Anecdata, but an acquaintance of mine struggled with lifelong anorexia. Severe enough that he was hospitalized a few times. With great effort he could cling to the bottom of the "normal BMI" range, but his life was generally ruled by the eating disorder - he couldn't have meals with people, he had to do various exercise rituals.
He was an early participant in one of these psychedelic studies a few years ago. After the first treatment, he said he couldn't really tell if it had any effect. But six months later, he was totally changed - able to function almost normally.
We should exercise our usual amount of skepticism about miracle treatments, but my hope is that his experience can be replicated.
Science generally works on IF Then statements when it comes to treatment, IF you take this drug your blood pressure will increase, IF you exercise more your life expectancy will increase, with mental health issues there very few IF then treatments, there are only if maybe treatments, this is for a slew of reasons such as how we don't really understand it, symptoms can be caused by many different underlying issues, and legal risk of prescribing something that isn't proven effective. That being said, the IF maybe treatments are the only way to treat mental health, Psilocybin falls in this category.
I lost a family member to anorexia, and the only thing I really regret is that I didn't suggest that we try psychedelic therapy now that everything else had failed and things looked pretty grim. I mostly blame myself for not pushing the idea. But I am also angry at the war on drugs which has caused all use of psychoactive drugs to be associated with such taboo.
Psychedelics open your brain up to rewiring in some way, and can be used under direction to treat a lot of things. But of course, people who didn't like the Vietnam War used them recreationally, which is why the US government made them globally illegal.
Psychedelics desolve the conceptual prison your mind is in, the government made them illegal because they build those prisons.
Charitably, you could argue a functional society involves some amount of indoctrination into a set of shared beliefs and a large percentage of people losing that indoctrination would destroy society. Could the US function if everyone was a pacifist, anti-capitalist, hippie? I think that was and still is the primary concern.
Psychedelics can dissolve more than the mind's conceptual prisons, perhaps much more of the mind than one would like. How did the hippie-era stereotype of the burned out acid head disappear so quickly from popular culture?
Kary Mullis is known to have used a lot of it and discovered PCR while off psychedelics. There's also the famous Hoffman's bycicle day. The stereotype is just that, and might be a result of lack of mental stimulation rather than LSD abuse, which is possibly the safest drug in terms of toxicity.
Interestingly, we know the CIA tried to use psychedelics to make people become the opposite of hippies, and they failed. This was part of MKULTRA. They were banned shortly after this failure.
anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. sure they dissolve some kind of prison, but many people never make it back from that dissolution and end up somewhere worse
Sure but "somewhere worse" is usually defined relative to the current societal framework. Society requires almost every adult to participate in labor, if LSD made you want to sit around and make paintings all day instead of work we would consider it a negative even though it would be a positive within other conceivable societal frameworks. For example, if AI removes the need for labor then maybe it would be fine and even desirable for everyone to just be high and make paintings all day. The complete dissolution that some people experience is likewise terrible for society, because people with no ego are poor, unmotivated workers amongst other potential behavioral issues, but in a Tibetan monastery you might be considered a saint.
As I understand it it can be a lot worse, a lot better, or anywhere in between. Scientifically backed coaching can probably shift it towards the "better" side. This is a new area of research because the whole thing was written off for several decades due to the war on drugs.
> anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. sure they dissolve some kind of prison, but many people never make it back from that dissolution and end up somewhere worse
Way to generalise. I also know people who drank water, went to sleep and never woke up.
Ego dissolution is dosage dependent and you don't need to reach that point to get positive benefits.
Also, many people do psychdelics that probably shouldn't.
unfortunately, I think repeated psychedlic use has deterministic and predictable changes to peoples personalities. its not some "awakening", its a structural change in the brain. i watched many close friends fade away after too much use
Surely, that's dosage dependent and frequency dependent. One per week vs once every three months vs once per year. Low dose vs medium dose vs high dose.
Plus, these things are illegal which means that most of the time you are not getting the real but instead pharmacologically similar substances that might have secondary effects. This is way you can't reliably imply a correlation because it is a black market and often what you think you consumed is not what you actually consumed.
Unless you actually tested what your friends consumed, you don't know what it was.
If you want to specify LSD, you should do that, not "psychedelics." There are many, many psychedelics. They have sometimes radical differences. You cannot generalize that word into "many people never make it back." That is flat-out wrong, not to mention harmful.
i disagree. i have a unique view of this type of drug use. i was part of a large social circle of psychedelic users, over the course of many years. i very rarely took part. i watched close friends change.
Drug use changes the way you vote. The people who were running the country during the Vietnam war recognized this and, along with the people who owned industry/media, didn't want that kind of change to go mainstream.
Yeah, Disenfranchise the hippies and the blacks by targeting those communities with heavy policing. Sorta like today where there's similar drug use levels between white and black populations, but one side is more heavily policed than the other.
