7 ms·

> "Psychiatrists really focus on negative symptoms of depression. So, if you are not sad anymore, if your sleep or appetite is not impaired, they think you're b

> "Psychiatrists really focus on negative symptoms of depression. So, if you are not sad anymore, if your sleep or appetite is not impaired, they think you're better. But if you look at what patients define as important, they say it's the degree in which their life is meaningful, in which they can connect with people around them, in which they can function in everyday life," Barba said. A more wholistic approach to health care would be beneficial. For folks looking for more depth or purpose, Psilocybin seems to help reconnect people with a part of themselves they only dimly remember. I often hear people talk about the risks of psychedelics, which are to be considered, but what’s the risk of doing nothing or withholding the best treatment?

phoronixrly 2y ago
> I often hear people talk about the risks of psychedelics, which are to be considered, but what’s the risk of doing nothing or withholding the best treatment? The risk is to make things worse. And I know that I am preaching to people that are of the opinion that they know better than the FDA, scientists and doctors and are all for self-medicating based off of the echo chamber here and a few cherry-picked, limited and flawed by default (like in the case of this one) studies on the first page of Google.
- HKH2 2y ago
  I don't want people self-medicating with psilocybin, just like I don't want people self-medicating with SSRIs. Which is more dangerous?
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    The best thing to do is to consult with a physician on matters related to your health.
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      Why? I mean it certainly depends but as far non severe mental health issues go physicians are just going to checklists since there is hardly anything else they can do (besides long-term therapy).
    - maeil 2y ago
      That's not clear cut. There clearly exist plenty of combinations of "situation + physician" where this is not the best thing to do. To claim otherwise may as well be religious dogma.
      - phoronixrly 2y ago
        I'm sorry, but how is trusting a person who dedicated 10+ years of their life studying/practicing this, and relying on rigorous safety and effectiveness research of drugs religious dogma? Are you sure you know what religion is? Are you sure you know what science is? Are you just trolling?
        beagle3 2y ago
        If you actually read the effectiveness and safety research with a critical eye, you would realize “rigorous” is often the wrong adjective, whereas “cherry picked” to the point of “fraudulent” is often more in line with reality. Case in point: 50,000 people died, with about 5 times as many suffering life-changing serious adverse events, from “rigorous research” on the safety of Vioxx. Yes, it has since been pulled from the market, which FDA apologists often construe as “system working as designed”. No, it isn’t, even in the least, when you go into the details. Also: Purdue and OxyContin. Regulatory capture of the FDA is decades old at this point. Ignoring that is not a rational or healthy position.
        farts_mckensy 2y ago
        I don't know, why don't we ask my colon? Oh, wait, we can't. I was prescribed accutane, subsequently got ulcerative colitis so bad that they had to remove the organ entirely. The surgeon said my colon was literally falling apart in his hands as he took it out. Blind deference to authority of doctors lead to this situation. They do not always make great decisions, especially if there is a financial incentive for them to do otherwise.
        maeil 2y ago
        I'm not trolling, see my reply elsewhere. Do you not know anyone who has spent many years of their life doing something and are still rather poor at it? You probably do. You may even have such a skill yourself - I certainly do!
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      that's easy to say when you forget about the state of healthcare.. everywhere, actually. I was going to say the US but in other countries it's not like you can just pop in for a chat about taking shroomies, either. I'm not sure having a ten minute meeting with a stranger who has a PhD in internal medicine is going to yield useful strategies for curing the existential dread underpinning your depression whether you're there to discuss getting zonked on LSD or something more "traditional" like Xanax
      - phoronixrly 2y ago
        > it's not like you can just pop in for a chat about taking shroomies You sure can just pop in to discuss options for your crippling depression though? And sorry, I do indeed live in a country with a functioning healthcare system, not the US.
