#404 ‒ Mental health beyond neurotransmitters: the role of hormones in psychiatry, why symptom reduction isn't enough, and the future of psychedelic therapies | Linus Abrams, M.D.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness. And we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen.

It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterateamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Dr. Linus Abrams, a psychiatrist with nearly thirty-five years of clinical experience specializing in mood disorders and psychopharmacology. After three decades in practice, Linus began rethinking many of the assumptions underlying modern psychiatry, leading him to explore how hormones, metabolism, inflammation, circadian biology in the endocrine system reshape or shape mental health.

Today his work integrates traditional psychiatry with endocrinology, offering a broader framework for understanding the conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and the profound effects of hormonal changes throughout life. I wanted to have Linus on because his work challenges some of our assumptions about how we think about mental health. We spent a lot of time talking about neurotransmitters and psychiatric medications, but I wanted to explore whether we're overlooking other important drivers of brain health and what that means for how we diagnose and treat patients. So in this episode we Talk about why psychiatry should focus not only on reducing symptoms, but also on restoring the full human experience, how psychiatric medications work, their limitations, including why correctly diagnosing bipolar disorder versus unipolar depression is very important as one example. The role hormones including estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and thyroid hormone play in mood, cognition, and mental health across different stages of life. how sleep, metabolism, inflammation, and chronic stress influences mental health.

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