Posted by Hooke 14 hours ago
How we didn't see that normalizing business dealings with criminal enterprise and then selling diy testing kits at the pharmacy wasn't a good way to handle this is beyond me. We could have taken the hint that once they're legalized in 1-2 states the safety and quality across the US jumps for some unknown reason.
There's also something to be said for microdosing. It's still in the anecdotal phase afaik, but I found it very helpful for depression, anxiety and socializing.
There are extensive reports of heavy addictions being virtually vaporized through DMT. Obviously some measure of openness and desire to change is important, but I personally do not think the potential here is debatable.
What is reproached to some of the parties here is to have a spiritual ideology, but that’s precisely what working with these medicines opens up. The healing that takes place is not so much physical, as it is psycho-spiritual, it’s the change in perception of the world - often in the direction of spiritual beliefs, that contributes to the betterment of the person’s mental health condition.
So you can’t isolate the two easily. It’s just tricky, and still this article raises important points.
But that's not the main way in which they are able to treat mental health problems, specifically not in the majority (I suspect all) actual scientific research on this subject, but also just for people using them outside medical trials.
The key thing, it seems, is that psychedelics temporarily (while you're under the influence) increase the connectivity between different neurons in the brain, and between different areas of the brain. That can help in two ways, the first of which is that some new connections can become not temporary, and keep existing for the foreseeable future. The other is that, while under the influence, those additional neuron connections allow the person to think in different ways than they normally do, to see ideas or problems from a different angle/perspective. And this difference is what allows the therapy administered at the same time as the psychedelic drug (or the self-therapy version of using a drug and then thinking about the subjects that are causing you distress in life) to potentially have a better chance of making a stronger change to how the person thinks about certain things than if the same therapy were provided without psychedelics enabling greater levels of rewiring of the brain.
It came to my mind if we have equally solid research for the effectivity of drugs like antidepressants. They have fame of sometimes working and sometimes don't depending on the patient, and I guess the same could be said of many psychedelics.
I'm not at all against antidepressants, and I know several people who have been helped a lot by them. But if there are potential alternatives like ketamine and psychedelics that have lower risk of side effects (ketamine in particular is extremely safe taken in a therapeutic setting) and only need to be taken once to potentially see an immediate effect, even if the science is weak, shouldn't these at least be available for adults to try before putting them on antidepressants?
And my memory of reading up on this is that the current understanding of how ketamine works for treating depression is that it's something about the way the body processes & gets rid of the ketamine, it's not from the effects that the person taking it feels (unlike with psychedelics where it's the effects themselves that open up new neural pathways in the brain allowing therapy to potentially be more effective). And taking ketamine daily won't be more effective for treating depression. So I wouldn't expect many patients to go from the medical treatment to thinking "I want to start using this recreationally" (though if enough people get treated with it, of course a few people are bound to go down that path - but plenty of people already go down the path of choosing to use it for fun).
Empirical research is also research.
That said, I agree. We need more research, which would have happened a long time ago if it wasn't for criminalization.
The same could be said for almost any drug or intervention.
The integrity of most drug research is compromised by commercial incentive. Molecules like psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT can’t be patented. I am more skeptical of commercial evangelism than whatever is currently going on with psychedelic research.
I seriously doubt there are any researchers that believe injecting someone with ketamine 27 times in a week is a good idea. The reality is people were profiteering from a vulnerable person, using fraudulent prescriptions [1].
I agree the science is weak, but it is promising [2]. Let's be more specific and avoid emotional language like in this article.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/20/us/matthew-perry-death-5-... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39106989/
The opioid epidemic helped erode away ethics in medicine, as many physicians partnered with drug-dealers/Sackler-family to exploit users knowing full well the "medication" had serious side-effects.
As I watch the squirrels getting high on the poisonous mushrooms, and howling at a passersby in the yard this time of year... it reminds one that the methodology of self-harm is an irrelevant detail.
Drug addicts have an endless supply of excuses why they think their behavior is justified. Indeed, there are an ecosystem of unethical people willing to help them along the wrong path.
I don't think people should go to jail for seeking an artificial cathartic experience, but rather be forced to join the Native shamans in a 2 week Datura fueled experience. However, facing insanity while hallucinating and rolling in your own excrement naked for 2 weeks is not popular for some reason... =3
The problem with saying this is that being high simply isn't a single thing. It’s a huge spectrum of experiences done for different reasons.
My experience with psychedelics is that they are extremely fun. Sure, it’s escapism - in the same way a funfair or a film is escapism. That doesn’t make it immoral. It’s not even clear that it’s self harm - certainly no more than horse riding is a form of self harm (statistically speaking).
For example, it opens by claiming No psychiatric treatment has attracted quite as much cash and hype as psychedelics have in the past decade - really?? Nobody would seriously believe that, of the entire pharmaceutical world, the largest $ slice goes to psychedelic research. Not even close.
