Psilocybin decreases depression and anxiety in cancer patients (2016)
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- The FDA recognized psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy for treatment-resistant depression: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...
- Some more studies, such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909164/
- More widespread use in medical treatment, such as approval in Australia (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66072427) and limited approval in Switzerland
Very much anecdotal but I can say that psychedelics helped me and several friends a lot with depression. They don't just magically make you feel better - at least not long-term - but they give you the neuroplasticity you need to adjust your internal filters and behaviour. As such, if the purpose is truly healing and recovery, they're best paired with professional therapy, preferably from somebody who's experienced with psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically.
You may have saved 20 years in an unhappy marriage.
Maybe a better example would be my friend who took psychedelics and then believed he was in communication with Elon Musk. This one is more obviously a false idea, but nevertheless he was convinced it was real for a period after the psychedelic experience.
There’s a mystical concept that psychedelics open your third eye to see the world as it really is or something, but psychedelics are notorious for giving false ideas and making them seem like revelations. It’s obvious when it’s nonsense (like telepathy with Elon Musk) but it’s less obvious when the implanted idea is something like “your husband secretly doesn’t love you”. Another strangely common report is the belief that people around you have been replaced by clones, which can get scary very fast if the person can’t separate the idea from reality.
In the referenced anecdote it could be as simple as an excuse needed for someone who's been thinking about it for years. Though maybe that's enough to be a benefit
Anyway I like your example and look forward to what is learned about using psychedelics to help people :)
No prior history of any mental illness in him nor any of his family.
This is a common excuse: Blame some hidden susceptibility, not the drug. It doesn’t matter what it was, though. The drug caused it and there were no warning signs. Fine before the drug. Not fine after the drug.
It's the interaction between that person and the drug.
I have a crustacean allergy. That doesn't mean crustaceans are bad, or other people shouldn't eat shrimp. It just means it's a bad mix for me.
One of the benefits of administering psychedelics in a clinical setting is that telepathic nonsense is more likely to be noticed early and corrected for, whether by reducing dosage or suspending treatement. (And treating it as medicine allows us to study those people who react negatively to it, further reducing harm.)
Now that is scary.-
PS. We used to trip to contact our wise, the Spirit, spirits, our gods, the beyond, our higher selves ...
... now we just get ketamine kid.-
Along with two other blokes, I got interested in psychedelics in high school. Took one medium high dose and wasn't right for a few months. Never in my life did i ever experienced paranoia, delusions, or hallucinations that are genuinely hard to separate from reality, but I did after that.
Intense psychedelic experiences can fracture what you once knew as "reality" allows all sorts of ideas to float into your mind, with equal possibility. This might be helpful and give you more flexible thinking (helpful for depression) but it also leaves you incredible vulnerable to all sorts of garbage ideas that you never would have considered otherwise. ie conspiracy theories or straight up delusions about the supernatural. Remember: It's not paranoia if you genuinely believe they really are out to get you!
Fighting these garbage ideas is a lot of work once they take hold, but you'll only know too late if you were vulnerable, and worse, if you can successfully align your understanding of reality with most other people.
I got extremely lucky that I stabilized. I'm convinced part of this was only doing it one time. My two co-experimenters took many trips with various doses are still in and out of mental hospitals years later. Psychedelics are incredibly potent and nobody really understands them very well. A lot of what is written on the internet ignores, downplays, or denies the very serious risks to your philosophy of mind and mental function. Its like playing with fire when you don't have heat sensation in your hands.
Several other comments on this page echo these warnings. One even claims there is an 18% chance you could go from depressed to schizophrenic. I have no idea where that figure came from, but the risk is certainly not 0%
And obviously, start low and see how it goes.
As such, if you are "surfing" thoughts and find an association of something, that association can become very prominent. If you don't have the context to understand why you are making that association, especially after the trip, you can get stuck with beliefs about yourself that could be non optimal.
On the flip side this hyperconnectivity also allows you to see things like a completely different person would see them, which is where the true healing power lies. Its like you can be disugsted with a particular food when you are sober, but on shrooms you can truly feel what it would be like to enjoy that food. Once you have that context, you are able to move forward after the trip into right directions.
This is why set and setting are EXTREMELY important for significant trips. You want to be with someone who a) has done psychedelics, b) is in a very good mental state, and c) has a low ego not to project their own personality onto you. The best trip sitters are those that encourage exploration - they take everything you communicate to them and ask you questions about it without imparting any bias.
That said, I _do_ recommend mushrooms to everyone I know with depression or anger issues.
How do you think psychedelics work? They activate the serotonin 2a receptor. It’s nothing but a different drug that effects serotonin. Except it does it more intensely but like all these drugs that act on receptors they wear off because of something what’s called receptor density changes.
For 70 years, we’ve been trying to manipulate receptors into making people feel good. It’s a losing proposition and it’s time to. We changed our thinking. For instance, if these people do have serotonin deficiencies, which is still possibly the case, what is it? That’s causing these deficiencies? Is it low, zinc, low B6, genetics, infection? There’s so many other things that we know that this could be, but we don’t try it.
