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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trialbonus, 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.
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.
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
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
- 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.
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.
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?”
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> becoming a more moral person
sīla
> mindfulness
sati
> acts of charity
caga / dana
They describe their participation as the most meaningful event of their lives, second to the birth of their children.
BlueGh0st•3h ago
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