8 ms·

Something in our industrial processes must be screwing with people's serotonin levels because Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto

Something in our industrial processes must be screwing with people's serotonin levels because Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto treatment method for a whole host of ailments. I personally suffer from IBS, migraines, sleeping problems, and mood swings, if I haven't taken a dose of psychedelics in the last 6 months. Now, getting regular exercise, eating well, staying hydrated, sleeping 8 hours a night, spending time with friends, sexual and emotional fulfillment, and performing fulfilling labor, that will get you 80% or even 100% towards fixing most, if not all your problems. But I think these Serotonergic drugs give people the extra push in the right direction, and immediately fixes a lot of the underlying problems that would normally take consistent, positive environmental changes to root out. I myself am biased towards psychedelics, but I understand they're not for everyone. But SSRIs tend to be overprescribed and because they are often taken for far longer than necessary they cause a lot of changes neurophysically that aren't necessarily positive (and the most common side-effect, the loss of sex-drive, often creates many more problems for the user in their personal life.) I honestly don't know what's best, but I think almost nobody will have a poor reaction to a <1g dose of Psilocybin mushrooms (or if we want to be more conservative, <.5g), and the benefits of even just one small dose far outweigh the risks, in my opinion.

ben_w 3y ago
100-150 years ago we were using heroin, cocaine, and morphine for such things as cough syrups, hay fever, cola. Ancient Romans used cannabis and opium for insomnia and earaches. Wild animals get drunk on rotten fruit, cats stone themselves on catnip. So you're not wrong to wonder why people take stuff, but none of that's new.
- ZunarJ5 3y ago
  Just because it's one of my favourites, we even have evidence of it in rock art: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/psychedelic-mushroom-algeria https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/psychedelic-mushroom-a...
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    Terence McKenna, a self proclaimed ethnobotanist, held the theory that higher intelligence emerged because of psychedelics, that our hunter gatherer ancestors had a very intimate relationship with psychedelic mushrooms. Way out there, but very interesting nonetheless. I would recommend his book The food of the Gods
  - petemir 3y ago
    Well, that's a bad start for TFA: > Editor’s note: This article has been retracted as it does not meet Atlas Obscura’s editorial standards. Our investigation revealed the author fabricated interviews with at least one source; Brian Akers confirmed via email that he was initially contacted but never interviewed by the writer, and that quotes and other material attributed to them by the writer have been fabricated. Giorgio Samorini did not reply to multiple email requests for comment. Jitka Soukopova confirmed via email that she had been interviewed by the writer and material attributed to her was accurate. Additional details provided by the writer could not be verified. Furthermore, I find it amazing that they are talking about rock art, but do not provide any photo...
    - ZunarJ5 3y ago
      I should have looked harder, apologies! :) Commented in a rush.
  - F2hP18Foam 3y ago
    How can someone write an article about cave paintings without including a photo of them, that's a bizarre choice. I think these are the carvings referenced: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/37-Tassili-prehistorical-murals-33-Situation-of-Tassili-in-the-Sahara-Desert-in_fig2_262482443 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/37-Tassili-prehistorical...
  - Vrondi 3y ago
    Fascinating. Here's a different article with a photo: https://www.openculture.com/2021/01/algerian-cave-paintings-suggest-humans-did-magic-mushrooms-9000-years-ago.html https://www.openculture.com/2021/01/algerian-cave-paintings-...
coldtea 3y ago
>Now, getting regular exercise, eating well, staying hydrated, sleeping 8 hours a night, spending time with friends, sexual and emotional fulfillment, and performing fulfilling labor, that will get you 80% or even 100% towards fixing most, if not all your problems. Each of those is quite harder to achieve these days (due to work pressure, everpresent and ever-promoted processed foods, screen time, a borked dating scene, the abundance of crap jobs, and so on), even more so all of them combined...
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Like a gamer that will optimize the fun out of a game if given the option, we've optimized fulfilment out of our lives.
- CyrsBel 3y ago
  They are easier to achieve than before. All of them. Just do it. Work pressure? Work less and push back if you need to, there's an abundance of easy jobs. Processed foods? Eat whole foods. Screen time? Use less screen. Borked dating scene? Not at all, work on yourself. Abundance of crap jobs? That means easy to get 1 or 2 of them and just coast a bit while working on self. People complain too much.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Yes. Also: Depressed? Just be cheerful. Alcoholic? Just quit drinking. Your city is breaking down? Just move elsewhere. Kids keep you up at night? Just give them away. Terminal illness? Just get well.
    - CyrsBel 3y ago
      > Depressed? Just be cheerful. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy exists and is known to be a first step towards recovery. > Alcoholic? Just quit drinking. Yes. See Albert Bandura in 2007 in study on Addictive Behaviors. Or after that, I was just reading this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179802/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179802/ > Your city is breaking down? Just move elsewhere. Yes, or fix it. Or don't contribute to the break down, especially not by speaking negative or toxic things when one can otherwise just be quiet and let the people fixing things fix things. > Kids keep you up at night? Just give them away. Discipline them, or figure out bed-time strategy? Can't help on this one tbh since I don't have kids of my own. > Terminal illness? Just get well. This just comes across as a last-ditch effort to try to prove me wrong lol
otikik 3y ago
Physical exercise for me is primarily a way to make my body produce drugs, to be in a better mood and sleep better. All the other benefits are icing on the cake.
- jkukul 3y ago
  Same here. One small caveat is that I must already be in a somewhat decent state to do physical activities. Sometimes I'm just too "mentally tired" to even get myself to exercise - it would be great to have a tool to get over the hump in moments like this.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Think this is kind of what parent was talking about the modern industrial world. We are all trapped in situations where it is hard to get exercise and sleep. Drugs are just way to paint over those problems.
