13 ms·

This is the million dollar question in psychedelic research today: Are the serotonergic effects of the psychedelic tryptamines primarily responsible for the the

by ipnon 4y ago

This is the million dollar question in psychedelic research today: Are the serotonergic effects of the psychedelic tryptamines primarily responsible for the therapeutic effects, or is the profound religious-mystical component indistinguishable from the positive changes observed? It is a profoundly expensive question. If pharmaceutical companies can deliver a pill that cures depression and gives life meaning without forcing users to face their angels and demons, then the FDA would give approval before the ink on the submission form had dried. As it stands, it would seem the predominant opinion in the community of psychedelic researchers is that the religious-mystical effects are the primary therapeutic vector. It is very difficult to meet God and walk away cynical and melancholy.

bowsamic 4y ago
[deleted]
- PraetorianGourd 4y ago
  I am confident the OP meant “meet God” as short-hand for “a spiritual and transcendental experience wherein the ego is destroyed and rebuilt anew with a profoundly different perspective”. I don’t think anyone would earnestly claim that there is zero risk to any hallucinogenic experience. One of my hopes is that through study we can better understand the ingredients that lead to profoundly positive experiences vs. profoundly traumatizing experiences. And anyone who claims we know that today is acting in bad faith.
  - ipnon 4y ago
    Roland Griffiths’ foundational psilocybin study did not have any adverse outcomes. They used a simple protocol: no patient or patient family history of schizophrenia or bipolar, patients underwent cognitive behavioral therapy before and after the trial, patients were made to develop a warm and trusting rapport with the physicians before administration, and a physician was on hand for the duration of the psilocybin administration to coach the patient through unforeseen disturbances and administer anxiolytics in the case of panic attacks. With this simple protocol they reported no adverse affects, although they also did not report a 100% rate of efficacy. Griffiths wrote an entire separate study on this protocol, it is self-recommending.
    - PraetorianGourd 4y ago
      This one? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909165/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909165/ Terminal cancer patients, those expecting to die and “meet God” soon, are a very, very niche audience compared to a general population with non-specific major depressive disorders. But at the same time, I love this. The more study, the better!
      - ipnon 4y ago
        After seeing the responses to my original post I wish I had used different terms. I did not mean "meeting God" literally, but used it more as a metaphor for "meeting your maker": coming to terms with universal human problems like mortality, our relations to our friends and family, the nature of good and evil, things of that nature. "Meeting God" I thought would sum all this up poetically, but you can always count on HN to take things literally! Griffiths' research is all high quality. He is the pioneer in making this field of scientific research palatable to the mainstream medical establishment.
- ruined 4y ago
  if i were unhappy with my life after an epiphany, i would simply act to change my situation
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    The only great impulse of change I had after my trips was an intense urge to kill myself
    - ruined 4y ago
      what, with no reason? you didn't have a why? fix the why.
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        It didn’t show me a why it just showed me that I want to die. Other LSD users say I should take more at a higher dosage but that seems like a bad idea
        chaps 4y ago
        What dosage did you take? I've heard low doses can actually be a deeply frustrating experience.
        bowsamic 4y ago
        100ug
        ruined 4y ago
        you keep looking at LSD for feelings you're having while sober. examine your reasons for your feelings now. if you can't identify your own motivations, how can you attribute cause like that?
        bowsamic 4y ago
        I wasn’t ever suicidal before, I was after, that’s all I know
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  The experience is highly variable between people. I'm sorry you had such a rough time, and I'm hoping that things are at least slowly getting better for you. About the god thing, my 2 cents. "god" doesn't always mean Christian White Old Guy on a Cloud Looking Angrily Downwards. There's a less narrow interpretation. If psychedelics strip away your day-to-day preoccupations, and show you life with a vastly different set of mental filters in place, many people experience a transcendent feeling of belonging to something bigger than their sober selves. A connectedness to other humans and nature that goes beyond ordinary experience. The idea that death isn't so bad, only suffering is; and suffering is the price we must pay for the ability to see its opposite, beauty. Which people then conversationally condense to "yeah you meet god"
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    So they just mean a transcendent, spiritual experience?
    - isoprophlex 4y ago
      Yeah i guess that's a lot more accurate if you want to avoid the cultural baggage of the god-word
    - swayvil 4y ago
      It expands your consciousness is a popular way of describing it. Imagine a chronic obsessive cellphone gazer. One day he lifts his nose from the screen. Sun! Clouds! Birds and squirrels! Except moreso.
      - canadiantim 4y ago
        This is a really good explanation
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        But shouldn’t God be in all things, including the profound, if he’s really the Absolute? I doubt he’d be limited to our human conception of nature