        dingnuts 2y ago
        In the US normally you talk to a therapist (not a doctor) or psychologist (not a medical doctor) about your depression at length, and then if you're deemed sufficiently depressed you get a short consult with a psychiatrist (finally a doctor) to prescribe medication. This is when you would theoretically finally be able to bring up shrooms, and your psychiatrist will laugh at you, write an Rx for an SSRI, and you'll see him next year when the Rx expires I'm not sure how it is in most countries but I'd expect the biggest difference is that it will cost you money in the US, but I've read many many horror stories about people waiting many months to have only a short chat with a physician from other countries. The lack of time available to spend taking to physicians seems to be a problem in other places too my point is that consulting a doctor with random questions isn't a simple, casual thing people can easily do in most places. in most places you have to plan ahead and either wait a long time for an appointment, and/or there is a cost barrier. if you have examples of countries where people are able to get to know their doctors on a personal level and can afford in time and money to talk to their physicians for more than a few minutes per year, please link them below
        Wytwwww 2y ago
        > You sure can just pop in to discuss options for your crippling depression though To get a prescription for one of the the handful of drugs are are available and are considered to be effective. What else can you learn by just "popping in"? > with a functioning healthcare system, not the US. What do you even mean by that?
    - standardUser 2y ago
      The US government severely restricts research on Schedule 1 drugs like psilocybin. Physicians don't have the data they need to inform patients.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      The idea that doctors aren't constantly "off base" and must be deferred to uncritically is pretty terrible. For example, it took literally two decades after it became well known that peptic ulcers were mostly caused by bacteria for the medical community to embrace giving anti-biotics for GI pain. To this day, there are still many American doctors who don't actually know about the Nobel Prize given in 2000 for this discovery, and claim it's "stress" and tell you to go home. Some claim they "know" but than try to "change your gut PH" and still refuse to give antibiotics due to "superbug" risk. This is a "small" thing (GI pain is not small to those who have it) - but if the doctors are screwing up such a small thing institutionally, what else do they mess up on? One is travelers sickness. Doctors in the USA do not want to perscribe front line antibiotics for it because of fear of superbugs - but they'll uncritically go eat their lunch at a McDonalds that same day, where they consume meat bathed in antibiotic slop which is more likely to contribute to superbugs then the amoxicillin that they didn't give you would have. Or what about right now, when it's become clear that Ozempic is literally a super-drug. Every doctor on earth should be trying to give that stuff to literally anyone. I can go to "third world countries" with deregulated health systems and get infinitely better care that I have real control over for on the orders of 1 USD (that's how much it cost for me in Thailand to get front line antibiotics for travelers sickness INCLUDING THE DOCTORS VISIT!) Why do we still sell Neosporin despite doctors wanting it off the market (also for risk of superbugs)? Why do few people in America use Providone-iodine for wound treatment despite it being by far the best solution scientifically for it (and it stains yellow)? Maybe it's because we're stupid. There really aren't better explanations. What about Circumcision? I'd straight up put doctors who do it in jail and many European nations would do the same. American doctors think circumcision is just fine, and long, deeply bitter swaths of medical ethics journals are dedicated to fighting over this again and again. Or what about the widespread disagreement over even basic stuff like digital rectal exams? There's no agreement on if they are worth it because often sticking one's hand up the butt of an old man does more damage to them than finding out that they (like everyone else at old age) have benign prostate cancer? Doctors in America have not earned their position of deference. The scientifically minded on HN who do their own research can and often do know how to treat certain conditions better than white-coats.
    - m_fayer 2y ago
      I really wish we would retire this chestnut already. As if there’s a reasonable grownup option here and everything else is playing with matches. No it’s not the best thing to do to brave huge waiting lists, call a hundred providers none of whom are taking new patients, pay a fortune out of pocket, and/or be faced with a distracted impatient person stuck to their screen who has 10 minutes for you. And I live in Germany, not the US.
  - striking 2y ago
    Psylocybin? Easily? You have to put effort into making an experience with psylocybin meaningful and helpful. It could go wrong very easily, especially for those who are in a difficult situation or headspace. (Speaking from experience.) As for SSRIs? Safe, effective, with a handful of annoying side effects. Straightforward to use, low potential for misuse, requires sustained use for any intended effects. A doctor who already has familiarity with a patient's mild or moderate symptoms of anxiety or depression may very well just prescribe one if asked and if not contraindicated. Not that you should randomly start popping Prozac, but it's unlikely to hurt you if you did. Ask your doctor, try the things that doctors currently believe are most likely to work first. If for whatever reason you choose to go beyond the current medical consensus, please stay safe and keep your doctor up to date.
    - HKH2 2y ago
      So are you okay with people choosing their own dose of SSRIs?
