++“Tripless” drugs might open more opportunities for psychiatry. Just don’t call them psychedelics. +
++Today’s psychedelic renaissance is thriving thanks to a list of drugs that you could count on just one hand. MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and DMT are driving a revolution in psychiatry while opening new frontiers in the exploration of consciousness. If you expand to your other hand with drugs like ketamine and ibogaine, there’s enough mystery in that small gang of substances to keep researchers busy for decades. +
++But what if there were hundreds, or thousands, more? Drugs are like tiny Legos that can be rearranged in a staggering variety of ways. Chemists have hardly begun to discover all the endless molecular forms contained within the psychedelic arena. In the 1960s, the biochemist Alexander Shulgin, who introduced MDMA to the world, invented nearly 200 psychedelics (largely in his backyard laboratory, where he used sheet metal to keep the squirrels out). When President Richard Nixon outlawed psychedelics in 1970, drug discovery went dark. +
++Nearly two decades into a revival of psychedelic research, the doors of drug discovery have swung wide open once again, and the latest development is roiling psychedelia, revealing fault lines that split the field into two. +
++The question: Can we tinker just enough with the molecular structure of psychedelic compounds so as to retain their therapeutic benefits, but ditch the trip? And should we? For many, the trip is the point. Cutting it out would be, to use 1960s terminology, a major bummer. Beyond a stream of unusual and profound experiences, many researchers believe that the insights people have on their trips are necessary for securing the long-term benefits, which can range from personally meaningful experiences to treating conditions such as depression or addiction. +
++For others, the trip is a barrier to treatment. Not everyone wants to have their entire consciousness rearranged in unfamiliar and sometimes unsettling ways for a little while. And integrating trips into existing models of therapy is both time-consuming and expensive. In Australia, the first country to legalize medically prescribed psychedelic therapy (which spans multiple days), one psychiatrist’s estimate put the combined cost of medication and the therapists’ time around $10,000 at the estimate’s lower end. In the US, Oregon is the first state to offer licensed access for adults over 21, where a single session costs $2,800. “Take your pick: Comorbidities, cost, convenience, or other challenges will get in the way for some people who may not be able to access those [psychedelic] treatments,” Mark Rus, the CEO of Delix Therapeutics, a company working on developing variations on tripless psychedelics, told me. +
++In 2020, a group of researchers led by Delix co-founder and chemist David Olson published work suggesting tripless psychedelics are possible. In this case, a reengineered form of ibogaine — a psychoactive substance with dissociative properties found in a West African shrub, traditionally used by the Bwiti religion in Gabon and being studied today for its anti-addictive potential — still displayed therapeutic effects while leaving out the distortions of consciousness, at least in mice. In the years since, more papers have come out demonstrating that reengineered psychedelics like LSD can retain therapeutic effects while losing the trip — but again, all in mice. +
++Now, these psychedelic-inspired, tripless drugs are heading into human trials for the first time. In June, Delix Therapeutics announced a successful first round of dosing as part of their Phase I clinical trials of DLX-001, a ”non-hallucinogenic” version of MDMA. If the results replicate in humans, the implications could be significant. Rid of the trip, these drugs could prove safe and therapeutically effective to take at home, bypassing the need (and expense) for multiple in-person sessions and staffing. But even if such drugs prove effective in mitigating conditions like depression, anxiety, or addiction, according to others in the field, you’d be missing out on the very thing that makes psychedelics so reliably life-changing. +
++Why would you want a psychedelic without the trip? +
++With all the talk of a psychedelic renaissance, it’s easy to get the wrong idea. Sixty-eight percent of Americans have never tried psychedelics, according to a recent YouGov poll. A survey of mental health service users found that 20 percent still viewed psychedelics as unsafe, even under medical supervision, citing concerns about adverse effects (among other concerns like lack of knowledge and illegality). Leading researchers are already preparing for the “bursting of the psychedelic hype bubble.” +
++Yet the vast majority of clinical psychedelic trips lean positive. Users consistently report them as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives, on par with the birth of one’s first-born child. And the list of promising therapeutic applications is growing. While uncommon, bad trips and negative side effects still happen, and the effects can persist for weeks or even years. +
