Personal anecdote: 2 years of "research", 2 trips on psilocybe (one month apart), proper set & setting & guide & a lot of talking about it later with a trusted person ... decades-long cripling neurosis/anxiety disorder gone, addictions gone, depression receding, worldview changed, rated as one of the most influential experiences.
Depression is (imho) not to be healed with "here, swallow a pill", structural changes to one's life are necessary. Psychedelics can help to show the way, not to solve it.
From personal experience, I think one of the reasons psychedelics can help with depression is that when you are severely depressed, it feels permanent, like nothing will ever get better or even meaningfully different.
But then you have a psychedelic experience, and for a brief moment, things are very much different. And if the experience is even slightly positive, it reminds you that it’s still possible to feel something good, and that glimmer of hope can chip away at your entrenched fatalism.
I'm confused how your first sentence appears to say that you completely solved your depression, addictions, anxiety, neurosis and worldview with two trips, and your second sentence says that depression can't be solved with a pill. These seem to be at odds, unless I'm missing something.
I wonder if the same effects can be attained by someone who has used psychedelics recreationionally their entire life, from say 16 onward. is it the external guidance during the experience that really makes the difference? or is a life of experiences responsible for one not having anxiety or depression on those levels
People confuse simple with easy. How to quit smoking? Simple. Don’t smoke. Easy? Not so much. Many things require mental willpower to make it happen.
Feels like those kind of therapies help make that happen. I know one person who was borderline suicidal and this kind of therapy helped her move life into a nice direction.
I'm glad for you, but the researchers involved in this story did an actual RCT with a cohort of patients and measured the effect, and the benefit of psilocybin was shown to be marginal. The study is linked in the first paragraph of the story.
I'm glad you had a good outcome. It's difficult to relate to your experience from the outside. Most of the time people talk about these experiences, they are vague and difficult to understand.
Sometimes in poor cases it can sound like gym-bro science where I should totally pop a supplement because this guy had a good experience on it and trust me bro.
I would love to know more specifically about the subjective experience is like, so we can pick out pieces that have a greater meaning to collective understanding.
Depression is an umbrella term for one experience caused by many, many different problems. Some chronic medical situations are going to allow your body to be re-depressed after a positive drug experience, so being able to see subjective reports in detail can allow the public to decide if it's worth doing a psychedelic treatment.
Not to mention we should probably map this experience out to slowly cut down on the same speculative questions every time drugs come up; about the divine/psychological/medical nature of a drug trip.
the second time it cured me from depression, the healing process happened in around 10 minutes where i was taken from the worst to the best. felt like 100's of simultaneous orgasms and was in shock for the next three days.
i have read a single take can increase neuronal connectivity by 10% in rodents, which is not surprising after that experience.
Is there a book you recommend for getting started with research? There is enough noise in this space that I find "search the internet" to be...difficult.
> Depression is (imho) not to be healed with "here, swallow a pill", structural changes to one's life are necessary.
Clinical depression rarely has anything to do with what you've done or events in the outside world.
Psychiatry has settled on treating depression with two strokes, a cocktail which is a chemical antidepressent, and a chemical stabilizer, and they expect you to take these daily and stay on it for the rest of your life. I have no evidence for it, but I assume this is some pharmaceutical company's agenda, to keep you a customer for the rest of your life. While it works, chemicals always have side-effects, and with so much exposure, daily, they are bound to compound, making it more difficult to consume.
Therapy alone can cure depression, it just takes a lot of time and effort. I don't think it is possible talk therapy could ever make things worse, but it just doesn't work fast enough. Still, recommended.
But I have discovered a way to cure depression relatively quickly in two ways.