Nobody other than crazy micro-dosers is taking mushrooms often enough to cause a change in receptor density and those people are putting themselves at risk of valvopathy due to 5HT2a restructuring of the heart valves (which, as an aside, is turning out to be a problem for people on prozac and other long-term SSRIs).
A drug that is very occasional, point use, with no ongoing use, which has long term treatment results, is absolutely, utterly unlike prozac.
That aside, let's say for the sake of argument that the mechanism is similar for prozac; I think that's wrong (one additional explanation may actually be: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675... ) but whatever. If so, then psilocin is vastly superior to prozac because you are not required to have continuous exposure for the benefits, as the corresponding cost, withdrawal, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, heart issues, etc. are removed.
This is so frustrating to me. Why not just google it before you think you know more about this than someone studying it for ten years? Two things can change receptor density: time and dose.
A Single Dose of Psilocybin Increases Synaptic Density and Decreases 5-HT2A Receptor Density in the Pig Brain
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33467676/
This is exactly why psychedelics last longer than prozac. It has less to do with half life and more to do with dose.
How is the mechanism not at least comparative to prozac since it is well know they both effect serotonin? The risk with psilocin is exactly the dose, as many people find out. And you thing there are not cardiac side effects from psychedelics?
A Case of Prolonged Mania, Psychosis, and Severe Depression After Psilocybin Use: Implications of Increased Psychedelic Drug Availability
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.22010...
Worsening suicidal ideation and prolonged adverse event following psilocybin administration in a clinical setting: case report and thematic analysis of one participant's experience
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11698204/
Safety First: Potential Heart Health Risks of Microdosing
https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/04/13/safety-first-p...
I have previously read that study. You should put it in context: for example, how quickly does the brain add A1 and A2 receptors for caffeine? (I already know the answer, but you might want to use it to contextualize that study).
The study about the woman co-administering venlafaxine (Effexor) which is an SNRI might be worth considering as non-representative.
Worsening suicidal ideation .. is not unique to _any_ antidepressant. Are you trying to suggest that this is somehow unique to psilocin? We were discussing prozac which is _well known to have this problem_. They got black box warnings for this reason.
As for the heart study, I mentioned this myself elsewhere, and SSRIs are showing the same issue: https://columbiasurgery.org/news/columbia-surgery-researcher... - much worse, however, because people take these drugs every day for decades.
I think these risks are more common than was previously discussed on the internet. For a long time reports of very negative experiences were dismissed, laughed at, downplayed, waved away as symptoms of something else, or excused as something positive but mysterious.
It’s becoming more acceptable for people to discuss their negative experiences and not get downvoted or attacked for sharing them.
This is the type of dismissal and downplaying I’m referring to.
My friend descended into psychosis after taking psychedelics. It was not “half the point” and not helpful to his life in any way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#History
This makes very little sense unless on purpose. I mean, like what, people been doing it for millenniums and still we got where we are now, and not because of downsides of its use, or what?
People in power fear losing their power, and they saw these drugs as a threat.
The weirdest part of the whole thing to me is that they outlawed Cannabis, Psilocybin, and LSD, but kept cocaine legal with a prescription under schedule 2.
This means that if you wanted to use the law as a political cudgel without being accused of thought-policing, you could outlaw psychedelics and be confident that the blast zone would exclude the politically faithful while locking up loads of political undesirables; like hippies, panthers, etc.
Of course, these days you have right-wing podcasters discussing DMT with billionaire CEOs, so it's a little trickier. Thus the tentative steps toward legalization.
These two camps are pretty wildly opposed! If I had to guess, I’d bet my money on the people in power liking and using the hard charging stuff while loathing the touchy feely stuff.
All this feels a bit trite, over-simplified, and maybe even a but concocted on my part. But after a lifetime of being around these drugs, it fits well with my experience.
I’d add, too, that the book “Chasing the Scream” gives a better perspective on drug laws & their origins, which really began much earlier than the 1970s.
I also think its incorrect to define this sort of escapism as escaping to something. IME people escape from something — the “to” doesn’t matter as long as the “from” ain’t there.
I’d further agree that it has nothing to do with interracial marriage — not sure where this point came from?
The “War on Drugs” as Nixon named it isn’t the beginning of the story.
> If I had to guess, I’d bet my money on the people in power liking and using the hard charging stuff while loathing the touchy feely stuff.
that some people liked the hard charging stuff and were white, and that some people liked the touchy feely stuff and who just so coincidentally some of them happened to be dark skinned, in an era that was racist to the point of having anti-miscegenation laws, isn't some minor coincidence.
> the “to” doesn’t matter as long as the “from” ain’t there.
The "to" matters because after you've gotten high you're there, but where's there? it's that the one where your kids are listening to you? where your wife never left, where your boyfriend wasn't beating you? In that "to", how is life?
But you eventually come down, and when you're sober again, it all matters! Particularly when you live in a society that criminalizes your escape. I've always thought it excessively cruel to criminalize substance abuse.
