It's all about the dopamine

Dopamine has an incredible job in our brains. It works with mental illness, as well as addiction, and the amount of dopamine your body produces and how you process it depends on genetic factors. Now a new study links dopamine and addiction/impulsivity.

"The people who had the highest levels of dopamine release reported subjectively stronger cravings after we gave them the drug," Buckholtz says. These findings "suggest a neurobiological link between human impulsiveness and drug abuse vulnerability," they said.

Mentally ill people are already pretty impulsive. I wonder if dopamine makes people more impulsive, and mentally ill people even more so?

"Some drugs for psychiatric conditions related to dopamine dysfunction, such as schizophrenia, work in broad strokes with 'kind of a sledgehammer approach,' he explains. Homing in on particular receptors and firing patterns might help develop drugs that could modulate in a 'more targeted and perhaps nuanced way,' he says, helping people with a broad range of dopamine-related ailments."

So this new research could be great for adapting dopamine targeting drugs to mental illness and addiction. Perhaps they'll come up with something good in the near future!