  - otikik 3y ago
    Best trick I have found so far: You "tie" the thing you want to do to a thing that you already do in a way that makes doing what you want to do as effortless as possible. In my case, I always throw my trash in sports clothes. I need to take trash out. I also need to change clothes when I go out, because I work remote. So just choosing sport clothing instead of something else is very frictionless. Once the trash is thrown, I'm out not he street, with my sport shoes on. I just need to start running at that point. Comparatively, just "purposely going for a run" feels like climbing a mountain.
- rubicon33 3y ago
  Anecdotal warning that this effect may reduce with age.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
> Something in our industrial processes must be screwing with people's serotonin levels because Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto treatment method for a whole host of ailments. This is a comically bad inference. P1: We have ailments that can be treated with class X of drugs that act on body process Y P2: We increasingly use those drugs Conclusion: Z is messing with body process Y
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  I'm slightly offended since I used to teach formal reasoning (and I always make a strong effort to avoid using it when constructing any arguments). You can always arbitrarily translate any parts of any phrase into any atomic sentence, and reframe certain claims as a series of propositions. None of your propositions that you claim I made are actually within the content of my argument. And especially for things that require historical, social, and political context to understands, it is completely useless to employ a system which pretends to be divorced from all those things. How are you supposed to evaluate a claim about the health effects of the industrial revolution using formal logic? How do you even know I was trying to use formal logic in my argument, or that I even cared if it made sense in a very particular logical system which has far more relevance for mathematics and computer programming than rhetoric and persuasion. I never made a single evidential claim nor could I, since this would be an area where empirical research is lacking. I was making an inference, which you made no attempt to directly engage with.
- pgt 3y ago
  Why is it "comically bad inference" to postulate that something environmental may be messing with our serotonin systems if psychedelic serotonergics cure ailments that we know require messaging via serotonin? (IBS ~ gut, migraine ~ brain, sleeping problems, and mood swings ~ brain)
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    I still don't see the argument. Let's say an argument is a series of premises followed by a conclusion. Maybe you can render it for me. How does it follow from a class of drugs addressing a class of ailments that there's some industrial process messing with some process in the body? Does that follow from every class of drugs that addresses any class of ailments? If we find out that aspirin is even more versatile than we thought and helps with an increasing amount of ailments, how does it follow that there's some related industrial process behind those ailments? Why not just the more parsimonious inference that... aspirin is more useful than we thought?
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto treatment method for a whole host of ailments. They are definitely not. Anecdotes aside, psychedelics are extremely overhyped right now and the downsides are heavily downplayed online. The studies about psychedelics and depression use heavy amounts of therapy and careful professional guidance, which the at-home experimenters don’t get. Psychedelics can also produce intense negative reactions, such as persistent false beliefs or even a worsening of anxiety and depression that lasts for some time. Many people online rush to dismiss these negative anecdotes if their personal experience was different, but they’re much more common than enthusiastic internet commenters would suggest.
- nprz 3y ago
  > but they’re much more common than enthusiastic internet commenters would suggest How do you know this?
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  Are you affiliated with the drug industry in some way? I can't imagine anyone else saying all this.
  - foobiekr 3y ago
    Everything that poster said is true. And I am pro-psychedelics.
    - hezralig 3y ago
      How do you know that it is true?
- mjtlittle 3y ago
  Not sure why your getting pushback on such a leveled take. I am also increasingly feeling like this is the case. Not to say that there is no value in psychedelics (definitely looks like there is in clinical settings), it just seems like some people are touting it as a miracle solution to all mental problems. Something that can be self administered with no oversight. I have read a couple threads over the past few months on reddit about how mushrooms increased the posters' suicidal thoughts, and that they decided to abstain from taking them because of that. I think this perspective is even reinforced by recreational users: the first thing you are told before participating is to be in a familiar set and setting, and also to be in a good place in life. However, in certain states of mind (ex. depression or some other condition), I wouldn't trust the individual to be able to make such informed judgements. The risk is known.
koboll 3y ago
Serotonin is related to social interaction in vertebrates. Guess what we're doing a lot less of in person in the age of streaming TV and the internet?
predictabl3 3y ago
Please, please, please, to anyone in the thread, don't take this as anything other than an anecdote but... I would go to extreme lengths to keep access to relatively small doses of mushrooms before ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER going back on an SSRI. I don't really know how to talk about it without sounding like "a hippie" or something, and I keep rewriting this to keep it brief but since starting to experiment with low doses of mushrooms, I've basically eliminated my alcohol and cannabis consumption. I think I'm a pretty "addictive-personality" type person and didn't think I'd ever leave those behind, nor find something else that I genuinely feel is a net benefit for me, and that I don't really feel compelled to "reach for" other than when I specifically want to and have time set aside for. I've suffered chronic lower back pain for 15 years, and the most dramatic single-point-in-time improvements I've felt have been the day after I've had a "nature day". I don't know if it's a mushroom<->inflammation thing, I don't know if it's some mal-adaptive posture issue that my brain circumvents when on mushrooms, but something is going on. Also, I'll go ahead and say it, SSRIs didn't sap my sex drive, but made it into a psychologically damaging curse due to physical side effects. Not an issue with mushrooms.