++After a shot of mescaline (an LSD-like psychedelic found in several species of cacti), the French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre saw a hallucinatory assortment of crustaceans that followed him around for weeks. “After I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. I mean they followed me into the street, into class,” he recalled. Today, we would call this episode hallucinogenic persisting perception disorder, an extremely rare side effect, and part of the reason clinical studies screen for participants with a predisposition for psychotic disorders. +
++No matter what sort of new mental health paradigm psychedelics may catalyze, between those with conditions that raise the risks of a trip, and those who may simply prefer to avoid experiencing one, there will be plenty of people who can benefit from different treatment options. If scientists can cut the trip out of psychedelics while leaving some of the therapeutic benefits intact, patients could take these drugs at home for a fraction of both the expense and time commitment of psychedelic therapy, widening the umbrella of treatment options to serve the over 50 million Americans who reported some kind of mental illness in 2020. +
++Just don’t call them psychedelics +
++One wrinkle in the development of these new drugs is semantic: If you successfully carve out the trip, what you are left with is not a psychedelic. And frankly, finding a name for these new compounds offers no simple options, and lots of room for confusion. +
++Olson coined the term “psychoplastogen,” drawing a boundary around the class of drugs that can rapidly boost neuroplasticity after a single dose. That distinguishes them from SSRI depression treatments like Prozac, which only boost neuroplasticity when taken over time. But both classical psychedelics and their new tripless relatives fit within the definition of psychoplastogens. To specify the tripless variety, you’ll find the offputting term “non-hallucinogenic psychoplastogen,” which poses no threat of catching on outside of academia. Instead, some have turned to calling them second-generation psychedelics, or “non-hallucinogenic psychedelics,” which grate against the very meaning of the word psychedelic. +
++Etymologically, psychedelic draws on the Ancient Greek for “mind manifesting,” referring directly to what scientists today call the “acute subjective experiences.” The psychiatrist Humphry Osmond came up with the name in conversation with the philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley in the 1950s, writing: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic / Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” A non-hallucinogenic psychedelic that subjectively manifests nothing out of the ordinary is an oxymoron. +
++To Rus and Olson, that’s fine. They’re in the business of psychoplastogens, not psychedelics. What matters is the untapped healing potential in rapid spikes of neuroplasticity, not how their new drugs compare and contrast to traditional psychedelics. +
++As far as naming goes, “neuroplastogen” is beginning to stick as a term describing the tripless category of psychoplastogens. We could still do with a Huxley-and-Osmand-like literary intervention to come up with something smoother, but until then, it’s an improvement. +
++How scientists carved the trip out of psychedelics (in mice) +
++While plenty of mystery still blankets the tripping brain, the classical psychedelics — psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, LSD, and mescaline — are at least known to all bind to the same serotonin 2A receptor, which is believed to be one of the main mechanisms underlying changes in activity across key brain circuits related to conscious experience. +
++One approach to untangling the trip from the therapy, published by a group of biochemists from the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology last year, involved zooming in a layer deeper. Instead of stopping at the observation of which receptor the drugs bind to, they looked at how the molecules actually fit into the curvature of the receptor. The fit is not perfectly snug, so using a method known as X-ray crystallography, they were able to see where the contact points are. +
++By shooting X-rays through a crystallized replica of a compound, and based on how the rays twist and turn through the crystal, you can determine how all the atoms therein are arranged, creating a sort of atomic map. A co-author on the publication, Sheng Wang, first used the method in a 2017 study to see how LSD fits into the related serotonin 2B receptor, and found that it slots into a cavity known as the orthosteric binding pocket (OBP). +
++In the 2022 publication, Wang and colleagues produced six new crystalline drug replicas, this time bound to the 2A receptor. They found that in addition to the OBP, some, but not all, compounds also nestle into a nearby second cavity, the extended binding pocket (EBP). +
