Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine, and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Peter, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching, residence, and medical students.

Welcome back to the podcast. I am here once again with Dr. Michael Cummings, a great psychopharmacology

resource. He's been on us in prior talks on schizophrenia, the basics of psychopharm,

anti-psychotics, and psychopathy. Dr. Cummings, welcome back.

Thank you very much. I'm glad to be back. I understand today we're going to talk about

anti-depressants, particularly in relation to treating depression and anxiety disorders.

Yeah, so do you want to start again with a little bit of the history of the antidepressants?

Sure. If you may recall from our previous podcast on the anti-psychotics,

the investigation of antihistamines led to the discovery of promethazine and then to chlorpromazine,

and then the anti-psychotic sort of took off, and there was a period of about a decade of intensive

discovery and investigation of different anti-psychotic compounds. As you might guess,

though, as people made variants of the anti-psychotics or what they thought might be anti-psychotics,

some of the molecules that were produced turned out not to be dopamine antagonists,

but had other properties. One of the first in which that happened was the

tricyclic antidepressant in Mipramine, originally clinically discovered by Dr. Kuhn in Switzerland.

He was working in a psychiatric hospital, and at the time, research was not nearly as

regularized or as systematic as it currently has become, and he was largely experimenting

with a molecule he had been given a Mipramine, which he discovered was not effective in treating

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