Drugs Against Mental Illness

Neurons communicate using chemicals, the release of a ‘transmitter’, from one brain cell on to the next. By modifying how these transmitters are made in the brain, their availability, the molecular target of their action, or indeed their removal, therapeutic drugs can combat a diverse range of brain disorders.

Although it might seem straightforward to design drugs that target a particular transmitter system in the brain and hence ‘cure’ a disorder, we shall see the situation is far more complex in that there is not a simple one to one matching of one transmitter to one disorder.

The sixth lecture in the series on Exploring the Brain.