First, chemically, but without a life sentence. I have discovered a substance that will cure depression overnight, not unlike an aspirin cures a headache. You get headaches, too? How would you feel about being told you need to take a daily medication for the rest of your life to cure it? No, one dose will do. The drug is unregulated, and is available OTC in cough gels. You won't find this in any PDR, but depending on the patient's weight, say for a 160lb. man, 900mg of dextromethorphan will cure depression overnight, and it has been for some time in many clinical studies exploring its potential as a fast acting treatment for treatment-resistant depression. You take the large dose with a pepsid, and go to bed, wake the next day depression free, and its depression-killing effects can last up to a year. It is an old and safe drug, and the lethal overdose is estimated, because it is unknown. Though it is an OTC remedy for cough, dextromethorphan has already been approved for treatment of emotional incontinence, which could be seen as sort of a cousin of depression.
The other cure, chemical free, is sunlight. Light in the eyes regulates mood. Not enough light will eventually cause depression. Too much light will cause mania (as we should have suspected from the exploits of Florida Man). Put enough sunlight in your eyes, it will cure your clinical depression. If daylight is not enough, get an artificial light that is an accurate simulator of natural sunlight, which is probably not LED, due to too much blue light, which also damages the eye and slowly blinds you, but you can't go wrong with halogen. Point it at your eyes. You can even close your eyes, light goes right through the eye lids and is still effective at fighting depression.
Whether the potential of psychedelic therapy has been overstated or not, I think the bubble cannot be "about to burst" for the simple reason it hasn't had the timeframe nor the scale to even be called "a bubble", let alone for it to finish on such an intense note as "bursting".
«Is the psychedelic therapy spark about to fizzle out?» might have been a more apt analogy.
(I have no reason to opine either way regarding the answer)
I’ve dealt with depression for the better half of my life. I tried SSRIs for a decade with moderate results — they definitely helped, but more so in a way where the depression felt manageable than feeling really happy. I went off them at the beginning of the year to experiment with managing the depression other ways: therapy, meditation, exercise.
One day I got to work and noticed that for the first time in a while, I was feeling really happy. In a way where I realized that other times I thought I was happy, I was really just not-too-sad. This was what actual happiness felt like. I was kind of surprised, but thought “wow, I guess the meditation and exercise are finally paying off? It must be that… nothing else has been different recently…”
And then I remembered that I’d tried shrooms for the first time the day before.
So far, trips seem to pretty reliably have this effect for maybe 1-2 weeks. I suspect I’m also seeing some more durable benefits beyond that, but a little harder to be sure.
I don’t take psychedelics. But I’m convinced meditation and exercise can re-wire your brain.
Meditation trains the mind to learn to see when it is falling into maladaptive grooves. It doesn’t prevent it, just a raises awareness. Exercise for me seems to shift the baseline mood forward a bit. Kind of feels like my hormones are in the right place after 25 years.
This sounds very similar to my experience. I have persistent depression - usually pretty minor, but sometimes worse than others - and social anxiety, and recently started psychedelic therapy with ketamine (I’m still on my SSRIs, which keep things in check, but certainly aren’t a cure).
I didn’t experience any psychedelic effects, but my mood was significantly improved during the weeks after. Anxiety greatly diminished, confidence greatly increased and I for the first time in a few years, I feel like I have a path to conquering my impostor syndrome.
I’m not yet totally comfortable telling my social circle that I’ve been prescribed horse tranquilizers, but I’ve been an immediate convert to the possibilities of these courses of treatment. I can’t say it isn’t psychosomatic or the placebo effect at work, but I’ve been frankly shocked at how quickly it worked for me and how well it has seemed to work.
I have had the same after trips. For a few days I just felt good which is usually rare for me. It was good to experience how feeling good feels. I had almost forgotten.
Let's not forget, the bubble being about getting these substances back from being banned and considered to dangerous for society to research and otherwise deal with responsibly.
Fits the theory that this is a paid hit piece, obviously without evidential support. Remind me, could there be an industry financially interested to get psychedelics back into the box?
If anyone with mental health issues is considering psychedelics on their own, outside a clinical setting: please be careful and do your research beforehand. They nearly completely ruined my life. Definitely do not do them if you are on an SSRI.
I am bipolar but was diagnosed incorrectly with depression and OCD, taking an SSRI. I was a regular marijuana smoker and took DMT which resulted in acute psychosis that lasted months. I'd had what I now recognized as hypomanic episodes before, but nothing this bad.