++Next, they dosed mice with each of the drugs. In mice, head twitching is taken as the sign of a trip, while increasing the amount of time they struggle to stay afloat in a cylinder of water before simply allowing themselves to drown is the sign of antidepressant effects (this is known as the forced swimming test, and we should stop doing it). Wang and colleagues learned that drugs slotting into the EBP show hallucinatory effects, while drugs that only fit into the OBP — like serotonin — display only antidepressant effects. +
++Armed with that insight, they created new variations of LSD designed to lean away from the EBP, focusing on the OBP. The result, at least in mice, was two relatives of LSD that achieved the hoped-for result: no head twitching, but more time spent keeping afloat in the depression tank; in other words, like Delix’s MDMA variant, a new potential neuroplastogen. +
++How much of the therapy will humans lose without the trip? +
++Despite recent advances, jumping from head-twitching and water-treading in mice to carving out psychedelic experiences while still treating depression in humans is a serious leap. “I just find it very implausible that you’ll see full and enduring benefits from psychedelics without the acute subjective effects [or: the trip],” David Yaden, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins who works in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, told me earlier this year. +
++In a 2021 paper, Yaden and his colleague Roland Griffiths contend that to get the full beneficial effects of psychedelics, the trip is necessary. That’s not exactly controversial: Even Olson, the Delix co-founder, who published a counterpoint on the same day, agrees. The trip may be “critical for achieving maximal efficacy,” he writes. However, Olson argues that whatever benefits are left over after cutting out the trip can still have value, especially since they may be able to reach wider patient populations. +
++How much benefit remains depends on an unsettled question in the world of psychedelic therapy: Is rapidly boosting neuroplasticity, on its own, good treatment? Olson believes so, and there’s some preclinical research in drugs like ketamine, MDMA, and ibogaine to back it up. More recently, however, a preprint study reported ketamine was given to subjects under anesthesia (eliminating any associated trip), and found no difference from placebo, suggesting that something about having the experience makes a difference. +
++At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, anesthesiology professor Matthew Banks is tinkering with something in between leaving the trip alone and anesthesia: What if you let people have their full-on psychedelic experience, but then erase their memory of the trip altogether? Do you need to remember a trip for the benefits to stick? +
++As part of an eight-person pilot study at the university’s Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances, participants received both psilocybin and midazolam, an amnesia-inducing drug used to leave conscious experience intact, but wipe away memories (it’s often used to help patients forget about colonoscopies). “It’s like you’re one of those philosophical zombies. You’re conscious and having conversations, but you have no recollection the next day,” Banks said. +
++He explained that getting the dosing right is tricky because psilocybin seems to lay down durable memories, which Banks speculates is due to the elevated neuroplasticity. Once researchers boosted the dose enough to wipe most of the trip from memory, the benefits seemed to have departed, too. “There appears to be something happening where we’re wiping out some of those long-term behavioral effects of the drug,” Banks said. +
++In part, this was likely because participants were healthy volunteers, not patients suffering from conditions like treatment-resistant depression. Since neuroplastogens are imagined as therapies, the amnesia study doesn’t tell us much about their fate in treating mental illness. While Banks admitted that successful preclinical studies in mice “open the possibility that all the hallucinogenic stuff is largely irrelevant” for therapeutic outcomes, he believes that “it really does matter what you actually do with all that plasticity.” +
++If neuroplastogens become take-at-home pills, then they do away with both parts of psychedelic therapy: the psychedelic experience, and the therapy itself. Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, pointed out to the New York Times last year that plasticity is just a greater capacity to be reshaped. Whether for better or worse may depend on what happens after you take the drug. Pairing trips with therapy helps guide the plasticity towards beneficial outcomes. Without the trip, Carhart-Harris said in the Times, the result could be underwhelming: a drug that creates “a little bit of plasticity but it’s not really transformative.” +
++However, just because neuroplastogens are entirely unlike psychedelic therapy doesn’t mean they can’t still offer their own benefits. Instead of using plasticity to reprogram a particular habit, let alone altering one’s metaphysical view of the universe, Rus described how they may help repair the neuronal wear and tear associated with everything from chronic stress to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Sustained stress can grind away at neurons and affect brain connectivity, especially in key regions such as the prefrontal cortex. Simply spiking neuroplasticity may help repair the worn neurons, and bring those dampened networks of connectivity back online. +