ben_w 3y ago

100-150 years ago we were using heroin, cocaine, and morphine for such things as cough syrups, hay fever, cola. Ancient Romans used cannabis and opium for insomnia and earaches. Wild animals get drunk on rotten fruit, cats stone themselves on catnip. So you're not wrong to wonder why people take stuff, but none of that's new.

ZunarJ5 3y ago
Just because it's one of my favourites, we even have evidence of it in rock art: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/psychedelic-mushroom-algeria https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/psychedelic-mushroom-a...
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  Terence McKenna, a self proclaimed ethnobotanist, held the theory that higher intelligence emerged because of psychedelics, that our hunter gatherer ancestors had a very intimate relationship with psychedelic mushrooms. Way out there, but very interesting nonetheless. I would recommend his book The food of the Gods
- petemir 3y ago
  Well, that's a bad start for TFA: > Editor’s note: This article has been retracted as it does not meet Atlas Obscura’s editorial standards. Our investigation revealed the author fabricated interviews with at least one source; Brian Akers confirmed via email that he was initially contacted but never interviewed by the writer, and that quotes and other material attributed to them by the writer have been fabricated. Giorgio Samorini did not reply to multiple email requests for comment. Jitka Soukopova confirmed via email that she had been interviewed by the writer and material attributed to her was accurate. Additional details provided by the writer could not be verified. Furthermore, I find it amazing that they are talking about rock art, but do not provide any photo...
  - ZunarJ5 3y ago
    I should have looked harder, apologies! :) Commented in a rush.
- F2hP18Foam 3y ago
  How can someone write an article about cave paintings without including a photo of them, that's a bizarre choice. I think these are the carvings referenced: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/37-Tassili-prehistorical-murals-33-Situation-of-Tassili-in-the-Sahara-Desert-in_fig2_262482443 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/37-Tassili-prehistorical...
- Vrondi 3y ago
  Fascinating. Here's a different article with a photo: https://www.openculture.com/2021/01/algerian-cave-paintings-suggest-humans-did-magic-mushrooms-9000-years-ago.html https://www.openculture.com/2021/01/algerian-cave-paintings-...