I will not get into details for privacy reasons but had to take months off of work or school. I alternately thought I was famous, being followed, could control cameras that were following me at all times - the works. I had visual and auditory hallucinations days after the DMT experience, auditory weeks to months later. I told friends strange things about my mental health history that were misperceived. It is a bit of a blur.
About a week after taking DMT, I was involuntarily hospitalized and only sent home with family supervision. They put me on strong antipsychotics with nasty side effects. They didn't help at all. I only got better months later, after I got off of all psychiatric drugs, and realized when talking with a friend that I was not famous. I then entered into a nearly year long depression and perceived that I had lost almost all my friends, although I now think that was not the case.
Now, I've been stable for almost 10 years, and am married with a great career. We have a dog, a house, and are looking to have kids soon. I'm incredibly happy and only recovered with the support of family, friends, and great doctors. I've been taking lamotrigine daily for bipolar. For me, it is a wonder drug. Bipolar is incredibly hard for psychiatrists to diagnose. It took them years to identify it.
Another friend of mine had acute psychosis due to another psychedelic drug and had a similar experience to mine with a hospitalization.
If you have any family history of schizophrenia or bipolar or are on psychiatric drugs, please really carefully consider the possible consequences of using psychedelics.
I made friends with a woman who does something called integration therapy. She deals mostly with people who have gone and dosed themselves in the hope of finding themselves or whatever and just end up needing professional help because that's a very hard thing to do to yourself if you're already messed up.
The way I've always seen it is this - Learning your lesson with these things is kind of like learning your lesson because you just got your ass handed to you in a fist fight, except with psychedelics it's like getting cosmically beaten into a pulp by having your consciousness put into a cannon and fired across the universe and back. Some people are really attuned to this kind of thing and can just shake it off while laughing the entire time. Others, who have no idea what they're getting into, with stuff like pre-existing anxiety conditions? If anyone really thinks them going solo on these kind of journeys is going to make them better then they might as well send them down some rapids with no boating or swimming experience for a 'therapeutic' prank show.
The key thing this article and the researchers touch on is that it's the integration part of the therapy that works, the drug is something like a catalyst, and any hype around treatments which work without that component is likely to turn out to be a dangerous disappointment. I don't disagree with this at all.
A lot of people here are claiming that Big Pharma is suppressing the truth about psychedelics so that they can make money from SSRIs. But remember: Big Pharma isn't making much money on SSRIs anymore, now that they've gone generic. If anything, it's the movement against SSRIs and in favor of new treatments that may be motivated by profit.
How is this a bubble if it's actually helping people with mental health issues. A lot of universities have begun studying this. These should never have been illegal in the first place.
Is this not the opposite of a bubble? It seems like public opinion and public policy are actually making significant shifts into making psychedelic treatments more mainstream. From which I expect a large industry to emerge.
1) This is nothing compared to when Prozac® was introduced in the 90's. The idea that Prozac was going to cure Western mental health ills was quite popular and viral. It was a dawn of a new age according to some. Now SSRI's are still used when appropriate, but no one thinks they are a cure all for depression.
2) There's a distortion at work here. Many people, including myself, thing that natural growing mushrooms or other plants containing hallucinogens should not be illegal. The problem is that it appears the only way to legalize at the current time is to force them into a doctor/patient therapeutic relationship. This is causing people to twist themselves into a knots trying to explain why this small step towards legalization should be allowed. Many exaggerations and false claims are being made. And who wants to always have to do their trip with a doctor sitting by their side?
My hometown of Santa Cruz California is on the right track. Decriminalize for personal use and move on to more important issues.
Santa Cruz decriminalizes magic mushrooms and other natural psychedelics, making it the third US city to take such a step
I happened to watch the 'Ecstacy' documentary on Prime last night. I was surprised to see the guy who brought MDMA to the world was sad that it had become a party drug as he believes it's primary purpose could have been to help people psychologically. Definitely worth a watch.