Perhaps you'd like to dig down into the stats using AI to find out that the gap in policing isn't really due to race. Check by poverty level, and perhaps by geographic areas.
Crack cocaine and cocaine are the same drug with a different delivery method but we all know exactly why one is punished more harshly. There's a federal policy that a given quantity of crack cocaine is to be treated as 10 times that quantity of regular cocaine, IIRC?
Psychedelics arent that far from turning your brain off and then turning it back on again
but anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. clearly they are doing some kind of unraveling that doesnt fully bounce back
Clearly it impossible to observe brain chemistry by looking at a person.
Psychedelics does however have longterm behavioural effects that are statistically significant and to some extent observable.
Using a definition of brain chemistry that defines brain chemistry at an atomic level you may assert that a change in behavioural patterns reflect a change in brain chemistry. But with such a definition anything that a person experiences does that.
Why would you want your brain to ravel back up? I've worked at ayahuasca retreats and know many people who do it for a living (who are many of the most grounded people I know). Using these things in a therapeutic manner is a completely different thing than using them recreationally, might as well be a different substance. I'd guess those people who "permanently changed their brain" (whatever that means) were not in a context for actually healing.
I believe that the drugs cause structural changes to the brain that make it more difficult to function in the reward structure of society. You can claim through a philosophical lens that society is flawed and so this is okay, but ive seen it derail peoples lives, such that they are just living in some rural area with limited participation in real life
ive barely taken them, but i watched many people change over years of use.
guess it depends on what "derail" means (meaning, do you actually know one's internal state and if they are happy?). Is something wrong with living alone in a rural area if you are happy? (This sounds great to me, for reference!).
I've watched hundreds of people take them in great containers with great support. It's never a good idea to make big changes right away, but we take small steps to adjust our lives so we can actually be happy. Yes, even if that is less "productive". Why do we do the things we do anyways?
> just living in some rural area with limited participation in real life
They might say the same thing about your lifestyle. The "reward structure of society" is highly abstract these days, arguably disconnected from "real life". You could say monks are disconnected from "real life."
Sorry, but the answer is almost certainly no. We now have good quality data on psylocybin as a treatment for depression; at best, it's slightly more effective than existing treatments, at the cost of a small but significant increased risk side-effects (primarily severe acute anxiety and psychosis, possibly HPPD). We have less data on other psychedelics and other conditions, but none of it looks spectacular when you take into account the usual biases affecting small trials of novel treatments.
Psychedelics are likely to be a good option for some patients, it's good to have another tool in the armamentarium, but the idea that they're a revolution in psychiatry is simply no longer credible.
This is a treatment that can help people. just because it didn't help you does not mean it's ineffective in totality which is the stance you seem to take.
We hear a lot of psilocybine lately, it cures altsheimer, people in coma awake miraculously. As long as we do not understand the workings, it reminds me of the days when radium or other nuclear substances were the cure for everything.
We don't fully understand the workings because it is (was?) classified as a drug, making research into it a lot more complicated. Thankfully there are charities and organizations that lobbied to make it more researchable.
We hear a lot about LLMs lately, they solve reasoning, mimic empathy, and awaken consciousness miraculously. As long as we do not understand the workings of the mind and brain, it reminds me of the days when machine learning or Bitcoin were the cure for everything.
It's a drug that makes your neurons more susceptible to forming new connections. Of course it's going to be useful for a lot of brain treatment. In addition, it's highly illegal which means these things didn't get found out a lot sooner.
upside is that in most states you can just go buy the spores and they just so happen to conveniently have spawn bags right nearby. BUT DONT EVER COMBINE THE TWO AND WAIT A FEW MONTHS
Here on the east coast, you can just wait until May comes around and it rains a couple days in a row. Then, you can just go for a walk by your local river/creek and wade through the seas of Japanese knotweed, lesser celandine, and box elder maple while looking for mushrooms growing out of the wet woody debris. Between them and nearby mulch beds, SWIM has allegedly found psilocybe ovoideocystidiata pretty consistently for the past several years, in Minecraft. Just don't try and take any shortcuts with the identification. It's better to throw out questionable specimens than risk needing a liver transplant.
This feels like a case where Betteridge's law of headlines applies, or at least should be presumed. [Recreational Drug] solves [malady] is such a hopeful go to and has recurred countless times.
I've partaken of 'shrooms a number of times: Fun times. I've even grown them (protip - not worth the trouble. It's amazing how something that grows in literal shit is suddenly the most fragile process imaginable when you try your PFTek method, and contamination will always be ruining your process). But people keep trying to make psilocybin a magic solution, and the studies have been extremely weak if not contradictory, and these stories always lean on worthless anecdotes.