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Meeting is just a way of describing a numinous experience. I have heard atheists, christians, pagans and sikhs alike use the term. Mathematicians often use it to describe especially profound proofs regardless of religion.
pgt 4y ago
Something Huberman said on his podcast about alcohol is that the anti-depressive effects of SSRIs are not due to serotonin, but due to neuroplasticity.
- jnovek 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on this, please? I’ve never heard this hypothesis and I don’t totally understand what it means. Are you saying that SSRIs trigger changes in the brain? What changes? Why do they trigger these changes? Genuinely curious.
  - snek_case 4y ago
    Yes, SSRIs trigger change in the brain. That's why the effect is not instant when you start taking the pill, the change needs some time to start to happen. In particular, it's believed that depressed people have lower levels of neuroplasticity. Their brains are less able to adapt to their current circumstances and they're stuck in negative thought patterns. SSRIs help increase the brain's ability to grow new connections and help the brain adapt, which helps you get out of negative thought patterns. If you're interested enough to watch a whole talk about this (you can jump to around 26 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2AdebIbx5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2AdebIbx5Y
    - loceng 4y ago
      Leading also to an increase in rate of suicide compared to placebo, and arguably increased homicide as well; guns being the misdirection narrative. Edit to add: Downvotes even though in 2015 the FDA required "black box" suicide warnings on SSRIs because what I'm saying is true?
      - snek_case 4y ago
        There's this narrative going around that antidepressants bad because medication bad, psychiatric industry evil, modern medicine bad, yadda yadda yadda. The problem is, everybody's brain chemistry is unique and different, because our genetics are different. Some antidepressants work for some people and not others. I've personally tried 5 of them. Only one of them worked on me, and it had some unfortunate side-effects (messed with my sleep). My ex-girlfriend used a different antidepressant (Zoloft). Personally, I've tried Zoloft and all it did was make me sleepy all the time, but I've found Lexapro was quite effective and useful for getting my life back on track. The way efficacy studies are done right now is, we measure the average effect on a group of people. That's doesn't really make sense when you think that everyone's genetics are unique and the antidepressant could be making some people better and some people worse, right? Maybe half the group feels better, but a quarter of the group becomes suicidal. Then on average, you see scores going up, you see the drug is beneficial on average... It would be kind of like giving everyone in a group a prescription for eyeglasses, all with the same prescription, and measuring that on average, participants can read better with the eyeglasses than not. In some ways, modern medicine is still very primitive. Flooding the whole brain with a chemical and hoping that it interacts with the right receptors and has a beneficial effect without too many side effects if you have the right genetics is very primitive. It's the best we have right now though, and antidepressants in general are probably more helpful than not, but yes, people SHOULD be aware that they might very well not work on them.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
What about very cheap and nonetheless effective "treatments" like exercise,sleep hygiene, magnesium, zinc, fish oil, onion, galic, saffron and even simply eating edible non psychoactive mushrooms? all these have been associated with a reduction in depressive symptoms. but obviously nobody can make a fortune with these simple advices.
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  This is true but it’s modeled after behaviors in the big picture - you just described a lot of effort and commitment versus taking a pill, maybe doing therapy / counseling once a week or two, and just living life. I’m getting back into fitness routine and it takes time, effort, and money that typically aren’t subsidized by the corporate gigs I’ve worked.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > you just described a lot of effort and commitment versus taking a pill Funny but I have come to regard the "effort and commitment" as part of the recovery mechanism. Causal or concomitant, I have no idea, let's just say 'linked'. By the same token I have come to regard "convenience" as, if not a great evil, some kind of joker/trickster that lures us down a dark path.
  - j-bos 4y ago
    This strikes me so much. Exercise is a proven health booster and yet health insurance doesn't cover gym memberships or exercise equipment. Why is that?
    - msgilligan 4y ago
      I’m not in the insurance industry and have no idea what the actual reason is. And I don’t know what the statistics are, but a significant percentage of people with gym memberships rarely go to the gym. I suspect the percentage of people with free (i.e. payed for by insurance) insurance who rarely go would be much higher.
avidiax 4y ago
I have not heard the claim that it's the mystical experience doing the work. I have heard some theories about the glutamate system in the brain, which is strongly affected by e.g. ketamine, psilocybin. My experience with ketamine treatment for TRD is that it was lots of awesome shapes and colors and sense of melting into the floor, but definitely no communion with "god" or "mystics", no special reexamination of the self or amazing new perspective. Despite that, I still experienced some improvement in symptoms. I would hope that pharmaceutical research can reduce the time and expense related to this treatment and the side effects like nausea, and less on the moral panic that some people use these drugs for fun somehow.
- s0berpotato 4y ago