There's no mismatch between being a party drug and helping people psychologically [1]. The only people who think so are the same kind of sad, dull people who were upset at the Finnish prime minister dancing - and since MDMA turned out to be an awesome party drug they had to ban it and punish the ones who had fun.
[1] For me, for example, I didn't have any major traumas before I tried MDMA (so therapy would have been pointless), but I were really shy. MDMA at a party setting helped me realize deeply that there's no reason for being scared of talking and connecting with people.
> The findings were somewhat lackluster: it found that the psychedelic was only marginally better than traditional treatments at relieving depression.
Err, what? What could possibly be lackluster about that? A one time (or few times) treatment does marginally better than a daily pill? Even if taken at face value, that's a spectacular result.
It's a bit odd that this article doesn't even mention the fact that psychedelic treatments for depression, if widely successful, would likely destroy a major fraction of anti-depressant sales across the United States. That's an obvious reason the pharmaceutical industry would be pushing back against this.
Sometimes I wonder if SSRIs are one of those things that the industry overinvested in and now that there's plenty of momentum (and budget) to support the narrative that they are the cure it's hard to suggest that there may be simpler alternatives
I'm worried that the industry is stampeding into lionizing and monetizing another thing that ultimately statistics say may not be working better than placebo and has harmful side effects, but 20-50% of the population is on and is also responsible for a large percentage of health care spending.
SSRIs are that. Opiates are almost that (for long term pain management.) Statins are suspicious (and also held up as miracles by paid experts suggesting that we might add both them and lithium to the water supply like fluoride.)
I see a future of bare clinic rooms filled with beds, and on each bed someone who is being intravenously fed psychedelics (that are still illegal to grow, or take without a doctor's signoff and a nurse's supervision.) Each of them paying a $10 copay, while the facility bills the government and insurance $500/hr.
It'll be like the methadone clinic model, where we decided that to get people off heroin, we would addict them to a drug far harder to quit than heroin.
edit: I wish we would simply decriminalize psychedelics, and not do this thing again where something gets captured by a couple of oligarchs and sends their worth into the stratosphere, while every media outlet is fanning the flames. Really fucking dreading seeing the psychedelic (completely industry-funded) patients' rights organizations representatives getting interviewed while crying on tv about how party/politician X doesn't take depression seriously and is trying to genocide them by not letting five year olds trip.
> Afterward, participants received aftercare, known as “integration,” in which they process everything that happened during the trip.
Integration is definitely the key step. Without integration, the trip is no different than recreational use for fun. Integration requires sustained effort and guidance. If you don't have professional help, then meditation is the best DIY method. It usually leads to Spirituality. Pyschedlics tend to go very well with Buddhist and Vedantic spiritual practices. I think it best complements with Neo-Advaita. If Advaita is the theory, then psychedelics are the practicals.
The headline presupposes that a bubble exists. I would argue it doesn't. A psychedelic therapy bubble would have many commercial products that do basically the same thing, all competing for the same dollars.
I think you need some kind of framework in order to utilize psychedelics properly. Buddhist or other meditation oriented practices are very popular, but not the only path.
The important thing is to have something you can cultivate because otherwise what might happen is that you accidentally heighten your existing feedback loops, which are likely negative, leading to a bad trip and in the worst case possibly psychosis.
Having strong foundational positive feedback loops that you can use as a anchor or bedrock are useful not only during chemically altered brain states, but in general life as well in protecting your mind (a Patronus for your “defense against the dark arts” you might say).
The first bloom of the rose being marginally better than current antidepressants is a bad sign, seeing as right now it's going to be getting the most biased and cherry picked selections of studies it's ever going to get. SSRIs started off as miracles before they became possibly no more effective than placebo. Psychedelics are starting as marginally better than possibly no more effective than placebo.
I was totally struck by the sexual abuse perpetrated by therapists within research studies that this article talks about. It belies a need for much more careful scrutiny of the whole research enterprise, if you ask me.
I can't believe someone who wants to help someone else (and, by the way, try to demonstrate the power of psychedelics that they no-doubt believe in) would jeopardize the whole enterprise that way.