      - standardUser 2y ago
        A prescribing doctor will not magically know the precise amount of an SSRI a patient should be taking, or which one to take. For most patients, finding the right drug and dosage is a process. And just like with psilocybin, no one would want to take a random amount. Like with any drug, a person would want to be informed and have proper guidelines about dosage from the start.
    - jorvi 2y ago
      > Psylocybin? Easily? Err.. no? This is from the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment: https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/340001001.pdf https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/340001001.pdf Page 19 onward has the charts. What do do we find at the very low end in terms of chronic and acute toxicity? Shrooms (“paddos”) and LSD. It always blows my mind how anti-drug people will do a handwavey gesture to the authority of institutes like the FDA, but never actually check up on what actual research says. > As for SSRIs? Safe, effective, with a handful of annoying side effects. Except the multitude of ways you can put yourself into a serotonin coma. I agree with your assessment that (first) use of psychedelics should be under proper guidance. But what you refer to, “going bad”, can sometimes be a traumatic past experience that people have stuffed away and by surfacing and processing it they can move past it. It’s not always meant to be kumbaya and flowers. Educate yourself, then talk.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    Definitely psilocybin. For instance, if you take psilocybin and then spend some time in a cow slaughterhouse house, you might go crazy. The same wouldn’t be true of SSRIs.
    - HKH2 2y ago
      With SSRIs, the dangers are long-term.
- tastyfreeze 2y ago
  Many people here are speaking from experience. I trust my own judgment over some knob in the FDA that is steeped in a culture of drug control.
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    > Many people here are speaking from experience. I trust my own judgment over some knob in the FDA that is steeped in a culture of drug control. Let me paraphrase this: Many people here are parroting stuff based on a sample size of 1, who lived to tell the tale. You trust your own judgement based on those people before the rigorous safety and effectiveness studies for the FDA, on a whim that the FDA approves or rejects drugs based on their... ? Culture of hating recreational drugs?
    - tastyfreeze 2y ago
      The FDA exists to tell you, a free individual, what you are allowed to put in your body. It has been a very long time since the FDA has been about safety only. It is wholly captured by business interests in food and drug industries. So yes, they, and the government culture as a whole, hate recreational drugs that they don't control in some way. No shooms for you but drugs that cause suicidal ideation are prescribed by the millions. I am wary of people "looking out for your safety" when there is financial incentive to do otherwise.
    - tikhonj 2y ago
      Schedule I drugs specifically? The regulation around them is inescapably rooted in a culture of hating recreational drugs.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Notice how you downgraded your confident claim of knowledge to a tentative question. What's going on homie?
      - phoronixrly 2y ago
        It just seemed incredibly stupid so I wanted to make sure I understood correctly what they meant.
- farts_mckensy 2y ago
  Is there any evidence that psilocybin "makes things worse" or are you just concern trolling?
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    Probably not…the question is, does Psilocybin have a higher incidence rate of users suffering episodes of severe depression or psychosis than, say, SSRIs. Amongst all the “spiritual” drugs, even counting THC, Psilocybin is the most well tolerated—even so, SSRIs tend to still be very safe, even if they are not very effective.
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    The best thing to do is to consult with a physician on this matter, еven if side effects, drug interactions and precautions are readily available and cardiac arrest and death are among them. Idk, is this worse?
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      What would be the point of that? I'm pretty certain that almost any physician would tell you not to consume psilocybin (especially if you are suffering from mental issues).
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    There are certainly reports and some research showing that developing psychosis is certainly a risk as least for some people.
- WhitneyLand 2y ago
  My suspicion has always been the majority of adverse reactions have related to improper dosing. Anyone can have a horrible response with too high of a dose yet with self-medicating theres no sure way to know the amount of medicine you’ve ingested even if weighing.
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    Rigorously determining the proper effective and safe dose is part of the approval process.
    - WhitneyLand 2y ago
      Of course if it’s pharmaceutical. People were alluding to the risks of self-medicating I was referring to that.
- layer8 2y ago
  > The risk is to make things worse. That risk exists in many medical interventions. We need to quantify that risk and weigh it against the chances of making things better.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    This is generally what the regulatory system tries to accomplish.
    - biorach 2y ago
      Right. But there was Oxycontin. So it's obviously got its flaws.