Truly, what kind of creatures are we? smfh
> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The initial war on drugs had nothing to do with the drugs themselves. But then successive governments had to keep running with it because letting the foot off the gas would let the opposition portray them as weak on drug abuse and crime. And then commercial interests got mixed into it too.
Research has proven that mushrooms and LSD are societally and personally the least damaging drug you can take. The top spots go to usual suspects like heroin and crack, and the subtop is alcohol and tobacco.
Besides, I’m not sure Timothy Leary and friends were more real about political party than Elon is today.
This absurd stigma of psychedelic substances need to stop now. This very moment.
Simple - there is no real lasting money in psylocibin as most people really only need 2 or 3 good sessions.
Whereas adderall is not technically addictive, but if you can function on it, you do become dependent on it.
You also really don't need it to become a prescription, shrooms just need to get legalized. The risks that come from overuse are far and few in between to the point where normal over the counter meds carry much more danger in abuse than shrooms do.
Has nothing to do with being a one shot solution vs subscription.
Even economically the conspiracy theory against one shot cures makes no sense. As your shitty subscription solutions all go generic, I enter the market with my low risk one shot cure and eat all of your lunch.
Through direct experience, I do not think 2 or 3 good sessions and you're done is really true. Maybe with experience even that goes - you learned what you needed to learn and there's nothing more to it.
But IMHO psilocin is a strong anti-inflammatory which may in and of itself be some (not all) of the mechanism for alleviating depression (the link between inflammation and depression is strong). That will almost never be lasting.
So we may be in the case where the real breakthroughs are, as you say, in the first two or three sessions. I think most people who took mushrooms out of desperation would agree with that - by the end of the third session many of the things they needed to accept are, in fact, front of mind for awhile. But ongoing maintenance is probably useful.
I don't think I've ever heard someone claim that Adderall isn't addictive.
> use of amphetamines and stimulants such as Adderall can result in tolerance and physiological dependence and can lead to the development of a substance use disorder. Misuse of prescription stimulants such as Adderall for any reason (e.g., to improve academic performance, reduce the effects of other drugs, etc.) is associated with both substance use disorders and use of other substances.
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/stimulants/amphetamine/...
Source?
The simple answer seems sufficiently explanatory. Psilocybin is burended by its history as a recreational drug. That creates pockets of motivated advocates against it in a way that doesn't materialise for most drug candidates.
Note: my iPhone autocomplete does not even recognise psylocibine as a proper word.
0: This game is really tiresome. It's "capitalism". "They just don't want to lose power". "There's no money in it". Thought-terminating cliches. LLM-grade.
I can surely see great benefit in someone thinking out of the box at meetings. While I also see the benefit of zombies blindly following commands, which is where Adderall gets u.
So it was an allegory, but still true. Sad or not. Reality bites.
But there's also the issue that not everyone should take psychedelics. They can have lasting negative effects on certain people that may already be experiencing issues with mental stability, or they may trigger such effects in people that don't necessarily know about their own mental wellbeing or how the psychedelic will affect them. These, like every drug, should be used with caution.
https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ph/preventionwellness/pages/psilo...
To be clear they absolutely do regularly provide short to medium term depression relief (up to a few months). I also know someone who had severe treatment resistant depression that was cured long-term (at least years) from one dose.
It has been life changing for her, but one thing she tells people now is that what also helped was that it was facilitated with a trained therapist there during the session for guidance to make sure she didn’t “get stuck in a loop.” There was also many sessions pre dosing day to optimize the result.
She would highly recommend the treatment and hopes it becomes mainstream soon.
EDIT: In the original link it says the placebo group received a much lower dose, so that seems to be one way of doing it.
A difficult one with psychedelics is as-mentioned: people can easily "break the blind". But if you want to eliminate that problem you can instead do a micro vs macro dose, in which case you're measuring a slightly different thing.
I sincerely hope this is not at all how any of this works. That sounds like a recipe for paranoia.
The rest is a regular placebo. It can be a really strong thing when you are feeling hot.
This particular trial, however, allowed participants who were in the placebo group to later opt in for the real dosing - obviously with those results omitted from the trial.
I feel that. Thought loops are scary and it takes someone to recognize them to get you out.
This is on top of the other effects of music, such as emotional effects.
Music, television, people talking, etc. gives you an external clock and the timelessness of the experience, one of the greatest feelings, is lost.
I guess if you're just doing them for fun it's ok.
If so the term "lost hope" is not in my opinion accurate.
I am quite happy that it worked and it is a better alternative than medication, I certainly do not think that medication is the cure all, or optimal.
What an absolutely asshole statement, which also shows an absolutely profound misunderstanding of suicide prevention and care.
Edit: Core belief of suicide ideation is that hope is gone. This is often (but not always) a perception. There may always be more things to try - but that's irrelevant to the person that is dead because they could not see another way.
> If so the term "last hope" is not in my opinion accurate.
What an absolutely asshole statement, which also shows an absolutely profound misunderstanding of suicide prevention and care.