++“What these new psychoplastogens are really good at doing is rapidly regrowing those spines [which connect neurons] and restoring circuit-level connectivity. The degree to which that repaired connectivity results in the behavioral changes or feelings that one seeks, time and data will ultimately tell,” Rus said. +
++No one believes current-generation antidepressants — SSRIs such as Prozac and Lexapro — are the pinnacle of depression treatments. In the space between Prozac and psychedelic therapy, there’s plenty of room for middling treatments that improve upon what we have now, but fall short of the transformative trips one might have on psychedelics. +
++Human trials will tell whether neuroplastogens may find a place in the cultural medicine cabinet. But these are just one category among hundreds of thousands of potential new psychedelic-inspired drugs that await discovery now that research is back online. Our single-digit list of psychoactive compounds is already transforming minds and industries alike. As that inventory expands, we may discover that the psychedelics we’re familiar with were only the modest beginnings of what will come next. +
++What we know — and what we don’t — about how heat affects mental health. +
++Extreme heat impacts everything it touches — the body, infrastructure, plant life — and even things it doesn’t. It’s hard to ignore the physical sensations of discomfort and sweat on a hot day, but high temperatures can have a negative effect on mental health, too. Given the record-breaking heat bearing down on the US, Europe, China, and Iran, millions of people may be feeling a change in their mood. +
++While studying heat waves and mortality in India as a Fulbright fellow, Amruta Nori-Sarma, now an assistant professor in the department of environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health, realized how much science didn’t understand about the health impacts of extreme heat. Although she was specifically looking to identify heat-related deaths, Nori-Sarma was interested in the health issues that might lead to mortality during extreme heat events. “We know a lot about the physical health impacts of extreme heat,” she says, “but what about the mental health impacts?” +
++In 2022, Nori-Sarma and her colleagues published a study examining the association between heat and mental health-related emergency room visits among US adults. During the hottest days of the summer, more people went to the emergency room for mental health conditions like substance use disorders, mood and anxiety disorders, stress disorders, other behavioral disorders, and more. +
++How can people care for their mental health on an ever-warming planet? There are few answers, but Nori-Sarma hopes further research will help illuminate who is most vulnerable to heat-related mental distress and how mental health clinicians can best care for patients when it’s hot. +
++This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. +
++Could you explain the results of your emergency room visit study? +
++We used a database of commercial health insurance claims across the US to look at adults who were visiting the emergency department between 2010 and 2019 during the summers. The effort was to try and get at this question: What are the different types of mental health outcomes that people experienced because of extreme heat exposure? So in that study, we were comparing the four or five hottest days of each summer to the coolest days of the summer. We saw elevated rates of emergency department visits very broadly across all mental health outcomes. But specifically, we did see elevated rates of emergency department visits for a variety of specific outcomes, including things like substance use disorders, mood [and] anxiety disorders, stress disorders, schizophrenia, self-harm, as well as childhood-onset personality and behavioral disorders. +
++We saw increased rates of emergency department visits pretty uniformly between men and women, and also pretty uniformly across age groups, which was really interesting. So even younger adults that we might think would be more healthy in the face of these extreme weather events experience greater need for emergency care for mental health issues during heat. One of the other things that I thought was really interesting in this study is that we actually saw higher rates of emergency department visits during summertime heat periods in the northern parts of the US compared to the southern parts of the US, which is kind of counterintuitive, because it’s hotter in the southern US. What that speaks to is maybe there are adaptive measures that are already put in place for communities in the southern US that experience hotter summers — things like air conditioning in homes, for example. +
++What is going on to cause these mental health issues? +
++In this current study, we weren’t able to assess at an individual level because all we have is the insurance claims data. We are not able to dig more deeply into the biological mechanisms. But we have a couple of theories. +