- dimal 2y ago
  And psychiatric drugs don’t ever make things worse? As someone who was severely injured by FDA approved, scientifically validated medications, I’d say some healthy distrust of a corporate-captured bureaucracy is warranted. Remember, OxyContin was FDA approved. Did the FDA ever launch an investigation into how they allowed that disaster to happen? No. They didn’t so much as say “whoops”.
delusional 2y ago
> A more wholistic approach to health care would be beneficial. Maybe. My personal experience has been that those "negative symptoms" were in fact the entire disorder. I didn't need purpose or depth. I needed to not be so sad that I couldn't function. I needed to be able to hold a coherent thought for 5 minutes without getting stuck into a negative spiral of self loathing. I want "purpose" and "connection", but those things are what everybody on earth are looking for. The search for those things is the _stuff_ that life is made of. I needed help to get back to a place where I could pursue those things. Pursuing them is my life.
photochemsyn 2y ago
The article discusses the risks of treatment: > 'He added a word of caution for therapists that "psilocybin requires active confrontation of painful, negative emotions and people who take this drug need to be open and prepared for the idea that they are going into a state where they may probably end up crying and confronting whatever they are maybe running away from in their lives. Not everyone may want to do this." The long-term consequences of trying to avoid such issues seem considerable, e.g. it might lead to schizophrenia if people try to wall off parts of their memories they find intolerable, though that's just speculation at this point.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Psilocybin seems to help reconnect people with a part of themselves they only dimly remember Is there science behind this statement? From what I know, we understanding psychedelics work. We don’t know precisely how.
roughly 2y ago
> A more holistic approach to health care would be beneficial. I've commented on this elsewhere, but with psychedelics in particular we wind up in a weird space around our normal approaches to health - for instance, there's a lot of effort right now on finding the chemical mechanisms by which psychedelics affect mood, with the goal of creating substances which have the same impact on depression without the phenomenology of the trip. My suspicion is the trip is the treatment, or at least part of it - that the experience of being in an entirely different mindstate, of reacting to the world in a fundamentally different way using different mental pathways for several hours - is a core part of the treatment. Medicine has a bad habit of ignoring the patient's lived experience - to look at the patient broadly as a mechanism, and particularly as a collection of mechanisms, and to see things like hypertension* as something to be treated with a chemical offset and not a reflection of the full factors of a person's life. My hope is that the psychedelics will help us recognize a paradigm shift here (like, in data leading to changes in practice, not just in their normal way), but I think they've still got too much of the taint of the hippie on them to really be taken seriously. * I'm using hypertension as just an example of a particular ailment, I'm not making a statement on the treatment hypertension in particular.

phoronixrly 2y ago

> I often hear people talk about the risks of psychedelics, which are to be considered, but what’s the risk of doing nothing or withholding the best treatment? The risk is to make things worse. And I know that I am preaching to people that are of the opinion that they know better than the FDA, scientists and doctors and are all for self-medicating based off of the echo chamber here and a few cherry-picked, limited and flawed by default (like in the case of this one) studies on the first page of Google.

HKH2 2y ago
I don't want people self-medicating with psilocybin, just like I don't want people self-medicating with SSRIs. Which is more dangerous?
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  The best thing to do is to consult with a physician on matters related to your health.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    Why? I mean it certainly depends but as far non severe mental health issues go physicians are just going to checklists since there is hardly anything else they can do (besides long-term therapy).
  - maeil 2y ago
    That's not clear cut. There clearly exist plenty of combinations of "situation + physician" where this is not the best thing to do. To claim otherwise may as well be religious dogma.
    - phoronixrly 2y ago
      I'm sorry, but how is trusting a person who dedicated 10+ years of their life studying/practicing this, and relying on rigorous safety and effectiveness research of drugs religious dogma? Are you sure you know what religion is? Are you sure you know what science is? Are you just trolling?
      - beagle3 2y ago
        If you actually read the effectiveness and safety research with a critical eye, you would realize “rigorous” is often the wrong adjective, whereas “cherry picked” to the point of “fraudulent” is often more in line with reality. Case in point: 50,000 people died, with about 5 times as many suffering life-changing serious adverse events, from “rigorous research” on the safety of Vioxx. Yes, it has since been pulled from the market, which FDA apologists often construe as “system working as designed”. No, it isn’t, even in the least, when you go into the details. Also: Purdue and OxyContin. Regulatory capture of the FDA is decades old at this point. Ignoring that is not a rational or healthy position.
