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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06204-3

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...)

Depression is a symptom, and for symptoms there are many causes.

Personalized medicine will fix this but that costs money and time and caring.

All the recent studies in the last decade have proven it's the opposite. What's your point exactly ?

A Star Trek reference?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Breakthrough Therapy designation means they can continue to study it with support.

It does not mean it’s approved for depression.

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...

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.

EDIT: Never mind, didn't see that it was cubensis - which might take more due to being weaker than regular wild semilanceata.

"[...] 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.