++One that I think is probably the most prevalent is the way that extreme heat disrupts sleep. When it’s hot outside, it’s more difficult to sleep, you’re more uncomfortable. If you’re living in a place where you don’t have access to air conditioning, that might further disrupt your sleep. The reason why I think this is plausible is because all of these different health outcomes that I mentioned earlier are so different from each other. There’s not a strong biological pathway that leads to all of these different outcomes. Substance use disorder is very different from mood anxiety disorders is very different from schizophrenia. The fact that we see similar increases in the rates of emergency department visits for all of these different health endpoints indicates to me that heat is an external stressor that’s somehow exacerbating people’s existing symptoms. +
++Does heat impact our everyday mood, or does it seem to have the greatest effect on people who already have some of these conditions, like anxiety or schizophrenia? +
++That’s a good question and another one that’s really difficult to answer with the data that we have, because these are emergency department visits, these are some of the most extreme presentations that people will have in terms of their outcomes. But I think it’s entirely likely that heat is impacting your day-to-day mood. If you have extreme heat, it makes it more difficult to cope with other stressors. If we can catch people when they’re just irritated or anxious, then we might be able to prevent, down the line, an extreme health care need. +
++What should individuals keep in mind as they care for their mental health in this time of unprecedented heat? +
++One of the things that’s really important is feeling like you’re prepared in case an extreme heat period happens — so knowing what resources are available to you. Cities, like Boston, have cooling centers, in case you’re caught in a location where there’s not good cooling during an extreme heat period. Not spending a lot of time outdoors in the sun or, if we have to, making sure we’re hydrated. +
++The other thing that I think is really important is relying on our social networks. It’s about checking in with ourselves, but also checking in on your friends and family, checking in on your neighbors, making sure that the people around you know what resources are available and are being taken care of during periods of extreme heat. +
++You mentioned that gender and age didn’t impact the rate of emergency room visits in your study. But are there any other factors that might make somebody more vulnerable for heat-related mental distress? +
++Yes. The study that we conducted with this dataset has led to a lot of additional questions that we can answer, but we only have access to commercial insurance beneficiaries. What about people who are on public insurance? Or what about people who don’t have health insurance? How are those folks coping with extreme heat? This is really important. This is a next step for our research. This is one of the most vulnerable populations: people who are of low socio-economic means who may be leveraging emergency departments as a front line for their health care needs, because that’s the best access to care that they have. +
++Other than that, diving more deeply into people who are receiving different forms of treatment for their ongoing mental health conditions and how that might be impacting both their experience of extreme heat and also their mental health conditions. That’s another really important, vulnerable population that we need to focus on. There’s medications that affect our body’s ability to thermoregulate. Anti-schizophrenia medications are ones that come to mind. People who have schizophrenia and who are taking medication for it might have a reduced ability for their own body to thermoregulate. That’s why sometimes you see people in extreme heat who are wearing layers and layers of jackets and clothing. It’s because their body has lost the ability to thermoregulate due to the medication usage. +
++How does summer seasonal affective disorder (SAD) differ from winter SAD? +
++I’m not as familiar with wintertime seasonal affective disorder. My understanding of SAD during the winter is that it’s very much correlated with the number of daylight hours that we have and the body’s ability to hormonally regulate and cope with reduced periods of daylight. I think that seasonal affective disorder in the summer is more correlated with the overwhelming nature of the heat exposure. Even if people are able to be out in the daylight for longer periods during the summer, the fact that it seems more difficult to do that if it’s extremely hot outside and you’re limited to an air-conditioned space, I think that’s the mechanism for summertime disorders. +
++Is there anything you find surprising or misunderstood about heat and how it affects our mental health? +