  I was introduced to the idea through a podcast of Lex Fridman hosting John Vervaeke. The idea is that being trained in some methods enables you to better re-frame ideas, reality etc. when under the effect of these substances and then to be able to integrate them to your life once you are sober. Basically to identify when something you identified and felt while under the effect is more "real" since your brain makes connections which don't usually happen. The training allows you to see these connections as something more than noise.
  - orange_fritter 4y ago
    "Integration" is a buzzword but probably for good reason. It's not healthy to compartmentalize your own mind, because those compartments eventually express themselves in often dysfunctional ways if you're not fully tapped in to them. Meditation can help with "integration" as well although I'm sure every drug and method has different efficacy. I see this as a stepping stone to better mental health, because sometimes crazy stuff gets churned up and your next step is to process it in a healthy way, hopefully working with a decent CBT professional.
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  The trip you had was different than what people experience on LSD or psilocybin. You still had a trip. You broke out of your normal frame of mind and were able to comprehend things from a perspective that you couldn't previously conceive of. It seems to me like this is the important component and not whether you think you met God or your creator. It seems to make sense that the changes in yourself afterwards are due to the experience and not to the chemistry, and I wonder if the people focusing purely on the chemistry have never had a trip.
loceng 4y ago
They're looking for a pill they can patent, and then will demonize and do a fear campaign on the non-patentable options. If the supposed anti-depressant effect of whatever specific molecule they claim doesn't induce relatively rapid nerve generation, opening up previously closed or blocked off pathways - that pruned off arguably due to trauma and lack of use - then they likely aren't as powerful as where the mystic effects come from; it's the temporary turning off, removing the ego mind from the algorithm of the mind/the mind's eye - allowing you to see reality very differently then you've been formed rigidly in beforehand; some tribes give Ayahuasca to their babies to keep them open as they develop, rather than letting trauma and/or natural processes lock them into more narrow behaviour and thinking patterns.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lm28469 4y ago
> If pharmaceutical companies can deliver a pill that cures depression and gives life meaning without forcing users to face their angels and demons, then the FDA would give approval before the ink on the submission form had dried Instead of selling xxx tonnes of xanax&co per day worldwide and make absolutely outrageous profit doing so ? Doubt
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Xanax has been generic for decades. This happens to all medications. Pharmacy loves newly patentable venues like this. It’d be another new, expensive pill or infusion to market.
  - parineum 4y ago
    It's almost like the patent system is meant to spur innovation and development of new things.
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  You do know that these new psychedelic-like drugs are going to be patented and probably quite expensive, right?
  - fragmede 4y ago
    That's not even hypothetical either. Ketamine was proven to have great anti-depressant effects so Johnson &Johnson came out with their own patentable formulation of it called Spravato.
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Not exactly. Ketamine is well known to have great anti-depressant effects, but since it's long out of patent, no one has the incentive to spend $1B to get the FDA approval for it. So J&J invented the chiral twin molecule (the mirrored version), got it approved, and it's now sold as Spravato. To me this is 100% a regulation bug rather than some misfeature of capitalism or corporate greed.
feet 4y ago
There are other serotonin receptors at which psychedelics are active besides 2a
jokoon 4y ago
Meeting God or finding meaning in life is not on the requirement list for the FDA. There other ways to evaluate treatments for depression.
sallystarace 4y ago
I am a religious person who happens to have enjoyed LSD in my time. I have had the most profound experiences during my many trips, and not a single one that was at all like the sense of awe I get from worship. I love the headspace that you get into during the trip. It is great for finally addressing issues that you have set aside. After the trip however, you think that all your ideas are good, then it wears off, so either way it is not useful just by itself.
- mistermann 4y ago
  Note that "you" refers to you, and some other people, but not necessarily all other people. I would even classify this realization as an exception to your "is not useful" rule.
- ipnon 4y ago
  I made a poor choice of words. It would have been better to say “the experience of the ineffable and reckoning with intensely personal beliefs.” I meant no blasphemy with my use of religious and Christian terms.
- orange_fritter 4y ago
  I had a friend's mother who had very profound experiences on LSD, so she wrote them down. After a few weeks, she read the diary. "I am the peanut." I think LSD is not a panacea but it can help you shake some stuck, unhelpful thoughts.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
>profound religious-mystical component If you're meeting god on your trips, I'm willing to bet you believed in god to begin with, and possibly believed you would meet him before your trip started. You see what you were expecting to see. To say that there is a religious-mystical component of the psychedelic experience, well, if its real it for sure isn't universally felt.
- hawaiianbrah 4y ago
  Not universal, sure, but I thought I recalled in “How to Change Your Mind”, they talk about studies done with psilocybin that definitely result in people of all walks of life experiencing a sort of super spiritual trip, even atheists.