Edit: Core belief of suicide ideation is that hope is gone. This is often (but not always) a perception. There may always be more things to try - but that's irrelevant to the person that is dead because they could not see another way.
Last vs Lost makes no difference. Therapy should be understood to include medication.
Your statement really rubs me the wrong way; incredibly judgmental and just… shitty. Sorry to say.
How often, for how many days, how much (=how high?)?
Is this a therapy with an end or do you have to take mushrooms forever?
Have you taken them with her?
(I've heard that expectation of your experience actually influences your experience a lot, so it could even be self-fulfilling!)
Epigenetics are weird, but if you are past 35 without symptoms than you should be fine without medication (know several people that weren't as lucky.)
Stay healthy friend =3
The 3rd generation medications keep his cycles under control fairly well. Note, prior to being processed by our medical system. These same a--hole sycophantic dealers would target vulnerable people with BS treatments all the time.
Talk with your doctor, get out for a walk every morning, and try out cognitive behavioral therapy when you are ready. =3
A funny post about what not to do:
I have a friend from college who smoked too much marijuana during lockdown back in India. Thankfully the insanity cleared up after a few weeks to a month clean of it, but not all are so lucky.
The denialism and propaganda campaigns bother me. As pro-legalization as I am, I personally have never and will never use drugs. They are dangerous and unnecessary, and I resent those who would influence others' decisions to do something high-risk and potentially very damaging because they want to get high.
I would love to meet one of these people that lose their minds in such a short time on drugs. I know they exist but I just want to see the reality of it.
Very common side-effect for people that try strong hallucinogens and or use malformed neurotransmitters.
The find-out part happens later =3
Having a family member with active untreated disorders can tilt the odds out of ones favor, but those with intellectual gifts also tend to be more resilient to such situations.
>The denialism and propaganda campaigns bother me
Understandable, after a few years people see the same excuses, exploitive scams, and rhetoric. The Sackler family ruined a lot of lives to capture that money, and I guess a few psychopaths saw a business opportunity.
Best of luck =3
But I think you might be missing the forest for the trees: unlike mushrooms, there is a _ton_ of research on pot specifically that illustrates that heavy use in the young is extremely detrimental to their mental health, especially young men. The studies on psilocybin/psilocin do not show this.
That said, Michael Pollan has a quote in one of his books that foes along these lines: coming to psychedelics in old age, when you are set in your ways and everything is locked in, helps you break out and reconsider things, but young people don't have those things, so the value is mostly absent.
Folks with maladaptive coping strategies tend not to age well, and it is unrelated to the specific pharmacological recreational preferences they have chosen.
Some people refuse help, and will despise folks for trying. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG4qp-2O3hs&list=RDjG4qp-2O3...
How many people live in low stress environments these days?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbk7leQdxbo
Go outside, stop watching media, and meet real people. lol =3
Life as I had known it, the things that then animated me, were “shown” to be a pantomime - a joke. It was tremendously sad, and - for better or worse - I’ve never been the same since.
Maybe it was a coming of age experience - something I would have more painfully experienced later anyway. But it cost something significant. It changed me. Still, some 25 years later, I don’t know if it was for the better.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t do it but just to proceed with caution and ideally under professional supervision.
I think it's too easy for people to get caught up in the idea that these are miracle cures and forget that, just like with any drug, the effects will be different for different people. I'd love for it to be available for people who are seeing benefits, but I don't think there's any shame in people saying, "that doesn't work for me"
They describe their participation as the most meaningful event of their lives, second to the birth of their children.
(Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer -- and still kicking nearly 10 years later ;)
I am more empathic for weeks after doses of psilocybin. Getting there doesn't rely on any hero trips, no fractals, just maybe to the point of seeing more vibrant lights for a few hours. They used to hurt my stomach which would throw off a trip while dealing with that, and I still avoid eating stems, but it looks like I have tolerance to that now.
Nothing supremely insightful, I mostly ignore my mind's attempts at epiphanies and the false feelings of clarity, I wait till music festivals to consume them and just enjoy the vibrant lights and echo-ing sounds. Just to the point where conversations and ambient noises from further away than expected are being amplified and spliced in to things happening much closer to me.
Recreationally, I like the people I attract when I'm feeling the effects of psilocybin. I'm far too analytical in default mode, not nearly as much as when I was a bit younger, but still a far cry from where I would prefer to be. Its like I "null route" all of that and am more present to how people feel or want to feel. Its kind of crazy and obvious when it wears off, I respond to stimuli differently, or ask about things I don't really want to ask about. Less "vibes" in the moment and more "analyze" like noticing incongruences in people's lives and asking about that as a form of smalltalk, when it would be better off ignored. People respond normally, but I can tell it doesn't give them a spark of warmth like the vibes version of me does. Wasn't a goal or something I was aiming to work on, just a side effect I noticed over time.
I also use other kinds of psychedelics but I didn't want to pollute this comment with more anecdotes.
A majority of your low dose 1st group likely very much realizes that they're on the inactive dose.
they don't do jack shit.