      - farts_mckensy 2y ago
        I don't know, why don't we ask my colon? Oh, wait, we can't. I was prescribed accutane, subsequently got ulcerative colitis so bad that they had to remove the organ entirely. The surgeon said my colon was literally falling apart in his hands as he took it out. Blind deference to authority of doctors lead to this situation. They do not always make great decisions, especially if there is a financial incentive for them to do otherwise.
      - maeil 2y ago
        I'm not trolling, see my reply elsewhere. Do you not know anyone who has spent many years of their life doing something and are still rather poor at it? You probably do. You may even have such a skill yourself - I certainly do!
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    that's easy to say when you forget about the state of healthcare.. everywhere, actually. I was going to say the US but in other countries it's not like you can just pop in for a chat about taking shroomies, either. I'm not sure having a ten minute meeting with a stranger who has a PhD in internal medicine is going to yield useful strategies for curing the existential dread underpinning your depression whether you're there to discuss getting zonked on LSD or something more "traditional" like Xanax
    - phoronixrly 2y ago
      > it's not like you can just pop in for a chat about taking shroomies You sure can just pop in to discuss options for your crippling depression though? And sorry, I do indeed live in a country with a functioning healthcare system, not the US.
      - dingnuts 2y ago
        In the US normally you talk to a therapist (not a doctor) or psychologist (not a medical doctor) about your depression at length, and then if you're deemed sufficiently depressed you get a short consult with a psychiatrist (finally a doctor) to prescribe medication. This is when you would theoretically finally be able to bring up shrooms, and your psychiatrist will laugh at you, write an Rx for an SSRI, and you'll see him next year when the Rx expires I'm not sure how it is in most countries but I'd expect the biggest difference is that it will cost you money in the US, but I've read many many horror stories about people waiting many months to have only a short chat with a physician from other countries. The lack of time available to spend taking to physicians seems to be a problem in other places too my point is that consulting a doctor with random questions isn't a simple, casual thing people can easily do in most places. in most places you have to plan ahead and either wait a long time for an appointment, and/or there is a cost barrier. if you have examples of countries where people are able to get to know their doctors on a personal level and can afford in time and money to talk to their physicians for more than a few minutes per year, please link them below
      - Wytwwww 2y ago
        > You sure can just pop in to discuss options for your crippling depression though To get a prescription for one of the the handful of drugs are are available and are considered to be effective. What else can you learn by just "popping in"? > with a functioning healthcare system, not the US. What do you even mean by that?
  - standardUser 2y ago
    The US government severely restricts research on Schedule 1 drugs like psilocybin. Physicians don't have the data they need to inform patients.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    The idea that doctors aren't constantly "off base" and must be deferred to uncritically is pretty terrible. For example, it took literally two decades after it became well known that peptic ulcers were mostly caused by bacteria for the medical community to embrace giving anti-biotics for GI pain. To this day, there are still many American doctors who don't actually know about the Nobel Prize given in 2000 for this discovery, and claim it's "stress" and tell you to go home. Some claim they "know" but than try to "change your gut PH" and still refuse to give antibiotics due to "superbug" risk. This is a "small" thing (GI pain is not small to those who have it) - but if the doctors are screwing up such a small thing institutionally, what else do they mess up on? One is travelers sickness. Doctors in the USA do not want to perscribe front line antibiotics for it because of fear of superbugs - but they'll uncritically go eat their lunch at a McDonalds that same day, where they consume meat bathed in antibiotic slop which is more likely to contribute to superbugs then the amoxicillin that they didn't give you would have. Or what about right now, when it's become clear that Ozempic is literally a super-drug. Every doctor on earth should be trying to give that stuff to literally anyone. I can go to "third world countries" with deregulated health systems and get infinitely better care that I have real control over for on the orders of 1 USD (that's how much it cost for me in Thailand to get front line antibiotics for travelers sickness INCLUDING THE DOCTORS VISIT!) Why do we still sell Neosporin despite doctors wanting it off the market (also for risk of superbugs)? Why do few people in America use Providone-iodine for wound treatment despite it being by far the best solution scientifically for it (and it stains yellow)? Maybe it's because we're stupid. There really aren't better explanations. What about Circumcision? I'd straight up put doctors who do it in jail and many European nations would do the same. American doctors think circumcision is just fine, and long, deeply bitter swaths of medical ethics journals are dedicated to fighting over this again and again. Or what about the widespread disagreement over even basic stuff like digital rectal exams? There's no agreement on if they are worth it because often sticking one's hand up the butt of an old man does more damage to them than finding out that they (like everyone else at old age) have benign prostate cancer? Doctors in America have not earned their position of deference. The scientifically minded on HN who do their own research can and often do know how to treat certain conditions better than white-coats.