[+] [-] myshpa|3 years ago|reply
Depression is (imho) not to be healed with "here, swallow a pill", structural changes to one's life are necessary. Psychedelics can help to show the way, not to solve it.
[+] [-] cainxinth|3 years ago|reply
But then you have a psychedelic experience, and for a brief moment, things are very much different. And if the experience is even slightly positive, it reminds you that it’s still possible to feel something good, and that glimmer of hope can chip away at your entrenched fatalism.
[+] [-] johnfn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konfusinomicon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molszanski|3 years ago|reply
Feels like those kind of therapies help make that happen. I know one person who was borderline suicidal and this kind of therapy helped her move life into a nice direction.
[+] [-] tptacek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrysteve|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes in poor cases it can sound like gym-bro science where I should totally pop a supplement because this guy had a good experience on it and trust me bro.
I would love to know more specifically about the subjective experience is like, so we can pick out pieces that have a greater meaning to collective understanding.
Depression is an umbrella term for one experience caused by many, many different problems. Some chronic medical situations are going to allow your body to be re-depressed after a positive drug experience, so being able to see subjective reports in detail can allow the public to decide if it's worth doing a psychedelic treatment.
Not to mention we should probably map this experience out to slowly cut down on the same speculative questions every time drugs come up; about the divine/psychological/medical nature of a drug trip.
[+] [-] voisin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] immmmmm|3 years ago|reply
i have read a single take can increase neuronal connectivity by 10% in rodents, which is not surprising after that experience.
still feeling great more than a year after.
meanwhile my mom gas been on AD for 40 years.
[+] [-] hi5eyes|3 years ago|reply
implementing those changes over time is the key
[+] [-] no_butterscotch|3 years ago|reply
What does "proper set & setting & guide" mean? Clinical? Or friend/shaman type thing?
[+] [-] mbesto|3 years ago|reply
The best way I had it described to me is:
Psychedelics are microscopes, not panaceas. A trained psychiatrist is the panacea.
[+] [-] ccooffee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
Clinical depression rarely has anything to do with what you've done or events in the outside world.
Psychiatry has settled on treating depression with two strokes, a cocktail which is a chemical antidepressent, and a chemical stabilizer, and they expect you to take these daily and stay on it for the rest of your life. I have no evidence for it, but I assume this is some pharmaceutical company's agenda, to keep you a customer for the rest of your life. While it works, chemicals always have side-effects, and with so much exposure, daily, they are bound to compound, making it more difficult to consume.
Therapy alone can cure depression, it just takes a lot of time and effort. I don't think it is possible talk therapy could ever make things worse, but it just doesn't work fast enough. Still, recommended.
But I have discovered a way to cure depression relatively quickly in two ways.
First, chemically, but without a life sentence. I have discovered a substance that will cure depression overnight, not unlike an aspirin cures a headache. You get headaches, too? How would you feel about being told you need to take a daily medication for the rest of your life to cure it? No, one dose will do. The drug is unregulated, and is available OTC in cough gels. You won't find this in any PDR, but depending on the patient's weight, say for a 160lb. man, 900mg of dextromethorphan will cure depression overnight, and it has been for some time in many clinical studies exploring its potential as a fast acting treatment for treatment-resistant depression. You take the large dose with a pepsid, and go to bed, wake the next day depression free, and its depression-killing effects can last up to a year. It is an old and safe drug, and the lethal overdose is estimated, because it is unknown. Though it is an OTC remedy for cough, dextromethorphan has already been approved for treatment of emotional incontinence, which could be seen as sort of a cousin of depression.
The other cure, chemical free, is sunlight. Light in the eyes regulates mood. Not enough light will eventually cause depression. Too much light will cause mania (as we should have suspected from the exploits of Florida Man). Put enough sunlight in your eyes, it will cure your clinical depression. If daylight is not enough, get an artificial light that is an accurate simulator of natural sunlight, which is probably not LED, due to too much blue light, which also damages the eye and slowly blinds you, but you can't go wrong with halogen. Point it at your eyes. You can even close your eyes, light goes right through the eye lids and is still effective at fighting depression.
