6 ms·

Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

42 points by tzury 2mo ago

inigyou 2mo ago
Psychedelics open your brain up to rewiring in some way, and can be used under direction to treat a lot of things. But of course, people who didn't like the Vietnam War used them recreationally, which is why the US government made them globally illegal.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
- an0malous 2mo ago
  Psychedelics desolve the conceptual prison your mind is in, the government made them illegal because they build those prisons. Charitably, you could argue a functional society involves some amount of indoctrination into a set of shared beliefs and a large percentage of people losing that indoctrination would destroy society. Could the US function if everyone was a pacifist, anti-capitalist, hippie? I think that was and still is the primary concern.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Interestingly, we know the CIA tried to use psychedelics to make people become the opposite of hippies, and they failed. This was part of MKULTRA. They were banned shortly after this failure.
  - bushwart 2mo ago
    Psychedelics can dissolve more than the mind's conceptual prisons, perhaps much more of the mind than one would like. How did the hippie-era stereotype of the burned out acid head disappear so quickly from popular culture?
    - gchamonlive 2mo ago
      Kary Mullis is known to have used a lot of it and discovered PCR while off psychedelics. There's also the famous Hoffman's bycicle day. The stereotype is just that, and might be a result of lack of mental stimulation rather than LSD abuse, which is possibly the safest drug in terms of toxicity.
    - scarecrowbob 2mo ago
      Why? Because it's not a very accurate stereotype. I do first aid at music festivals and volunteer at a free clinic that serves a homeless population. I see a lot of spun folks and folks in varying stages of "burned out" (to use the term from the stereotype). I'm still in EMT school, but I've had to work with a lot of folks having adverse reactions to these substances. Meth and alcohol, simply being poor, childhood trauma, getting into a bad medical situation, losing a job and not finding one; all of those things will put folks into some bad places. But most substance abuse, in my limited experience, comes down to various traumas folks get into and maybe some chemical predispositions. That's not how most of the folks I know who have had very adverse psychedelic experiences have gotten into those states. And it is generally a very transitory state. While there are long-term psychological effects from stuff like acid (and IME, MDMA, Ket, and Nitrous are worse physiologically than things like LSD, C2B, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, etc), generally psychedelic substances lead people to doing less of those drugs over time and that has a very different effect than, say, alcohol and chronic poverty. Propaganda about these things has a hard time taking hold in the face of most folks lived reality.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        Thank you for your service
    - Anonbrit 2mo ago
      Why has the stereotype of the coked-out stock trader or ketamine addicted delusional billionaire not held the same place in popular culture? Vagely functional coke heads are very, very common in certain circles
  - mikert89 2mo ago
    anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. sure they dissolve some kind of prison, but many people never make it back from that dissolution and end up somewhere worse
    - virgil_disgr4ce 2mo ago
      > did Psychedelics more than a few times If you want to specify LSD, you should do that, not "psychedelics." There are many, many psychedelics. They have sometimes radical differences. You cannot generalize that word into "many people never make it back." That is flat-out wrong, not to mention harmful.
      - mikert89 2mo ago
        i disagree. i have a unique view of this type of drug use. i was part of a large social circle of psychedelic users, over the course of many years. i very rarely took part. i watched close friends change.
      - jdietrich 2mo ago
        >There are many, many psychedelics. They have sometimes radical differences. Psilocybin is a more selective 5-HT2A agonist than LSD and is more rapidly metabolised. At normal recreational or clinical doses, they really aren't very different. LSD isn't quite as well-researched as psilocybin as a psychiatric drug, but the data we have suggests that it isn't meaningfully different in terms of risks or benefits.
    - bossyTeacher 2mo ago
      > anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. sure they dissolve some kind of prison, but many people never make it back from that dissolution and end up somewhere worse Way to generalise. I also know people who drank water, went to sleep and never woke up. Ego dissolution is dosage dependent and you don't need to reach that point to get positive benefits. Also, many people do psychdelics that probably shouldn't.
