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Comment by dangom | Hacker News Reader

I have a pet hypothesis that "curing" depression is an active endeavor, instead of a passive one. Just like being healthy in general requires at least a moderate regard to nutrition and exercising. No amount of medicine can replace those.

From anecdotal reports, it seems that mushrooms forces one into an active thought space (like dropping someone of at the gym with a program for them to follow), such that one is more likely to engage with ones own thoughts, and is capable of interpreting them, recasting them, accepting or letting them go.

The idea of "rewiring" seems a bit too far, since rewiring cannot be achieved instantly.

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Have you been depressed? I can tell from experience that a depressed mind is quite active. In a bad way - constantly hurting itself with dark thoughts and hence reinforcing the bad stuff constantly.

You can't exercise depression away. At least for those situations I am familiar with.

To me the point being made is that there will never be a "cure in a pill" for many things, including depression. Medication may help, but really getting past it will also take active effort.

If you're overweight, you can't get lean and fit by taking a pill (much as many would like it to be true). You will have to make some effort by eating less (actively resisting feelings of hunger) and getting more physically active.

Active is a bad word to describe what I meant. I don't mean to say that a depressed mind is not thinking, just that it may not be able to get itself out of the place it is in without "active" effort (as in therapy - self-therapy or mediated by others). The conundrum is that putting in that effort may not possible because all energy is already spent - as you pointed out. My suggestion is that psychedelics opens space for these thoughts to be actively dealt with in a productive way.

There is also mounting evidence that depression is a symptom and not a single disease, and the symptom may be originating from multiple causes. This view is supported by the extreme between-subject variability seen in imaging studies [1]. That being the case, maybe not all causes would require an "active" approach, just as maybe not all will respond to psychedelics.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-00789-3

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