[+] [-] ParallelThread|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mordisquitos|3 years ago|reply
«Is the psychedelic therapy spark about to fizzle out?» might have been a more apt analogy.
(I have no reason to opine either way regarding the answer)
[+] [-] flybrand|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mountainriver|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecbz|3 years ago|reply
One day I got to work and noticed that for the first time in a while, I was feeling really happy. In a way where I realized that other times I thought I was happy, I was really just not-too-sad. This was what actual happiness felt like. I was kind of surprised, but thought “wow, I guess the meditation and exercise are finally paying off? It must be that… nothing else has been different recently…”
And then I remembered that I’d tried shrooms for the first time the day before.
So far, trips seem to pretty reliably have this effect for maybe 1-2 weeks. I suspect I’m also seeing some more durable benefits beyond that, but a little harder to be sure.
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|3 years ago|reply
Meditation trains the mind to learn to see when it is falling into maladaptive grooves. It doesn’t prevent it, just a raises awareness. Exercise for me seems to shift the baseline mood forward a bit. Kind of feels like my hormones are in the right place after 25 years.
[+] [-] nocoiner|3 years ago|reply
I didn’t experience any psychedelic effects, but my mood was significantly improved during the weeks after. Anxiety greatly diminished, confidence greatly increased and I for the first time in a few years, I feel like I have a path to conquering my impostor syndrome.
I’m not yet totally comfortable telling my social circle that I’ve been prescribed horse tranquilizers, but I’ve been an immediate convert to the possibilities of these courses of treatment. I can’t say it isn’t psychosomatic or the placebo effect at work, but I’ve been frankly shocked at how quickly it worked for me and how well it has seemed to work.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] febeling|3 years ago|reply
Fits the theory that this is a paid hit piece, obviously without evidential support. Remind me, could there be an industry financially interested to get psychedelics back into the box?
[+] [-] throwpsychosis|3 years ago|reply
I am bipolar but was diagnosed incorrectly with depression and OCD, taking an SSRI. I was a regular marijuana smoker and took DMT which resulted in acute psychosis that lasted months. I'd had what I now recognized as hypomanic episodes before, but nothing this bad.
I will not get into details for privacy reasons but had to take months off of work or school. I alternately thought I was famous, being followed, could control cameras that were following me at all times - the works. I had visual and auditory hallucinations days after the DMT experience, auditory weeks to months later. I told friends strange things about my mental health history that were misperceived. It is a bit of a blur.
About a week after taking DMT, I was involuntarily hospitalized and only sent home with family supervision. They put me on strong antipsychotics with nasty side effects. They didn't help at all. I only got better months later, after I got off of all psychiatric drugs, and realized when talking with a friend that I was not famous. I then entered into a nearly year long depression and perceived that I had lost almost all my friends, although I now think that was not the case.
Now, I've been stable for almost 10 years, and am married with a great career. We have a dog, a house, and are looking to have kids soon. I'm incredibly happy and only recovered with the support of family, friends, and great doctors. I've been taking lamotrigine daily for bipolar. For me, it is a wonder drug. Bipolar is incredibly hard for psychiatrists to diagnose. It took them years to identify it.
Another friend of mine had acute psychosis due to another psychedelic drug and had a similar experience to mine with a hospitalization.
If you have any family history of schizophrenia or bipolar or are on psychiatric drugs, please really carefully consider the possible consequences of using psychedelics.
[+] [-] jamal-kumar|3 years ago|reply
The way I've always seen it is this - Learning your lesson with these things is kind of like learning your lesson because you just got your ass handed to you in a fist fight, except with psychedelics it's like getting cosmically beaten into a pulp by having your consciousness put into a cannon and fired across the universe and back. Some people are really attuned to this kind of thing and can just shake it off while laughing the entire time. Others, who have no idea what they're getting into, with stuff like pre-existing anxiety conditions? If anyone really thinks them going solo on these kind of journeys is going to make them better then they might as well send them down some rapids with no boating or swimming experience for a 'therapeutic' prank show.