by ipnon 4y ago

bowsamic 4y ago

[deleted]

PraetorianGourd 4y ago
I am confident the OP meant “meet God” as short-hand for “a spiritual and transcendental experience wherein the ego is destroyed and rebuilt anew with a profoundly different perspective”. I don’t think anyone would earnestly claim that there is zero risk to any hallucinogenic experience. One of my hopes is that through study we can better understand the ingredients that lead to profoundly positive experiences vs. profoundly traumatizing experiences. And anyone who claims we know that today is acting in bad faith.
- ipnon 4y ago
  Roland Griffiths’ foundational psilocybin study did not have any adverse outcomes. They used a simple protocol: no patient or patient family history of schizophrenia or bipolar, patients underwent cognitive behavioral therapy before and after the trial, patients were made to develop a warm and trusting rapport with the physicians before administration, and a physician was on hand for the duration of the psilocybin administration to coach the patient through unforeseen disturbances and administer anxiolytics in the case of panic attacks. With this simple protocol they reported no adverse affects, although they also did not report a 100% rate of efficacy. Griffiths wrote an entire separate study on this protocol, it is self-recommending.
  - PraetorianGourd 4y ago
    This one? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909165/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909165/ Terminal cancer patients, those expecting to die and “meet God” soon, are a very, very niche audience compared to a general population with non-specific major depressive disorders. But at the same time, I love this. The more study, the better!
    - ipnon 4y ago
      After seeing the responses to my original post I wish I had used different terms. I did not mean "meeting God" literally, but used it more as a metaphor for "meeting your maker": coming to terms with universal human problems like mortality, our relations to our friends and family, the nature of good and evil, things of that nature. "Meeting God" I thought would sum all this up poetically, but you can always count on HN to take things literally! Griffiths' research is all high quality. He is the pioneer in making this field of scientific research palatable to the mainstream medical establishment.
ruined 4y ago
if i were unhappy with my life after an epiphany, i would simply act to change my situation
- bowsamic 4y ago
  The only great impulse of change I had after my trips was an intense urge to kill myself
  - ruined 4y ago
    what, with no reason? you didn't have a why? fix the why.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      It didn’t show me a why it just showed me that I want to die. Other LSD users say I should take more at a higher dosage but that seems like a bad idea
      - chaps 4y ago
        What dosage did you take? I've heard low doses can actually be a deeply frustrating experience.
        bowsamic 4y ago
        100ug
      - ruined 4y ago
        you keep looking at LSD for feelings you're having while sober. examine your reasons for your feelings now. if you can't identify your own motivations, how can you attribute cause like that?
        bowsamic 4y ago
        I wasn’t ever suicidal before, I was after, that’s all I know
isoprophlex 4y ago
The experience is highly variable between people. I'm sorry you had such a rough time, and I'm hoping that things are at least slowly getting better for you. About the god thing, my 2 cents. "god" doesn't always mean Christian White Old Guy on a Cloud Looking Angrily Downwards. There's a less narrow interpretation. If psychedelics strip away your day-to-day preoccupations, and show you life with a vastly different set of mental filters in place, many people experience a transcendent feeling of belonging to something bigger than their sober selves. A connectedness to other humans and nature that goes beyond ordinary experience. The idea that death isn't so bad, only suffering is; and suffering is the price we must pay for the ability to see its opposite, beauty. Which people then conversationally condense to "yeah you meet god"
- bowsamic 4y ago
