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Mindscape Psychopharmacology2021-10-02

“...and that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something — or tries to. People need things like that to go on living — mental landscapes that have meaning for then, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That's what I think.”

—Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Most psychiatric patients end up on too many and/or the wrong medications. That is a problem for patients, doctors, and payors. It is called irrational polypharmacy.

We have a solution.

A tri-dimensional mental landscape (Mindscape) can be created modeling the major domains/dimensions of the mind: anxiety, mood and cognition. At each moment in time, a person is represented by a point with (x,y,z) coordinates in this 3D space. The sum of points over time is distributed as a cloud, unique to each individual1.

A Mindscape rational psychopharmacology approach2 would be the combination of 3 or more medications, each acting primarily on one dimension (anxiety, mood, or cognition). Depending on where the major pathology is, indicated by where somebody is in their Mindscape, one or another of the medications is used at higher doses and the others at lower doses. With currently available drugs, psychiatric patients should be on various doses of a combination of an anxiolytic, an antidepressant or mood stabilizer, and an antipsychotic, with the higher dose generally in the primary affected dimension. For example, in depression, the antidepressant or mood stabilizer medication would be of primary use, at higher doses, with the anxiolytic and antipsychotic medications of secondary use, at lower doses.

We have released this past week a Mindscape feature as part of our Life x Mind App. It can be used for prescribing medications more rationally by doctors, and for self-discovery by individuals.

Live. Happier. Longer.

Bob

Footnotes

  1. Niculescu AB, Schork NJ, Salomon DR. Mindscape: A convergent perspective on life, mind, consciousness and happiness. Journal of Affective Disorders. 2010 Jun;123(1-3):1-8. ↩

  2. Niculescu AB, Hulvershorn L. Toward Early, Personalized, Rational Polypharmacy In Psychiatry: A Tri-Dimensional Approach. Psychopharm Review; 2010; 45(2): 9-16 ↩