Or as clinical death from Amanita toxicity, with some meta commentary on religion.
+1. :)
I would be more interested in polling the close friends and family of study participants and asking them about perceived changes. Instruct participants not to tell anyone about their experience in the study (whether they think they got a drug or how much).
It looks like the study tried to do something like this with "session monitors" who interviewed the participants the day after. They call it double-blind, but it's more like single-blind because the 3rd person assessment is the outcome measure.
The design you mention is really interesting! Have you seen this done anywhere?
Psylocybin isn’t the most studied because it’s likely to be the most effective drug. It’s because the therapists/grad students can work an 8 hour day instead of providing 12+ hour care for LSD or multi-day treatment with Ibogaine.
They discovered mindfulness meditation and in combination with becoming a more moral person, limiting music, eliminating social media and unwholesome entertainment, and practicing small acts of charity multiple times per week they were able to overcome their depression. It's been almost 15 years since they've had any symptoms.
> [unskilful] desire
taṇhā (The second Noble Truth)
> aversion
dosa
> we're never satisfied
dukkha (The first Noble Truth)
> moral code
sīla
Even if the whole world is going to shit, if you desire the happiness and wellbeing of others, as a deep internal orientation, this itself is its own form of happiness which is not subject to anything external. Since this thread already has Buddhist vibes, you don't have to take my word for it and can refer to metta (loving-kindness) as its own practice in addition to mindfulness.
I think learning about different cultures and religions can unlock perspectives which enhance whatever we're currently practicing.
They practiced something called guarding their senses where they limited the amount of sensual pleasures they exposed themselves to and this calmed down their mind down to the point where even small things like the taste of ordinary food or having a conversation with a friend felt really satisfying.
> guarding their senses
indriyasaṃvara
> calmed down their mind down
samādhi / samatha
They didn't just cut out the obviously mindless things like television and social media, but music, small talk, and even books were considered things to be consumed in moderation, because they were striving to spend as much time as possible each day really focused on the present moment.
> becoming a more moral person
sīla
> mindfulness
sati
> acts of charity
caga / dana
If you are genuinely interested in what I am referring to then you can search for pañcasīla (The Five Precepts) which form the foundation of Buddhist ethics/morality/virtue.
Isn't it more accurate to call it an early commonality of Early Budhism than a foundation [1]?
Even taking the data at face value, the trial cannot disentangle the drug effect from expectancy, psychotherapy, and statistical noise. The enormous effect sizes are almost certainly inflated, multiple-comparison error is uncontrolled, and the participant pool is highly self-selected. Until a preregistered, parallel-group, active-placebo, adequately powered study with blinded independent raters replicates these findings, their practical value for routine cancer care remains minimal.
It’s so interesting to see how strong the drive to prove something works is, overriding everything. As a clinical psychologist, I would welcome this kind of therapy if it worked. But this is just sad. It’s just like listening to people claim that ivermectin can cure everything.
Show me one place where this therapy is conducted by people who haven’t "drunk the Kool-Aid," and I’ll be impressed. It’s so frustrating to work with actual patients and see how much these therapies really don’t work in reality. These kinds of biased studies pop up all the time without actually panning out. I’m starting to think that people promoting therapy, giving false hope, and spending money on research like this should be viewed as corrupt and evil.
Similar psychedelic therapy claims—for LSD/psilocybin alleviating cancer-related anxiety/depression—have echoed since the 1950s-1970s, yet they've never panned out into practical, scalable clinical therapies. This alone should raise a MASSIVE Bayesian statistics red flag, due to prior discount: with decades of unfulfilled hype. At this point new evidence requires extraordinary proof to update our view.
If such massive effectiveness were true, it would blow what we already have out of the water, and I would be the first to promote it to my patients. But you know what they say when something sounds too good to be true.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...
?
Breakthrough Therapy designation means they can continue to study it with support.
It does not mean it’s approved for depression.
When I was a teen a friend gave me an analogy that stuck with me. In much older computers (e.g. C64, Vic-20, etc), they'd behave "interestingly" when you mucked around with the physical circuit board or there was a fault. E.g. if something short circuited because a screw was loose in the board, or a cartridge was halfway in or a chip partially desocketed, etc. Characters would appear in random places, or the machine go through odd loops and so on. And to someone who didn't know how the machine worked, there could be a certain "magic" and a "pattern" to this. But clearly you'd be missing the point if you thought you had "enhanced" the machine this way.
LSD and psilocybin are kind of like that, but for your brain. They short circuit and alter pathways. In ways that can be entertaining but you're entirely missing the point if you try to assign a higher meaning to them.
Our brains are expert pattern-finding machines, and produce causes and reasons even when there are none. For some there may be value in the experience of altering the operation of your brain to get yourself out of a stuck pattern, I guess. But I am not sure the very random stochastic nature of the whole thing is ... medicinal.
Legalization has never been a question of “is this good for people?”
Then again, I think it's important that my views are never imposed on anybody. So it's perfectly fine to be a pure hedonist and use everything under the sun.