- joinjune 2mo ago
  Drug use changes the way you vote. The people who were running the country during the Vietnam war recognized this and, along with the people who owned industry/media, didn't want that kind of change to go mainstream.
  - tokai 2mo ago
    That was not why they started the war on drugs, and we have that on record.
    - guerrilla 2mo ago
      Always beleive the record...
    - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
      Yeah, Disenfranchise the hippies and the blacks by targeting those communities with heavy policing. Sorta like today where there's similar drug use levels between white and black populations, but one side is more heavily policed than the other.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        Crack cocaine and cocaine are the same drug with a different delivery method but we all know exactly why one is punished more harshly. There's a federal policy that a given quantity of crack cocaine is to be treated as 10 times that quantity of regular cocaine, IIRC?
      - deburo 2mo ago
        Perhaps you'd like to dig down into the stats using AI to find out that the gap in policing isn't really due to race. Check by poverty level, and perhaps by geographic areas.
        MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
        I was trying to hide my power level but yeah, the point is to maintain a permanent "underclass" that can't pick and choose what work they take. If everyone was truly free, we'd have to pay the real price to clean up shit and that would mean an inversion of our pyramid scheme.
- ASalazarMX 2mo ago
  Every time I see "does {PSYCHEDELIC} cure {AILMENT}" studies, I fear a recreation of the opioid crisis. They need to be studied as a treatment, yes, but people, doctors, and pharmaceuticals will abuse them given the opportunity and lack of oversight.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Psychedelics aren't even remotely addictive. People who take them usually don't want to take any more of them for months.
    - ASalazarMX 2mo ago
      While most won't give you withdrawal symptoms, they can cause psychological addiction.
      - IAmBroom 2mo ago
        In the same sense that Pinterest can do so.
jhoechtl 2mo ago
We hear a lot of psilocybine lately, it cures altsheimer, people in coma awake miraculously. As long as we do not understand the workings, it reminds me of the days when radium or other nuclear substances were the cure for everything.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  It's a drug that makes your neurons more susceptible to forming new connections. Of course it's going to be useful for a lot of brain treatment. In addition, it's highly illegal which means these things didn't get found out a lot sooner.
  - exhumet 2mo ago
    upside is that in most states you can just go buy the spores and they just so happen to conveniently have spawn bags right nearby. BUT DONT EVER COMBINE THE TWO AND WAIT A FEW MONTHS
    - Denatonium 2mo ago
      Here on the east coast, you can just wait until May comes around and it rains a couple days in a row. Then, you can just go for a walk by your local river/creek and wade through the seas of Japanese knotweed, lesser celandine, and box elder maple while looking for mushrooms growing out of the wet woody debris. Between them and nearby mulch beds, SWIM has allegedly found psilocybe ovoideocystidiata pretty consistently for the past several years, in Minecraft. Just don't try and take any shortcuts with the identification. It's better to throw out questionable specimens than risk needing a liver transplant.
      - exhumet 2mo ago
        thats awesome, also on the east coast but northeast so nothing of note besides the nice fall weather to help cause a flush if they just so happen to get the process started this year... or something, not like id know
- 2mo ago
llm_nerd 2mo ago
This feels like a case where Betteridge's law of headlines applies, or at least should be presumed. [Recreational Drug] solves [malady] is such a hopeful go to and has recurred countless times. I've partaken of 'shrooms a number of times: Fun times. I've even grown them (protip - not worth the trouble. It's amazing how something that grows in literal shit is suddenly the most fragile process imaginable when you try your PFTek method, and contamination will always be ruining your process). But people keep trying to make psilocybin a magic solution, and the studies have been extremely weak if not contradictory, and these stories always lean on worthless anecdotes.
- jgalt212 2mo ago
  SciAm really should prefer a headline such as: Psilocybin opens up new pathways to treating anorexia
  - phoronixrly 2mo ago
    Not even that... One quoted study says it 'provides preliminary support for the feasibility, safety and potential efficacy' of the drug. The other study is funded by a company selling psychedelics as potential medicines...