++A thing that people don’t tend to think about as much is that a lot of people right now, and especially a lot of young people, are already facing additional levels of anxiety and stress around climate change. Having that baseline level of anxiety already elevated because you’re anticipating future events is also a problem. It might limit our ability to cope as these events are occurring. It might reduce our resilience in the face of future summertime extremes. One of the things that I’m really interested in is what are the ways in which this anticipation of ongoing climate change is also impacting people’s need for emergency care or other types of health care. +
++What other questions do you want to answer in your research? +
++We’re working on the question of who are the most vulnerable in society and trying to see what resources we have to understand the impact of extreme heat exposures on people who experience homelessness or housing insecurity, people who don’t have access to health insurance, people who are repeat visitors for psychiatric emergency services. We’re doing that on a smaller scale in the greater Boston area. +
++The other thing that I think is a really important factor is what role do clinicians play in keeping their patients safe. Are clinicians aware of the elevated need for emergency care during extreme heat waves? What can we do to support clinicians so that they’re understanding the impact that climate and extreme heat are having on their patients? We’re starting by talking with the clinicians. The translation of our results would be seeing more patients in the emergency department when it’s hot. Do physicians experience that? And if they do, what are the things that they are noticing about their patients when they’re coming in for emergency department visits? We can get their perspective on what are the manifestations of these different mental health outcomes during extreme heat. When do we see them? And how can we provide better services for people in advance? +
++What the viral story of a missing Alabama woman says about all of us. +
++From the beginning, the details of Carlee Russell’s disappearance seemed destined to cause an internet frenzy: Russell, a Black 25-year-old nursing student, went missing from the side of a highway in Hoover, Alabama, on the night of July 13, shortly after calling 911 to report a child wandering alone on the side of the highway. +
++Russell’s brother’s girlfriend, on the phone with her following her 911 call, reported hearing Carlee scream and what sounded like the phone being dropped. When the police reached Carlee’s car just a few minutes after her 911 call, they found her phone and wig nearby, along with her purse and the food she’d just picked up for dinner inside of her car. Neither Russell nor a toddler was anywhere to be found. +
++Less than two weeks later, after her return and a story police said they couldn’t confirm, an attorney speaking for Russell admitted there was no kidnapping: “My client apologizes for her actions to this community,” Russell’s attorney said in a press conference on Monday. “We ask for your prayers for Carlee as she addresses her issues and attempts to move forward, understanding she made a mistake in this matter.” The attorney confirmed that they are in touch with the local district attorney’s office about possible charges against Russell in the case. +
++In the days after her disappearance, Russell went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms, and received national media attention as law enforcement agencies searched for her. The chilling details surrounding her disappearance — and the prospect that a child was used to lure her into danger — likely contributed to it going viral: Fears about human trafficking and abduction have become a bigger part of the national conversation in recent years. +
++But then, 49 hours after she went missing, Russell showed up at the doorstep of her family home. Everyone who’d been following the case had a lot of questions. So, apparently, did the police. +
++In a news conference on July 19, Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis revealed that detectives had been unable to verify many of the things that Russell had told investigators in the brief interview she gave them following her return. +
++According to Derzis, Russell said that after calling 911, a man emerged from the trees near the highway to say he was checking on the child. She then said the man forced her into a car, and “the next thing she remembers is being in the trailer of an 18-wheeler,” said Derzis. Russell said that the man who kidnapped her had orange hair with a bald spot, and that she heard the voice of a woman who was with him but never saw her face. +
++At one point, she said, she managed to escape from the trailer, but was recaptured and taken to a house where she was forced to undress and be photographed. After being put in another vehicle, Russell said she escaped again, and was able to make it to her home by running through the woods. +
++Derzis shared some other details that seemed to cast doubt on Russell’s story. Video footage showed Russell leaving the spa she worked at the day of her disappearance reportedly concealing a bathrobe, toilet paper, and other items. Those items, as well as the snacks she purchased from Target shortly before her disappearance, were missing, despite her purse and other belongings being left with the vehicle. +