The dose makes the poison, though. So I think that limited use of alcohol, cannabis, shrooms, and LSD might be useful to gain new perspectives, serve as a social lubricant, or even provide some form of temporary relief.
The drug isn't really the problem; it's the pattern of use. So maybe I should have said that "most drugs are mostly used in a terrible way, to such an extent that they become terrible by default."
If I were to try anything, psilocybin would be high up the list of stuff I would like to try. Just to see what effect it would have on me. I suspect little (every life-changing, perspective-changing experience people yab on about never changed anything for me once they actually happened to me, and I am 100% immune to hypnosis and personality change when drunk), but it would be interesting to see.
That is true, but it misses some important nuance: the war on drugs has effectively eliminated the ability for legitimate researchers to do significant research on these criminalized drugs.
For example, for me personally, a mild dose of marijuana is as effective as Zolpidem (Ambien) as a sleep aid, but without the lethargy and mental fog the next morning.
That's not true any more. We have a substantial body of data already from clinical trials and a huge number of trials currently in the pipeline. The results from completed trials are quite equivocal - while psilocybin does appear to work as a treatment for depression, anxiety and other common psychological disorders, we have no evidence yet to suggest that it is meaningfully more effective than current treatments.
We have good reason to believe that psychedelics may be useful for some patients in some circumstances, but the widespread talk of a revolution in psychiatry is pure hype.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=psilocybin&filter=pubt...
https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?intr=psilocybin&aggFilters...
For many people (myself included) taking psychedelics was an immediately life altering experience. I don't need any more scientific validation that psychedelics helped me than I would need to prove that touching a hot stove burned me. It's an immediate and unmistakable effect that is wholly different from any other experience I've had.
Now, proving that these drugs would be beneficial at a population level may be an unanswered scientific question. But, to quote you: "trying to prove psilocybin works for psychiatric illness" - well, that's been done. The people who have been helped have all the proof they need. I think the issues you've raised are more properly targeted at the question "should we recommend psilocybin treatment to depression patients more broadly" which is in fact a much higher bar than "do they work?"
I would only add that it's extremely hard to know if something actually works. There are seriously some medications that people claim don't work, but objectively they are healthier, happier, more social, more active, and "better" on almost every objective measure. An example of this is when you really have a good match with venlafaxine for co-morbid panic disorder and depression.
Then there are drugs everybody claims are good for them, but they almost never are, especially in the long run. Basically, all of the benzo sleeping aids (in the context of chronic use).
So I can't and won't say you are not right. But I hope you permit me my goal of finding "objective" markers for saying "something works." Because, to quote Murderbot, "Humans are idiots!" (me included). And self-report is a notoriously unreliable measure.
A very worthy goal!
What do you mean by this?
The worst case is a friend who became disconnected from reality for a very long time. Went from atheistic to believing in mystical ideas. He thought he was able to see and sense things that we could not, like auras and secret messages. He was getting better last time we checked but he’s hard to get in contact with now. No prior hints of psychosis or family history, just a psychedelic induced mental illness.
The other anecdotes were not as dramatic, but also not as positive or free of side effects as studies like this one would make you think. Multiple stories of extended periods of derealization or anxiety attacks that started after the trip. There are similar comments here throughout this comment section.
There was a time when sharing these negative stories was met with disbelief and downvotes. I think as it’s becoming more common people are realizing that the interaction between psychedelics and depression isn’t as great as it seemed for a few years when they were virtually being promoted by podcasters and social media influencers as a novel cure for depression.
The whole ketamine thing though is even crazier at least with psychedelics there is a forced introspection and very little addictive nature.
All this does is create a credible argument that the pro legalization crowd are objectively lying to people and therefore untrustworthy.
just ignore things like cyanide, and mercury
I think that’s what people thought when reading negative anecdotes, but I definitely didn’t see a lot of suggestions that we lock people up.
The same thing happened for marijuana: Any mention of negative effects would bring downvotes, scorn, and disbelief pre-legalization. Then once it was legal it became acceptable to say that marijuana wasn’t a panacea and using a lot of it was actually a problem.
Before this change, it was common to read highly upvoted anecdotes here and on Reddit claiming everything from medicinal properties to fixing depression to improving driving skills (an actual claim I saw here and on Reddit multiple times). Now it’s widely acceptable that frequent marijuana use is not good for mental health and wellbeing, but that was once a thing you could not say on the internet.
Nobody had to suggest that, it was the law of the land already. Hyperbolic argument is hyperbolic ("iron cages" was a bit of a tip-off) but consequences short of imprisonment were typically some other state-run means of destroying one's career, family, and/or life. Pointing out that this isn't a good thing and isn't actually working somehow made you into The Enemy Of Decency. And while there's still lots of Drug Warriors out there who still think that way, I'm encouraged at the increasing avenues for actually productive discussion. Seems to be the one politically-charged topic that isn't getting more toxic these days.