The key thing this article and the researchers touch on is that it's the integration part of the therapy that works, the drug is something like a catalyst, and any hype around treatments which work without that component is likely to turn out to be a dangerous disappointment. I don't disagree with this at all.
[+] [-] jasonhansel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jp0d|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devonallie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelwww|3 years ago|reply
2) There's a distortion at work here. Many people, including myself, thing that natural growing mushrooms or other plants containing hallucinogens should not be illegal. The problem is that it appears the only way to legalize at the current time is to force them into a doctor/patient therapeutic relationship. This is causing people to twist themselves into a knots trying to explain why this small step towards legalization should be allowed. Many exaggerations and false claims are being made. And who wants to always have to do their trip with a doctor sitting by their side?
My hometown of Santa Cruz California is on the right track. Decriminalize for personal use and move on to more important issues.
Santa Cruz decriminalizes magic mushrooms and other natural psychedelics, making it the third US city to take such a step
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/us/santa-cruz-mushrooms-psych...
[+] [-] bambam3000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmsnberbar66|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristofferR|3 years ago|reply
[1] For me, for example, I didn't have any major traumas before I tried MDMA (so therapy would have been pointless), but I were really shy. MDMA at a party setting helped me realize deeply that there's no reason for being scared of talking and connecting with people.
[+] [-] darawk|3 years ago|reply
Err, what? What could possibly be lackluster about that? A one time (or few times) treatment does marginally better than a daily pill? Even if taken at face value, that's a spectacular result.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mousetree|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HighlandSpring|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes I wonder if SSRIs are one of those things that the industry overinvested in and now that there's plenty of momentum (and budget) to support the narrative that they are the cure it's hard to suggest that there may be simpler alternatives
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
SSRIs are that. Opiates are almost that (for long term pain management.) Statins are suspicious (and also held up as miracles by paid experts suggesting that we might add both them and lithium to the water supply like fluoride.)
I see a future of bare clinic rooms filled with beds, and on each bed someone who is being intravenously fed psychedelics (that are still illegal to grow, or take without a doctor's signoff and a nurse's supervision.) Each of them paying a $10 copay, while the facility bills the government and insurance $500/hr.
It'll be like the methadone clinic model, where we decided that to get people off heroin, we would addict them to a drug far harder to quit than heroin.
edit: I wish we would simply decriminalize psychedelics, and not do this thing again where something gets captured by a couple of oligarchs and sends their worth into the stratosphere, while every media outlet is fanning the flames. Really fucking dreading seeing the psychedelic (completely industry-funded) patients' rights organizations representatives getting interviewed while crying on tv about how party/politician X doesn't take depression seriously and is trying to genocide them by not letting five year olds trip.
[+] [-] krona|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] braindead_in|3 years ago|reply
Integration is definitely the key step. Without integration, the trip is no different than recreational use for fun. Integration requires sustained effort and guidance. If you don't have professional help, then meditation is the best DIY method. It usually leads to Spirituality. Pyschedlics tend to go very well with Buddhist and Vedantic spiritual practices. I think it best complements with Neo-Advaita. If Advaita is the theory, then psychedelics are the practicals.
[+] [-] 34679|3 years ago|reply
Begging the question:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
[+] [-] lawrenceyan|3 years ago|reply
The important thing is to have something you can cultivate because otherwise what might happen is that you accidentally heighten your existing feedback loops, which are likely negative, leading to a bad trip and in the worst case possibly psychosis.
Having strong foundational positive feedback loops that you can use as a anchor or bedrock are useful not only during chemically altered brain states, but in general life as well in protecting your mind (a Patronus for your “defense against the dark arts” you might say).
[+] [-] Ambolia|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tony_cannistra|3 years ago|reply
I can't believe someone who wants to help someone else (and, by the way, try to demonstrate the power of psychedelics that they no-doubt believe in) would jeopardize the whole enterprise that way.
Why has nobody in this thread commented on that?
[+] [-] AndrewVos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
To those of us "of a certain age," this sounds ... familiar.
[+] [-] mistermann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derbOac|3 years ago|reply