Here's yet another anecdote of near-zero real value to add to the pile: I treated my severe treatment-resistant depression with ketamine infusions. It's obviously not the same as psilocybin, but I believe the current thinking is that psychoelics and dissociatives both have some positive effect on neuroplasticity, and that sorta checks out in my case. I'd say you need to combine it with some good cognitive behavioral therapy - it seemed to make CBT a lot more effective for me where it failed in the past because my brain was more open to rewiring. I haven't been re-treated in a few years now, but I still feel a lot better.
But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.
People tend to view these things as "pop the drug, and you're cured" but if you really want to make the most of the neuroplasticity, you need to make a conscious plan ahead of time so that you can guide the trip and focus on the problems you're genuinely facing.
The drug won't magically give you the answer but you may reach some more profound general breakthroughs regarding your own behavior, patterns you fall into unconsciously, etc.
Similar to how addiction and associated behaviors are really only resolved when the person addicted decides to make the change, you can use these to influence into a similar state.
Not even that... One quoted study says it 'provides preliminary support for the feasibility, safety and potential efficacy' of the drug. The other study is funded by a company selling psychedelics as potential medicines...
He was an early participant in one of these psychedelic studies a few years ago. After the first treatment, he said he couldn't really tell if it had any effect. But six months later, he was totally changed - able to function almost normally.
We should exercise our usual amount of skepticism about miracle treatments, but my hope is that his experience can be replicated.
Charitably, you could argue a functional society involves some amount of indoctrination into a set of shared beliefs and a large percentage of people losing that indoctrination would destroy society. Could the US function if everyone was a pacifist, anti-capitalist, hippie? I think that was and still is the primary concern.
Way to generalise. I also know people who drank water, went to sleep and never woke up.
Ego dissolution is dosage dependent and you don't need to reach that point to get positive benefits.
Also, many people do psychdelics that probably shouldn't.
Plus, these things are illegal which means that most of the time you are not getting the real but instead pharmacologically similar substances that might have secondary effects. This is way you can't reliably imply a correlation because it is a black market and often what you think you consumed is not what you actually consumed.
Unless you actually tested what your friends consumed, you don't know what it was.
If you want to specify LSD, you should do that, not "psychedelics." There are many, many psychedelics. They have sometimes radical differences. You cannot generalize that word into "many people never make it back." That is flat-out wrong, not to mention harmful.
but anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. clearly they are doing some kind of unraveling that doesnt fully bounce back
Psychedelics does however have longterm behavioural effects that are statistically significant and to some extent observable.
Using a definition of brain chemistry that defines brain chemistry at an atomic level you may assert that a change in behavioural patterns reflect a change in brain chemistry. But with such a definition anything that a person experiences does that.
ive barely taken them, but i watched many people change over years of use.
I've watched hundreds of people take them in great containers with great support. It's never a good idea to make big changes right away, but we take small steps to adjust our lives so we can actually be happy. Yes, even if that is less "productive". Why do we do the things we do anyways?
They might say the same thing about your lifestyle. The "reward structure of society" is highly abstract these days, arguably disconnected from "real life". You could say monks are disconnected from "real life."
This is a weird take, I think.
Psychedelics are likely to be a good option for some patients, it's good to have another tool in the armamentarium, but the idea that they're a revolution in psychiatry is simply no longer credible.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39627679/
Disclosure: I have participated in a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and did not see any meaningful benefit.
In German it's Droge and Medikament
Cleave: To split apart ('cleave the wood') or to adhere closely ('cleave to one's principles')
Sanction: To give official permission/approval or to impose a penalty/ban
Oversight: Watchful supervision or an unintentional mistake/omission
Dust: To remove fine particles ('dust the shelf') or to sprinkle them on ('dust the cake with sugar')
Bolt: To secure firmly in place or to run away suddenly
Clip: To fasten together ('clip the papers') or to cut off ('clip the coupon')
Fast: Moving quickly or fixed firmly in place ('stuck fast')
Left: Departed (verb) or remaining (adjective)
Screen: To display/show ('screen a movie') or to hide/conceal
Weather: To withstand or endure ('weather the storm') or to wear away/deteriorate over time
Peruse: To read carefully and thoroughly or to skim casually
Trim: To decorate/adorn ('trim the tree') or to cut away excess ('trim the hedges')
Rent: To pay for the use of something or to receive payment for allowing someone to use something
Table: In British English, to propose for discussion; in American English, to postpone or remove from discussion
I've partaken of 'shrooms a number of times: Fun times. I've even grown them (protip - not worth the trouble. It's amazing how something that grows in literal shit is suddenly the most fragile process imaginable when you try your PFTek method, and contamination will always be ruining your process). But people keep trying to make psilocybin a magic solution, and the studies have been extremely weak if not contradictory, and these stories always lean on worthless anecdotes.
But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.
The drug won't magically give you the answer but you may reach some more profound general breakthroughs regarding your own behavior, patterns you fall into unconsciously, etc.
Similar to how addiction and associated behaviors are really only resolved when the person addicted decides to make the change, you can use these to influence into a similar state.
Psilocybin opens up new pathways to treating anorexia