- mosburger 2mo ago
  Here's yet another anecdote of near-zero real value to add to the pile: I treated my severe treatment-resistant depression with ketamine infusions. It's obviously not the same as psilocybin, but I believe the current thinking is that psychoelics and dissociatives both have some positive effect on neuroplasticity, and that sorta checks out in my case. I'd say you need to combine it with some good cognitive behavioral therapy - it seemed to make CBT a lot more effective for me where it failed in the past because my brain was more open to rewiring. I haven't been re-treated in a few years now, but I still feel a lot better. But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.
cainxinth 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/r7Rbt https://archive.ph/r7Rbt
ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago
I lost a family member to anorexia, and the only thing I really regret is that I didn't suggest that we try psychedelic therapy now that everything else had failed and things looked pretty grim. I mostly blame myself for not pushing the idea. But I am also angry at the war on drugs which has caused all use of psychoactive drugs to be associated with such taboo.
mikert89 2mo ago
Psychedelics arent that far from turning your brain off and then turning it back on again but anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. clearly they are doing some kind of unraveling that doesnt fully bounce back
- temp0826 2mo ago
  Why would you want your brain to ravel back up? I've worked at ayahuasca retreats and know many people who do it for a living (who are many of the most grounded people I know). Using these things in a therapeutic manner is a completely different thing than using them recreationally, might as well be a different substance. I'd guess those people who "permanently changed their brain" (whatever that means) were not in a context for actually healing.
  - mikert89 2mo ago
    I believe that the drugs cause structural changes to the brain that make it more difficult to function in the reward structure of society. You can claim through a philosophical lens that society is flawed and so this is okay, but ive seen it derail peoples lives, such that they are just living in some rural area with limited participation in real life ive barely taken them, but i watched many people change over years of use.
    - nathan_compton 2mo ago
      > just living in some rural area with limited participation in real life They might say the same thing about your lifestyle. The "reward structure of society" is highly abstract these days, arguably disconnected from "real life". You could say monks are disconnected from "real life." This is a weird take, I think.
    - temp0826 2mo ago
      I guess it depends on what "derail" means (meaning, do you actually know one's internal state and if they are happy?). Is something wrong with living alone in a rural area if you are happy? (This sounds great to me, for reference!). I've watched hundreds of people take them in great containers with great support. It's never a good idea to make big changes right away, but we take small steps to adjust our lives so we can actually be happy. Yes, even if that is less "productive". Why do we do the things we do anyways?
bbayles 2mo ago
Anecdata, but an acquaintance of mine struggled with lifelong anorexia. Severe enough that he was hospitalized a few times. With great effort he could cling to the bottom of the "normal BMI" range, but his life was generally ruled by the eating disorder - he couldn't have meals with people, he had to do various exercise rituals. He was an early participant in one of these psychedelic studies a few years ago. After the first treatment, he said he couldn't really tell if it had any effect. But six months later, he was totally changed - able to function almost normally. We should exercise our usual amount of skepticism about miracle treatments, but my hope is that his experience can be replicated.
- Taronar 2mo ago
  Science generally works on IF Then statements when it comes to treatment, IF you take this drug your blood pressure will increase, IF you exercise more your life expectancy will increase, with mental health issues there very few IF then treatments, there are only if maybe treatments, this is for a slew of reasons such as how we don't really understand it, symptoms can be caused by many different underlying issues, and legal risk of prescribing something that isn't proven effective. That being said, the IF maybe treatments are the only way to treat mental health, Psilocybin falls in this category.
