense, right? Kind of generating or giving rise to the hidden psyche, the hidden

realities of the mind, psychedelic sort of makes sense.

There are a few things that we think about in science.

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