++Derzis also noted that Russell drove 600 yards while on the phone with 911 saying she was watching the child, and police said they received no other reports of a toddler walking alone. (Video footage on the highway appears to show only one figure, Russell, on the side of the road.) “To think that a toddler, barefoot, that could be 3 or 4 years old, could travel six football fields without getting in the roadway, without crying, it’s very hard for me to understand,” Derzis said. +
++Then there were the internet searches on Russell’s mobile phone: In the days before her arrest, Derzis said, Russell was searching for information about one-way bus tickets and how to take money from a cash register without getting caught. She also looked into whether someone had to pay for an Amber Alert — a government program that helps alert communities when children are missing. On the day she went missing, Russell apparently searched for the movie Taken, a 2008 thriller in which Liam Neeson plays a dad who hunts down human traffickers who kidnapped his teenage daughter and her best friend. +
++“I do think it’s highly unusual … on the day someone gets kidnapped … that they’re searching the internet, Googling the movie Taken, about an abduction. I find that very strange,” Derzis said. +
++Why the Carlee Russell story took off and what the social media response about it says +
++He didn’t come right out and say it, but the subtext seemed clear: Police had serious doubts about Russell’s story. +
++And just as quickly as social media users rushed to share concern for Russell and the details about her disappearance, so too did they rush to offer their opinions on the latest developments. +
++Some criticized Russell for perpetrating what appeared to be a hoax and argued that her story would make it harder for people to believe families when other Black women go missing. +
++Others condemned the rush to judgment, noting that Russell could have mental health issues that the public isn’t aware of and pointing out that missing Black women rarely receive the same amount of media attention white women do. A few said they were just happy Russell was home, regardless of what happened. +
++There’s still much about Russell’s story we don’t know, and certain things we may never understand, including the state of Russell’s mental health. But if past prosecutions of women who staged their own disappearances are any indication, police will likely be unsympathetic if they think they have strong evidence that she fabricated her disappearance. +
++When a story about a possible crime sparks national attention to the extent this one did, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The reactions are informed not only by the facts of the case, but filtered through broader contexts that exist outside the particulars of the incident. And those responses can tell us a lot about the culture in which we live. +
++The public concern about Russell’s case was driven in part by the understanding that Black women rarely receive the same amount of attention that white women get when they go missing. It was also driven by the frightening details around her disappearance, including the reports of a lost child. America has been consumed by a moral panic about the idea of human traffickers lurking in the shadows, ready to kidnap unsuspecting women and children and sell them into sexual slavery. +
++The outsize fear is driven by internet conspiracy theories and misinformation, social media, politicians, and pop culture. But the reality is that the people most at risk of human trafficking are those who are already vulnerable because they live at the margins of society, sometimes as children in the foster care system, or as undocumented immigrants, or as people struggling with addiction or homelessness. They are often forgotten because the authorities don’t always identify them as victims. +
++And in this case, it seems clear that while our culture is obsessed with salacious-sounding crimes, we’re also, whatever the truth of this case turns out to be, deeply fascinated by the idea of scam artists. +
++There are, unfortunately, countless real stories of missing Black women and children, like Relisha Rudd, an 8-year-old who went missing in Washington, DC, in 2014 and still hasn’t been found. As the Black and Missing Foundation stated this week: “We must remain vigilant and not lose sight of the bigger picture while we await additional information.” For years, the foundation “has been sounding the alarm on the plight of missing Black and Brown people, from around the country, and their stories rarely go viral … Let’s keep hope alive for these families and channel our efforts to bringing them home.” +
++The public, and the media, will likely move on from Russell’s story soon. Finding Rudd, and other missing children and adults, remains just as urgent as it was before social media discovered the Russell case, and will remain just as important once it moves on. +
++Update, July 24, 6 pm ET: This story was originally published on July 22 and has been updated with a new statement from Russell’s attorney. +