coldtea 3y ago

>Now, getting regular exercise, eating well, staying hydrated, sleeping 8 hours a night, spending time with friends, sexual and emotional fulfillment, and performing fulfilling labor, that will get you 80% or even 100% towards fixing most, if not all your problems. Each of those is quite harder to achieve these days (due to work pressure, everpresent and ever-promoted processed foods, screen time, a borked dating scene, the abundance of crap jobs, and so on), even more so all of them combined...

moffkalast 3y ago
Like a gamer that will optimize the fun out of a game if given the option, we've optimized fulfilment out of our lives.
CyrsBel 3y ago
They are easier to achieve than before. All of them. Just do it. Work pressure? Work less and push back if you need to, there's an abundance of easy jobs. Processed foods? Eat whole foods. Screen time? Use less screen. Borked dating scene? Not at all, work on yourself. Abundance of crap jobs? That means easy to get 1 or 2 of them and just coast a bit while working on self. People complain too much.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Yes. Also: Depressed? Just be cheerful. Alcoholic? Just quit drinking. Your city is breaking down? Just move elsewhere. Kids keep you up at night? Just give them away. Terminal illness? Just get well.
  - CyrsBel 3y ago
    > Depressed? Just be cheerful. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy exists and is known to be a first step towards recovery. > Alcoholic? Just quit drinking. Yes. See Albert Bandura in 2007 in study on Addictive Behaviors. Or after that, I was just reading this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179802/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179802/ > Your city is breaking down? Just move elsewhere. Yes, or fix it. Or don't contribute to the break down, especially not by speaking negative or toxic things when one can otherwise just be quiet and let the people fixing things fix things. > Kids keep you up at night? Just give them away. Discipline them, or figure out bed-time strategy? Can't help on this one tbh since I don't have kids of my own. > Terminal illness? Just get well. This just comes across as a last-ditch effort to try to prove me wrong lol

otikik 3y ago

Physical exercise for me is primarily a way to make my body produce drugs, to be in a better mood and sleep better. All the other benefits are icing on the cake.

jkukul 3y ago
Same here. One small caveat is that I must already be in a somewhat decent state to do physical activities. Sometimes I'm just too "mentally tired" to even get myself to exercise - it would be great to have a tool to get over the hump in moments like this.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Think this is kind of what parent was talking about the modern industrial world. We are all trapped in situations where it is hard to get exercise and sleep. Drugs are just way to paint over those problems.
- otikik 3y ago
  Best trick I have found so far: You "tie" the thing you want to do to a thing that you already do in a way that makes doing what you want to do as effortless as possible. In my case, I always throw my trash in sports clothes. I need to take trash out. I also need to change clothes when I go out, because I work remote. So just choosing sport clothing instead of something else is very frictionless. Once the trash is thrown, I'm out not he street, with my sport shoes on. I just need to start running at that point. Comparatively, just "purposely going for a run" feels like climbing a mountain.
rubicon33 3y ago
Anecdotal warning that this effect may reduce with age.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

> Something in our industrial processes must be screwing with people's serotonin levels because Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto treatment method for a whole host of ailments. This is a comically bad inference. P1: We have ailments that can be treated with class X of drugs that act on body process Y P2: We increasingly use those drugs Conclusion: Z is messing with body process Y