It also works the other way around, people even talk about how years of therapy didn't help but psilocybin did, and few seem to consider that maybe it was a combination of both? Perhaps all of that therapy that "didn't help" set the stage for something else.
General problem with anecdata I guess.
Besides, he's kind of a closed off person who has a lot of emotions he just avoids dealing with, even more so since the cancer diagnosis. He definitely needs a trip sitter, but he has few friends (certainly none who could do that competently), and no one in our family could fulfill such a role for him. Maybe I could for someone else, but my relationship with him is too complicated for me to do that job well, I think. :-\
To top it off, my dad's cancer is in his liver, even though he never drank much at all for dietary reasons (he was on a strict keto diet for ages). I would worry about the possibility of toxicity with introducing new drugs without medical supervision.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?cond=cancer&aggFilters=sta...
It indeed decreases. When my spouse was diagnosed, they prescribed her anti-depressants. We replaced them with psilocybin. Never taken any anti-depressants.
We had a very serious case with multiple surgeries, chemos, radiations. Not one, not two, and not ten or even twenty. MORE than that.
The treatment still goes on, soon it is gonna be 5 years. With ZERO anti-depressants. And I've learnt how to grow them, not buying them.
So we don't need studies, we tested it the hard way, and it works :) I can talk about it for hours.
While the first 5 week post treatment actually looks impressive, I don't think the treatment arms being essentially the same after 6 months supports the conclusions of the study. Unless we backpedal and say the inactive grouo was microdosing (which has its own baggage...)
You can even collect depressed people, do nothing at all, and when you survey them 6 months later the average scores will improve. This is because depression is, on average, an aberrant condition and the average patient will tend to revert toward the mean.
However, psychedelic studies have a bigger problem: Psychedelics trigger false feelings of amazement and wonder, feeling like something magical has happened. This is like turbo placebo when you tell people that it’s a depression treatment. Maybe that’s a valuable therapeutic effect, or maybe not. There’s a lot to explore, but from all the studies I’ve read I’m not as bullish on mushrooms for depression as the headlines would indicate.
The key indicator of efficacy is the difference between groups. In this case there is some difference between groups but it is small.
Depression is a symptom, and for symptoms there are many causes.
Personalized medicine will fix this but that costs money and time and caring.
One day I had a little too much. That day I was really productive and obsessed with folds in clothing.
Ketamine was equally "experiential" but actually had lasting impact. It's a pity it's challenging to come by, as one can DIY the former.
Hormesis is characterized by a biphasic dose-response: low-level exposures to stressors (toxins, temperature, exercise, dietary restriction, etc.) are those which stimulate adaptive beneficial responses, eg exercise, ischemic preconditioning (short bouts of reduced blood flow improving tissue resilience), and dietary energy restriction.
Rather than negating homeostasis, we can say that hormesis "refines" it: mild, intermittent stress can make us resilient through larger future perturbations.
EDIT: Never mind, didn't see that it was cubensis - which might take more due to being weaker than regular wild semilanceata.
I don't really have anxiety or depression. I do have a fairly high stress family life, wife and kiddos have lots of issues. A few weeks ago I had 2g on an empty stomach on a Sunday and I just listened to music for ~4 hours and it was like I had a vacation. I hadn't enjoyed listening to music so much for 20-30 years. Also, I seem to feel kind of sleepy when I'm trippy, but afterwards I'm wide awake for 4-5 hours. So evening dosing is best avoided.
It's kind of great, for me personally, living in a state where it has been decriminalized.
"[...] psilocybin converts to psilocin in the body at roughly a 1:1 ratio by active effect [...]
Psilocybe cubensis (most common): Contains about 0.5-1.0% psilocybin by dry weight. Since psilocybin converts to psilocin in the body at roughly a 1:1 ratio by active effect, 30mg of psilocin would be equivalent to roughly 3-6 grams of dried P. cubensis.
Psilocybe semilanceata (liberty caps): Much more potent at 1-2% psilocybin content, so you'd need only about 1.5-3 grams dried.
Psilocybe azurescens: Even more potent at 1.5-2.5% psilocybin, requiring roughly 1-2 grams dried.
Important caveats:
- Individual mushrooms within the same species can vary by 3-5x in potency Growing conditions, harvesting time, and drying/storage methods all affect potency
- The caps are typically more potent than stems
- Fresh vs. dried makes a huge difference (fresh mushrooms are ~90% water)"
Have to note that the paper is from 2016; for those really interested, it's good to read recent review papers.
When ready, please talk with your doctor first. =3
Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trialWhat is this compared to a recreational dose? Are these patients getting high as part of their treatment?
People may think they are finding enlightenment, but are no different from the local deranged squirrels aggressively howling at passerby after nibbling Amanita in the fall. Apparently the squirrels use the mushroom to help preserve food stores, and it doesn't poison them as severely (often fatal for humans.)
Paul Stamets is a weird dude, but his work contains some profoundly detailed observations.
People need to think about Fungi as closer to animals that don't move on their own, and acknowledge they rapidly adapt genetically to survive. Pretty to photograph, but often far more complex than people like to admit. =3
All the recent studies in the last decade have proven it's the opposite. What's your point exactly ?