Or, Suggesting that people should get off proven medications in order to try MDMA or psilocybin is dangerous unless those drugs are backed by airtight evidence - this is an arguable claim, in the wording semantics, because it implies that it's standard for regulated medications to be risk-free, "airtight" idealisms with only good possible outcomes, when the reality is quite far from that! - a % of SSRI patients routinely experience seriously unpleasant or debilitating side effects and withdrawal ordeals. To exclude effective treatments by way of special, higher ethical barriers to entry is not necessarily scientifically sound practice.
That’s not what it said though. It said “no psychiatric treatment”. I’m a little behind on the antipsychotic pipeline but I’m not sure the statement as written - past decade, psychiatric - is too far off the mark.
Journalism is really a type of opinion piece, social lubricant in 2024. The purpose is so you and I have something to talk about and connect when we would not have other wise.
Did either of us learn anything? Of course not but only an idiot would expect to learn anything based on the title.
If I want to learn something I will just browse arXiv myself.
I am someone who has suffered bouts of depression, sometimes severe with consistent thoughts of suicide, since I was a child. I had been in therapy for over a decade (which was immensely helpful for me), and I had tried a couple different antidepressants. This spring, partially due to some particularly bad sleep issues, I had an unusually bad bout of depression where I was borderline non-functional. As a "last ditch" effort I went in for ketamine infusion therapy at a clinic. Before the therapy they have you take a "depression assessment" questionnaire, the PHQ-9. The scores range from 0 to 27, and I went in as a 25 (basically, ready to jump off a bridge).
Without exaggeration, my initial ketamine session, which lasted about 2 hours, was the most profound experience of my life, and I firmly believe it saved my life. Not only that, it completely changed my understanding of my mental illness. Mental illness is hard to separate from your vision of "you", because if you, say, break your arm, nobody considers you a different person, but your mind is really what people most consider to be "you" - when it's broken, it's hard to not feel like you are broken. With my depression, the best way I could explain it is not just that things that used to make me happy no longer did, not even that I could no longer feel joy, but that I couldn't remember what joy itself actually felt like. When you can't even remember what the emotion of happiness feels like, existence feels pretty bleak.
What ketamine did for me is essentially "broke the damn", and I felt an enormous rush of actually being able to feel emotions again. The analogy I like to use is that my depression was like "brain atherosclerosis", i.e. my emotional channels were "clogged", and the ketamine therapy was like "brain angioplasty" - it felt like it broke up all the "clot" in my brain so that my neurons could talk to each other again and I could feel. It was the first time I actually understood my mental illness as a physical disease. At the end of my session I was literally balling for like 30 mins just because the flood of emotions felt so intense.
The next morning I was singing in the shower, and a couple days later when I retook the PHQ-9 I was a 3. It's been about 9 months since my first session, and while I don't always feel as awesome as I did right after it, I do feel like my completely changed view of my depression has made me much more resilient, and also much more willing to ask for help. In my initial series I had 4 sessions spaced over about 3 weeks (the recommendation for an initial series is 6, but for me after the 4th one I was like "no, I'm totally good" - I didn't want to "get used to" the ketamine trip because it was such a powerful experience for me). I had one "booster" session of ketamine about 3 months ago when I was feeling not great, and it was very helpful.
Now, I know that I was extremely lucky - my shrink calls me a "ketamine responder". The problem with depression is that it's not a disease, it's a symptom, and since doctors don't often know the underlying cause, a lot of the treatment is just "throw things at it and see what works". I have a friend that got very little depression release from ketamine, but TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) was what was helpful for him. So I'm very, very wary of ketamine getting oversold as a "wonder cure" - it may work for some people, but not others, and I've already seen how CBD and marijuana shops have popped up all over basically planning to cure every symptom under the sun since marijuana was legalized.
At the same time, I'm also wary of psychedelics being dismissed in a similar way to how they were dismissed and demonized about 50-60 years ago. I fully understand that the plural of anecdotes is not data, but I'm also not trying to find the statistically significant treatment for your average person - I'm just trying to not die. For me, I have all the evidence I need, and I feel it would be a tragedy to take away that option for other people before we know more.
I know, from repeated personal experience, that psychedelics (or mushrooms at least) can be highly effective against even severe depression.
They have been the single most effective anti-depressant that I have ever taken.
Now, I haven't had the depression curing wonder of an experience that some people claim;
It never pulled me out right out of it - but it pulled me back from suicide (on multiple occasions) and a single (rather large) dose is effective for 3 or 4 months before I find myself spiraling back down.
And if we're gonna have a conversation about anti-depressants that are being used despite scant evidence in their favour, perhaps we should start with SSRIs - which not only made my depression worse, but also left me almost asexual for ~20 years.