  So they just mean a transcendent, spiritual experience?
  - isoprophlex 4y ago
    Yeah i guess that's a lot more accurate if you want to avoid the cultural baggage of the god-word
  - swayvil 4y ago
    It expands your consciousness is a popular way of describing it. Imagine a chronic obsessive cellphone gazer. One day he lifts his nose from the screen. Sun! Clouds! Birds and squirrels! Except moreso.
    - canadiantim 4y ago
      This is a really good explanation
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      But shouldn’t God be in all things, including the profound, if he’s really the Absolute? I doubt he’d be limited to our human conception of nature
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Meeting is just a way of describing a numinous experience. I have heard atheists, christians, pagans and sikhs alike use the term. Mathematicians often use it to describe especially profound proofs regardless of religion.

pgt 4y ago

Something Huberman said on his podcast about alcohol is that the anti-depressive effects of SSRIs are not due to serotonin, but due to neuroplasticity.

jnovek 4y ago
Can you elaborate on this, please? I’ve never heard this hypothesis and I don’t totally understand what it means. Are you saying that SSRIs trigger changes in the brain? What changes? Why do they trigger these changes? Genuinely curious.
- snek_case 4y ago
  Yes, SSRIs trigger change in the brain. That's why the effect is not instant when you start taking the pill, the change needs some time to start to happen. In particular, it's believed that depressed people have lower levels of neuroplasticity. Their brains are less able to adapt to their current circumstances and they're stuck in negative thought patterns. SSRIs help increase the brain's ability to grow new connections and help the brain adapt, which helps you get out of negative thought patterns. If you're interested enough to watch a whole talk about this (you can jump to around 26 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2AdebIbx5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2AdebIbx5Y
  - loceng 4y ago
    Leading also to an increase in rate of suicide compared to placebo, and arguably increased homicide as well; guns being the misdirection narrative. Edit to add: Downvotes even though in 2015 the FDA required "black box" suicide warnings on SSRIs because what I'm saying is true?
    - snek_case 4y ago
      There's this narrative going around that antidepressants bad because medication bad, psychiatric industry evil, modern medicine bad, yadda yadda yadda. The problem is, everybody's brain chemistry is unique and different, because our genetics are different. Some antidepressants work for some people and not others. I've personally tried 5 of them. Only one of them worked on me, and it had some unfortunate side-effects (messed with my sleep). My ex-girlfriend used a different antidepressant (Zoloft). Personally, I've tried Zoloft and all it did was make me sleepy all the time, but I've found Lexapro was quite effective and useful for getting my life back on track. The way efficacy studies are done right now is, we measure the average effect on a group of people. That's doesn't really make sense when you think that everyone's genetics are unique and the antidepressant could be making some people better and some people worse, right? Maybe half the group feels better, but a quarter of the group becomes suicidal. Then on average, you see scores going up, you see the drug is beneficial on average... It would be kind of like giving everyone in a group a prescription for eyeglasses, all with the same prescription, and measuring that on average, participants can read better with the eyeglasses than not. In some ways, modern medicine is still very primitive. Flooding the whole brain with a chemical and hoping that it interacts with the right receptors and has a beneficial effect without too many side effects if you have the right genetics is very primitive. It's the best we have right now though, and antidepressants in general are probably more helpful than not, but yes, people SHOULD be aware that they might very well not work on them.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

