in 2020 i was very interested in psychedelics because of the breakthrough with PTSD and MDMA via MAPS. so i read pihkal and tihkal and i started reading a bioch

in 2020 i was very interested in psychedelics because of the breakthrough with PTSD and MDMA via MAPS. so i read pihkal and tihkal and i started reading a biochemistry textbook and generally took an intense interest in that area. and i went to oakland when i had the chance to be back in the bay area and i went to zide door and bought a small amount of psilocybin. at a bohemian friends house (it has since been cleaned out and sold, perhaps the last such house in the bay area at the time!) i took the little capsule in my palm and contemplated if i really wanted to take the risk. and i did. it was not a large enough dose to produce a psychoactive effect -- i think i had read that a psychoactive dose was not necessary to see benefits in mental health. there is one effect that i remember very clearly. it was when it got later into the night that i noticed something subtle but extremely strange. i felt awake or energized in some way. and i realized that my whole life, during the evening and late hours i would be sort of depressed and not feeling good. and so that was the first time that i felt lucid and energized after dusk. my whole life i had always known that i feel very depressed and agitated at dusk. but this experience really showed me how abnormal it was. later on i made a connection that is very oddly absent in medical circles that explains this. you know how when someone is having a deadly allergic reaction they are meant to use what is known as an "epi-pen?" thats because epinephrine, whats inside the pen, reduces inflammation. but what isnt mentioned or connected anywhere to anything is that when you go to sleep at night your body massively reduces the level of epinephrine that circulates in your blood so that you can sleep. inflammation therefore must increase. and inflammation is implicated in many psychiatric disorders including and perhaps most of all with depression. one time much later i was in the hospital because i had a bad fever. maybe i was being kind of paranoid for going in. but as i was laying in the hospital bed my fever suddenly broke. and a wave of intense depression, unmistakable, washed over me. i thought this might be turning into an emergency but soon enough it passed as if nothing had happened. it was very useful to know about the connection between inflammation and depression during that little journey. why is the connection between inflammation and various psychiatric diseases not taken seriously by the medical establishment? because its too complicated of a subsystem for a statistical study to tease it out. even if it were the sole cause of depression it still wouldnt lend itself to any study that is not exploring directly the biochemical mechanism. expect some breakthroughs in this area.