It's an entirely different class of hallucinogen. I don't have personal experience with it but I have done other dissociative hallucinogens and his take is likely largely true (though I wouldn't argue with someone saying they felt euphoria on it). The problem here is it's the entirely wrong mushroom.
I can assure any doubters that psilocybin on the other hand has legitimate euphoric effects.
I asked for 5 citations not sponsored by dealers that he claimed were available, and my post was flagged. To be fair, I would also accept 3 double-blind medical citations of reasonable quality.
You can't argue with the irrational, as hitting yourself in the head with a brick also causes similar results. lol =3
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35458717/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12001667
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12030455/
None of those publications are sponsored by dealers.
There are multiple others which I’m not going to search but I hope now you have starting points, you’ll be curious enough to do further research.
> hitting yourself in the head with a brick also causes similar results.
That’s false and you aren’t going to find a single paper (funded by anyone) that would conclude this.
>That’s false and you aren’t going to find a single paper (funded by anyone) that would conclude this.
A brick may be too strong for some, but minor brain injury often causes euphoric experiences and personality changes... even if people hop up and down on the spot long enough. Native traditions in Africa have been getting concussion highs that way likely since history began.
Incidentally, getting hit with a brick would certainly cause someone to stop ruminating on existential angst for a little while, and euphoric concussions do cause cathartic experiences. lol =3
Notably, the age of surgical and chemical lobotomies were used to treat unruly patients in North America for several decades. Commonly, procedures were applied to treatment resistant criminal psychopaths and countless others with little long-term success.
We agree "something" happens (well documented with LSD), but disagree on the safety warnings in your own citations. Which do not clearly address long-term health effects due to the cocktail of other compounds in cancer patients.
I am not judging peoples life choices, but we must agree most people that do recreational drugs are not in cancer or psychiatric care.
Thank you for the citations, as it cleared up why we differ in opinion on this matter. Best of luck =3
Or... don't bother, the one you will find is questionable at best if you read past the headline.
Mostly, real doctors take "Primum non nocere" very seriously, and do not conflate therapeutic studies as proof organ damage isn't a risk. Fungal infection of those with compromised immune systems is harm.
People do experiment on the desperate, but it is rarely ethical gambling with someone's life. The squirrels seem to enjoy their trip, but also seem less invested in trying to justify its safety.
May you live an enjoyable life with authentic experiences. Have a glorious day. =3
So, just to be clear, you have no evidence of renal failure from psilocybe cubensis?
So to be clear, cancer patients have a lot of other problems that likely would confound which reported symptoms are related to which medication.
Someone with access to the PsycINFO database login could clarify things for sure. If I recall it was a few cases of micro-dosing related organ failure cases that caught my attention. No idea which specific psilocybe mushroom was responsible.
The Natives also used Datura, but rolling in your own excrement naked for 2 weeks with severe hallucinations isn't a popular recreational experience for some reason. A few kids die every so often trying to prepare the plant.
Have a great day, and stay healthy =3
I must apologize for the low quality data here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...
I'd say that counts squarely as "no evidence". Besides, I asked for 5 citations.
Also, you can keep the off topic babbling to a minimum. We are talking about the lack of evidence of renal failure resulting from psilocybe cubensis.
What seems like a detractor is an allusion to some therapeutic psychiatric citations describing native shamanistic traditions as some sort of qualifying safety feature in compounds.
I really can't be bothered to pull more papers folks seem to simply ignore. The trivial counter-proof is there, and it is unethical to harm people for more data.
Best of luck, and please keep an eye open for early signs of renal failure like persistent excessive foaming in urine etc. =3
Good luck, most Dealers/Junkies engage in argumentum ad hominem when confronted with their exploitive/maladaptive coping behavior.
We will have to agree to disagree, =3
https://www.medlink.com/articles/neurologic-presentations-of...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1336442/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...
Would you like to give up? It's a bad look my man.
See the other post for current status of this thread.
I'll assume from there you failed to read any of it.
Edit:
lol, here's the paper he cited and deleted:
https://academic.oup.com/ndt/article-abstract/11/11/2324/190...
The 4th one is the one you already admitted had bad data.
At least one of the other two clearly states that the mushroom was unidentified. You will have to read or delete both.
A Star Trek reference?
First came across his work while modeling hermetic food and waste reclamation options. Paul looked at this area several decades prior, and documented everything in detail. He is weird, but a good scientist worthy of respect. =3
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...
Some do not choose wisely =3
Try not to be rude, and ask if you don't understand. =3
You are correct of course, it's a serotonergic hallucinogen.
https://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/chemistry/chemistry_com...
There just may be a tiny bit of SAR going on there. :)
They are still in denial their kidneys may eventually fail. =)
bonus, it made my buddy quit drinking
variance, it made my other buddy delusional and stupid. hasn't really recovered
Was the setting different? Different people around, different location …
After all learning from mistakes can be just as helpful as the positives in life.