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Psychopharmacology

How drugs that act on the brain change mood, thinking and behavior — and how the body handles those drugs along the way.

Cause → effect → explain Diagram study Midterm study guide Review

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Pharmacodynamics

What a drug does once it reaches its target: how tightly it binds, whether it activates, blocks or tunes a receptor, how it raises neurotransmitter indirectly, and how dose-response curves describe potency, efficacy and safety.

Why it matters: Every drug in the course is described by a mechanism of action. Agonist, antagonist, modulator, reuptake inhibitor, enzyme inhibitor and releaser are the vocabulary for everything that follows.
You'll be able to: Name a drug's mechanism of action, predict what happens when it's combined with another drug or stopped suddenly, and read potency, efficacy and safety off a dose-response curve.

How drugs bind: affinity, shape and binding site

Explains what a drug physically does at its target: how tightly it binds (affinity), why its shape matters, where on the receptor it binds, and how long it stays.

Connects to Locks and keys: receptor specificity, agonists and antagonists · Brain and synapse
Connects to The two journeys: pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics · Fundamentals and course themes
Unlocks Agonists: full, partial, inverse and biased
Unlocks Antagonists and allosteric modulators (PAMs and NAMs)
Unlocks Dose-response curves: potency, efficacy, slope and variability

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