DiscourseFan 3y ago
I'm slightly offended since I used to teach formal reasoning (and I always make a strong effort to avoid using it when constructing any arguments). You can always arbitrarily translate any parts of any phrase into any atomic sentence, and reframe certain claims as a series of propositions. None of your propositions that you claim I made are actually within the content of my argument. And especially for things that require historical, social, and political context to understands, it is completely useless to employ a system which pretends to be divorced from all those things. How are you supposed to evaluate a claim about the health effects of the industrial revolution using formal logic? How do you even know I was trying to use formal logic in my argument, or that I even cared if it made sense in a very particular logical system which has far more relevance for mathematics and computer programming than rhetoric and persuasion. I never made a single evidential claim nor could I, since this would be an area where empirical research is lacking. I was making an inference, which you made no attempt to directly engage with.
pgt 3y ago
Why is it "comically bad inference" to postulate that something environmental may be messing with our serotonin systems if psychedelic serotonergics cure ailments that we know require messaging via serotonin? (IBS ~ gut, migraine ~ brain, sleeping problems, and mood swings ~ brain)
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  I still don't see the argument. Let's say an argument is a series of premises followed by a conclusion. Maybe you can render it for me. How does it follow from a class of drugs addressing a class of ailments that there's some industrial process messing with some process in the body? Does that follow from every class of drugs that addresses any class of ailments? If we find out that aspirin is even more versatile than we thought and helps with an increasing amount of ailments, how does it follow that there's some related industrial process behind those ailments? Why not just the more parsimonious inference that... aspirin is more useful than we thought?

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

> Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto treatment method for a whole host of ailments. They are definitely not. Anecdotes aside, psychedelics are extremely overhyped right now and the downsides are heavily downplayed online. The studies about psychedelics and depression use heavy amounts of therapy and careful professional guidance, which the at-home experimenters don’t get. Psychedelics can also produce intense negative reactions, such as persistent false beliefs or even a worsening of anxiety and depression that lasts for some time. Many people online rush to dismiss these negative anecdotes if their personal experience was different, but they’re much more common than enthusiastic internet commenters would suggest.

nprz 3y ago
> but they’re much more common than enthusiastic internet commenters would suggest How do you know this?
jimmaswell 3y ago
Are you affiliated with the drug industry in some way? I can't imagine anyone else saying all this.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  Everything that poster said is true. And I am pro-psychedelics.
  - hezralig 3y ago
    How do you know that it is true?
mjtlittle 3y ago
Not sure why your getting pushback on such a leveled take. I am also increasingly feeling like this is the case. Not to say that there is no value in psychedelics (definitely looks like there is in clinical settings), it just seems like some people are touting it as a miracle solution to all mental problems. Something that can be self administered with no oversight. I have read a couple threads over the past few months on reddit about how mushrooms increased the posters' suicidal thoughts, and that they decided to abstain from taking them because of that. I think this perspective is even reinforced by recreational users: the first thing you are told before participating is to be in a familiar set and setting, and also to be in a good place in life. However, in certain states of mind (ex. depression or some other condition), I wouldn't trust the individual to be able to make such informed judgements. The risk is known.

koboll 3y ago

Serotonin is related to social interaction in vertebrates. Guess what we're doing a lot less of in person in the age of streaming TV and the internet?

predictabl3 3y ago

Please, please, please, to anyone in the thread, don't take this as anything other than an anecdote but... I would go to extreme lengths to keep access to relatively small doses of mushrooms before ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER going back on an SSRI. I don't really know how to talk about it without sounding like "a hippie" or something, and I keep rewriting this to keep it brief but since starting to experiment with low doses of mushrooms, I've basically eliminated my alcohol and cannabis consumption. I think I'm a pretty "addictive-personality" type person and didn't think I'd ever leave those behind, nor find something else that I genuinely feel is a net benefit for me, and that I don't really feel compelled to "reach for" other than when I specifically want to and have time set aside for. I've suffered chronic lower back pain for 15 years, and the most dramatic single-point-in-time improvements I've felt have been the day after I've had a "nature day". I don't know if it's a mushroom<->inflammation thing, I don't know if it's some mal-adaptive posture issue that my brain circumvents when on mushrooms, but something is going on. Also, I'll go ahead and say it, SSRIs didn't sap my sex drive, but made it into a psychologically damaging curse due to physical side effects. Not an issue with mushrooms.