  - m_fayer 2y ago
    I really wish we would retire this chestnut already. As if there’s a reasonable grownup option here and everything else is playing with matches. No it’s not the best thing to do to brave huge waiting lists, call a hundred providers none of whom are taking new patients, pay a fortune out of pocket, and/or be faced with a distracted impatient person stuck to their screen who has 10 minutes for you. And I live in Germany, not the US.
- striking 2y ago
  Psylocybin? Easily? You have to put effort into making an experience with psylocybin meaningful and helpful. It could go wrong very easily, especially for those who are in a difficult situation or headspace. (Speaking from experience.) As for SSRIs? Safe, effective, with a handful of annoying side effects. Straightforward to use, low potential for misuse, requires sustained use for any intended effects. A doctor who already has familiarity with a patient's mild or moderate symptoms of anxiety or depression may very well just prescribe one if asked and if not contraindicated. Not that you should randomly start popping Prozac, but it's unlikely to hurt you if you did. Ask your doctor, try the things that doctors currently believe are most likely to work first. If for whatever reason you choose to go beyond the current medical consensus, please stay safe and keep your doctor up to date.
  - HKH2 2y ago
    So are you okay with people choosing their own dose of SSRIs?
    - standardUser 2y ago
      A prescribing doctor will not magically know the precise amount of an SSRI a patient should be taking, or which one to take. For most patients, finding the right drug and dosage is a process. And just like with psilocybin, no one would want to take a random amount. Like with any drug, a person would want to be informed and have proper guidelines about dosage from the start.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    > Psylocybin? Easily? Err.. no? This is from the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment: https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/340001001.pdf https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/340001001.pdf Page 19 onward has the charts. What do do we find at the very low end in terms of chronic and acute toxicity? Shrooms (“paddos”) and LSD. It always blows my mind how anti-drug people will do a handwavey gesture to the authority of institutes like the FDA, but never actually check up on what actual research says. > As for SSRIs? Safe, effective, with a handful of annoying side effects. Except the multitude of ways you can put yourself into a serotonin coma. I agree with your assessment that (first) use of psychedelics should be under proper guidance. But what you refer to, “going bad”, can sometimes be a traumatic past experience that people have stuffed away and by surfacing and processing it they can move past it. It’s not always meant to be kumbaya and flowers. Educate yourself, then talk.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Definitely psilocybin. For instance, if you take psilocybin and then spend some time in a cow slaughterhouse house, you might go crazy. The same wouldn’t be true of SSRIs.
  - HKH2 2y ago
    With SSRIs, the dangers are long-term.
tastyfreeze 2y ago
Many people here are speaking from experience. I trust my own judgment over some knob in the FDA that is steeped in a culture of drug control.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  > Many people here are speaking from experience. I trust my own judgment over some knob in the FDA that is steeped in a culture of drug control. Let me paraphrase this: Many people here are parroting stuff based on a sample size of 1, who lived to tell the tale. You trust your own judgement based on those people before the rigorous safety and effectiveness studies for the FDA, on a whim that the FDA approves or rejects drugs based on their... ? Culture of hating recreational drugs?
  - tastyfreeze 2y ago
    The FDA exists to tell you, a free individual, what you are allowed to put in your body. It has been a very long time since the FDA has been about safety only. It is wholly captured by business interests in food and drug industries. So yes, they, and the government culture as a whole, hate recreational drugs that they don't control in some way. No shooms for you but drugs that cause suicidal ideation are prescribed by the millions. I am wary of people "looking out for your safety" when there is financial incentive to do otherwise.
  - tikhonj 2y ago
    Schedule I drugs specifically? The regulation around them is inescapably rooted in a culture of hating recreational drugs.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    Notice how you downgraded your confident claim of knowledge to a tentative question. What's going on homie?