What about very cheap and nonetheless effective "treatments" like exercise,sleep hygiene, magnesium, zinc, fish oil, onion, galic, saffron and even simply eating edible non psychoactive mushrooms? all these have been associated with a reduction in depressive symptoms. but obviously nobody can make a fortune with these simple advices.

6stringmerc 4y ago
This is true but it’s modeled after behaviors in the big picture - you just described a lot of effort and commitment versus taking a pill, maybe doing therapy / counseling once a week or two, and just living life. I’m getting back into fitness routine and it takes time, effort, and money that typically aren’t subsidized by the corporate gigs I’ve worked.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > you just described a lot of effort and commitment versus taking a pill Funny but I have come to regard the "effort and commitment" as part of the recovery mechanism. Causal or concomitant, I have no idea, let's just say 'linked'. By the same token I have come to regard "convenience" as, if not a great evil, some kind of joker/trickster that lures us down a dark path.
- j-bos 4y ago
  This strikes me so much. Exercise is a proven health booster and yet health insurance doesn't cover gym memberships or exercise equipment. Why is that?
  - msgilligan 4y ago
    I’m not in the insurance industry and have no idea what the actual reason is. And I don’t know what the statistics are, but a significant percentage of people with gym memberships rarely go to the gym. I suspect the percentage of people with free (i.e. payed for by insurance) insurance who rarely go would be much higher.

avidiax 4y ago

I have not heard the claim that it's the mystical experience doing the work. I have heard some theories about the glutamate system in the brain, which is strongly affected by e.g. ketamine, psilocybin. My experience with ketamine treatment for TRD is that it was lots of awesome shapes and colors and sense of melting into the floor, but definitely no communion with "god" or "mystics", no special reexamination of the self or amazing new perspective. Despite that, I still experienced some improvement in symptoms. I would hope that pharmaceutical research can reduce the time and expense related to this treatment and the side effects like nausea, and less on the moral panic that some people use these drugs for fun somehow.

s0berpotato 4y ago
I was introduced to the idea through a podcast of Lex Fridman hosting John Vervaeke. The idea is that being trained in some methods enables you to better re-frame ideas, reality etc. when under the effect of these substances and then to be able to integrate them to your life once you are sober. Basically to identify when something you identified and felt while under the effect is more "real" since your brain makes connections which don't usually happen. The training allows you to see these connections as something more than noise.
- orange_fritter 4y ago
  "Integration" is a buzzword but probably for good reason. It's not healthy to compartmentalize your own mind, because those compartments eventually express themselves in often dysfunctional ways if you're not fully tapped in to them. Meditation can help with "integration" as well although I'm sure every drug and method has different efficacy. I see this as a stepping stone to better mental health, because sometimes crazy stuff gets churned up and your next step is to process it in a healthy way, hopefully working with a decent CBT professional.
hallway_monitor 4y ago
The trip you had was different than what people experience on LSD or psilocybin. You still had a trip. You broke out of your normal frame of mind and were able to comprehend things from a perspective that you couldn't previously conceive of. It seems to me like this is the important component and not whether you think you met God or your creator. It seems to make sense that the changes in yourself afterwards are due to the experience and not to the chemistry, and I wonder if the people focusing purely on the chemistry have never had a trip.

