MDMA: Empathogen or Love Potion?

10/29/17, 3*30 PM

MDMA: Empathogen or Love

Potion?
Elsevier

15 December 2010 — MDMA or ‘ecstasy’ increases feelings of empathy and

social connection. These ‘empathogenic’ effects suggest that MDMA might be
useful to enhance the psychotherapy of people who struggle to feel connected
to others, as may occur in association with autism, schizophrenia, or
antisocial personality disorder.

However, these effects have been difficult to measure objectively, and there
has been limited research in humans. Now, University of Chicago
researchers, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, are reporting
their new findings in healthy volunteers in the current issue of Biological
Psychiatry.

Dr. Gillinder Bedi, author, explained: “We found that MDMA produced
friendliness, playfulness, and loving feelings, even when it was administered
to people in a laboratory with little social contact. We also found that MDMA
reduced volunteers' capacity to recognize facial expressions of fear in other
people, an effect that may be involved in the increased sociability said to be
produced by MDMA.”

These data suggest that MDMA produces effects that make others seem more
attractive and friendly, which may serve as a significant motivator in its use
as a recreational drug. Importantly, it also makes others appear less
threatening, which could increase users’ social risk-taking.

“Within the context of treatment, these effects may promote intimacy among
people who have difficulty feeling close to others,” observed Dr. John Krystal,

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Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “However, MDMA distorts one’s perception

of others rather than producing true empathy. Thus, MDMA may cause
problems if it leads people to misinterpret the emotional state and perhaps
intentions of others.”

Certainly, further research in controlled settings is necessary before MDMA

could be considered for use as a psychotherapy treatment. But, these findings
also underscore the need to understand more about the ways in which
different drugs affect social experiences, given that abused drugs are so
commonly used in social settings.

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Notes to Editors:
The article is “Is Ecstasy an “Empathogen”? Effects of ±3,4-
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine on Prosocial Feelings and Identification
of Emotional States in Others” by Gillinder Bedi, David Hyman, and Harriet
de Wit. The authors are affiliated with the Human Behavioral Pharmacology
Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience,
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Bedi is also with the Division on
Substance Abuse, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Department of
Psychiatry, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New
York, New York. The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 68,
Number 12 (December 15, 2010), published by Elsevier.

The authors’ disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in

the article.

John H. Krystal, M.D. is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the

Yale University School of Medicine and a research psychiatrist at the VA
Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of
interests are available here.

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MDMA: Empathogen or Love Potion? 10/29/17, 3*30 PM

Full text of the article mentioned above is available upon request. Contact
Chris J. Pfister at c.pfister@elsevier.com to obtain a copy or to schedule an
interview.

About Biological Psychiatry

This international rapid-publication journal is the official journal of the
Society of Biological Psychiatry. It covers a broad range of topics in
psychiatric neuroscience and therapeutics. Both basic and clinical
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Full-length reports of novel results, commentaries, case studies of unusual
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Psychiatry titles and 13th out of 230 Neurosciences titles in the 2009 ISI
Journal Citations Reports® published by Thomson Reuters. The 2009
Impact Factor score for Biological Psychiatry has increased to 8.926.

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