    - phoronixrly 2y ago
      It just seemed incredibly stupid so I wanted to make sure I understood correctly what they meant.
farts_mckensy 2y ago
Is there any evidence that psilocybin "makes things worse" or are you just concern trolling?
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Probably not…the question is, does Psilocybin have a higher incidence rate of users suffering episodes of severe depression or psychosis than, say, SSRIs. Amongst all the “spiritual” drugs, even counting THC, Psilocybin is the most well tolerated—even so, SSRIs tend to still be very safe, even if they are not very effective.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  The best thing to do is to consult with a physician on this matter, еven if side effects, drug interactions and precautions are readily available and cardiac arrest and death are among them. Idk, is this worse?
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    What would be the point of that? I'm pretty certain that almost any physician would tell you not to consume psilocybin (especially if you are suffering from mental issues).
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  There are certainly reports and some research showing that developing psychosis is certainly a risk as least for some people.
WhitneyLand 2y ago
My suspicion has always been the majority of adverse reactions have related to improper dosing. Anyone can have a horrible response with too high of a dose yet with self-medicating theres no sure way to know the amount of medicine you’ve ingested even if weighing.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  Rigorously determining the proper effective and safe dose is part of the approval process.
  - WhitneyLand 2y ago
    Of course if it’s pharmaceutical. People were alluding to the risks of self-medicating I was referring to that.
layer8 2y ago
> The risk is to make things worse. That risk exists in many medical interventions. We need to quantify that risk and weigh it against the chances of making things better.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  This is generally what the regulatory system tries to accomplish.
  - biorach 2y ago
    Right. But there was Oxycontin. So it's obviously got its flaws.
dimal 2y ago
And psychiatric drugs don’t ever make things worse? As someone who was severely injured by FDA approved, scientifically validated medications, I’d say some healthy distrust of a corporate-captured bureaucracy is warranted. Remember, OxyContin was FDA approved. Did the FDA ever launch an investigation into how they allowed that disaster to happen? No. They didn’t so much as say “whoops”.

delusional 2y ago

> A more wholistic approach to health care would be beneficial. Maybe. My personal experience has been that those "negative symptoms" were in fact the entire disorder. I didn't need purpose or depth. I needed to not be so sad that I couldn't function. I needed to be able to hold a coherent thought for 5 minutes without getting stuck into a negative spiral of self loathing. I want "purpose" and "connection", but those things are what everybody on earth are looking for. The search for those things is the _stuff_ that life is made of. I needed help to get back to a place where I could pursue those things. Pursuing them is my life.

photochemsyn 2y ago

The article discusses the risks of treatment: > 'He added a word of caution for therapists that "psilocybin requires active confrontation of painful, negative emotions and people who take this drug need to be open and prepared for the idea that they are going into a state where they may probably end up crying and confronting whatever they are maybe running away from in their lives. Not everyone may want to do this." The long-term consequences of trying to avoid such issues seem considerable, e.g. it might lead to schizophrenia if people try to wall off parts of their memories they find intolerable, though that's just speculation at this point.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> Psilocybin seems to help reconnect people with a part of themselves they only dimly remember Is there science behind this statement? From what I know, we understanding psychedelics work. We don’t know precisely how.

roughly 2y ago

> A more holistic approach to health care would be beneficial. I've commented on this elsewhere, but with psychedelics in particular we wind up in a weird space around our normal approaches to health - for instance, there's a lot of effort right now on finding the chemical mechanisms by which psychedelics affect mood, with the goal of creating substances which have the same impact on depression without the phenomenology of the trip. My suspicion is the trip is the treatment, or at least part of it - that the experience of being in an entirely different mindstate, of reacting to the world in a fundamentally different way using different mental pathways for several hours - is a core part of the treatment. Medicine has a bad habit of ignoring the patient's lived experience - to look at the patient broadly as a mechanism, and particularly as a collection of mechanisms, and to see things like hypertension* as something to be treated with a chemical offset and not a reflection of the full factors of a person's life. My hope is that the psychedelics will help us recognize a paradigm shift here (like, in data leading to changes in practice, not just in their normal way), but I think they've still got too much of the taint of the hippie on them to really be taken seriously. * I'm using hypertension as just an example of a particular ailment, I'm not making a statement on the treatment hypertension in particular.