loceng 4y ago

They're looking for a pill they can patent, and then will demonize and do a fear campaign on the non-patentable options. If the supposed anti-depressant effect of whatever specific molecule they claim doesn't induce relatively rapid nerve generation, opening up previously closed or blocked off pathways - that pruned off arguably due to trauma and lack of use - then they likely aren't as powerful as where the mystic effects come from; it's the temporary turning off, removing the ego mind from the algorithm of the mind/the mind's eye - allowing you to see reality very differently then you've been formed rigidly in beforehand; some tribes give Ayahuasca to their babies to keep them open as they develop, rather than letting trauma and/or natural processes lock them into more narrow behaviour and thinking patterns.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lm28469 4y ago

> If pharmaceutical companies can deliver a pill that cures depression and gives life meaning without forcing users to face their angels and demons, then the FDA would give approval before the ink on the submission form had dried Instead of selling xxx tonnes of xanax&co per day worldwide and make absolutely outrageous profit doing so ? Doubt

ceejayoz 4y ago
Xanax has been generic for decades. This happens to all medications. Pharmacy loves newly patentable venues like this. It’d be another new, expensive pill or infusion to market.
- parineum 4y ago
  It's almost like the patent system is meant to spur innovation and development of new things.
jasonhansel 4y ago
You do know that these new psychedelic-like drugs are going to be patented and probably quite expensive, right?
- fragmede 4y ago
  That's not even hypothetical either. Ketamine was proven to have great anti-depressant effects so Johnson &Johnson came out with their own patentable formulation of it called Spravato.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Not exactly. Ketamine is well known to have great anti-depressant effects, but since it's long out of patent, no one has the incentive to spend $1B to get the FDA approval for it. So J&J invented the chiral twin molecule (the mirrored version), got it approved, and it's now sold as Spravato. To me this is 100% a regulation bug rather than some misfeature of capitalism or corporate greed.

feet 4y ago

There are other serotonin receptors at which psychedelics are active besides 2a

jokoon 4y ago

Meeting God or finding meaning in life is not on the requirement list for the FDA. There other ways to evaluate treatments for depression.

sallystarace 4y ago

I am a religious person who happens to have enjoyed LSD in my time. I have had the most profound experiences during my many trips, and not a single one that was at all like the sense of awe I get from worship. I love the headspace that you get into during the trip. It is great for finally addressing issues that you have set aside. After the trip however, you think that all your ideas are good, then it wears off, so either way it is not useful just by itself.

mistermann 4y ago
Note that "you" refers to you, and some other people, but not necessarily all other people. I would even classify this realization as an exception to your "is not useful" rule.
ipnon 4y ago
I made a poor choice of words. It would have been better to say “the experience of the ineffable and reckoning with intensely personal beliefs.” I meant no blasphemy with my use of religious and Christian terms.
orange_fritter 4y ago
I had a friend's mother who had very profound experiences on LSD, so she wrote them down. After a few weeks, she read the diary. "I am the peanut." I think LSD is not a panacea but it can help you shake some stuck, unhelpful thoughts.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

>profound religious-mystical component If you're meeting god on your trips, I'm willing to bet you believed in god to begin with, and possibly believed you would meet him before your trip started. You see what you were expecting to see. To say that there is a religious-mystical component of the psychedelic experience, well, if its real it for sure isn't universally felt.

hawaiianbrah 4y ago
Not universal, sure, but I thought I recalled in “How to Change Your Mind”, they talk about studies done with psilocybin that definitely result in people of all walks of life experiencing a sort of super spiritual trip, even atheists.