  - Anonbrit 2mo ago
    Just about all common psychological medication (by which I mean antidepressants, antipsychotics, ADHD meds, etc) have a pretty weakly measurable effect and effectiveness. If you take them, your symptoms might improve. In some casesthey'll get a lot worse. In many cases it will have no effect on your symptoms. There are lots of side effects. What's the difference here?
jdietrich 2mo ago
Sorry, but the answer is almost certainly no. We now have good quality data on psylocybin as a treatment for depression; at best, it's slightly more effective than existing treatments, at the cost of a small but significant increased risk side-effects (primarily severe acute anxiety and psychosis, possibly HPPD). We have less data on other psychedelics and other conditions, but none of it looks spectacular when you take into account the usual biases affecting small trials of novel treatments. Psychedelics are likely to be a good option for some patients, it's good to have another tool in the armamentarium, but the idea that they're a revolution in psychiatry is simply no longer credible. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39627679/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39627679/ Disclosure: I have participated in a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and did not see any meaningful benefit.
- Taronar 2mo ago
  This is a treatment that can help people. just because it didn't help you does not mean it's ineffective in totality which is the stance you seem to take.
  - jdietrich 2mo ago
    The question posed is "Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?". Psychedelics are effective in treating some psychiatric disorders - I've been clear about that - but they are (at best) only marginally more effective than most existing treatments. That's a good thing, it will help some patients, but it's a million miles from being the key treatment.
firebot 2mo ago
Mushrooms have always made me vomit... So treat anorexia with bulimia? Hmmm.
stephenitis 2mo ago
I attended a presentation at the maps conference in ‘23(?). The presenter said that the effect was not enduring for those on already on a path to recovery. She hypothesized that the body need nourishment and a lot of ancillary support to sustain that kind of neurological change. (I’ll try to search for it when I have free time) Psychedelic trips are taxing on the body and I think I agree with the hypothesis nutrients are underestimated in supporting a healthy mind in these states, from personal experience.

42 points by tzury 2mo ago

Psychedelics open your brain up to rewiring in some way, and can be used under direction to treat a lot of things. But of course, people who didn't like the Vietnam War used them recreationally, which is why the US government made them globally illegal.

cindyllm 2mo ago
[dead]
an0malous 2mo ago
Psychedelics desolve the conceptual prison your mind is in, the government made them illegal because they build those prisons. Charitably, you could argue a functional society involves some amount of indoctrination into a set of shared beliefs and a large percentage of people losing that indoctrination would destroy society. Could the US function if everyone was a pacifist, anti-capitalist, hippie? I think that was and still is the primary concern.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Interestingly, we know the CIA tried to use psychedelics to make people become the opposite of hippies, and they failed. This was part of MKULTRA. They were banned shortly after this failure.
- bushwart 2mo ago
  Psychedelics can dissolve more than the mind's conceptual prisons, perhaps much more of the mind than one would like. How did the hippie-era stereotype of the burned out acid head disappear so quickly from popular culture?
  - gchamonlive 2mo ago
    Kary Mullis is known to have used a lot of it and discovered PCR while off psychedelics. There's also the famous Hoffman's bycicle day. The stereotype is just that, and might be a result of lack of mental stimulation rather than LSD abuse, which is possibly the safest drug in terms of toxicity.
  - scarecrowbob 2mo ago
    Why? Because it's not a very accurate stereotype. I do first aid at music festivals and volunteer at a free clinic that serves a homeless population. I see a lot of spun folks and folks in varying stages of "burned out" (to use the term from the stereotype). I'm still in EMT school, but I've had to work with a lot of folks having adverse reactions to these substances. Meth and alcohol, simply being poor, childhood trauma, getting into a bad medical situation, losing a job and not finding one; all of those things will put folks into some bad places. But most substance abuse, in my limited experience, comes down to various traumas folks get into and maybe some chemical predispositions. That's not how most of the folks I know who have had very adverse psychedelic experiences have gotten into those states. And it is generally a very transitory state. While there are long-term psychological effects from stuff like acid (and IME, MDMA, Ket, and Nitrous are worse physiologically than things like LSD, C2B, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, etc), generally psychedelic substances lead people to doing less of those drugs over time and that has a very different effect than, say, alcohol and chronic poverty. Propaganda about these things has a hard time taking hold in the face of most folks lived reality.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Thank you for your service
  - Anonbrit 2mo ago
    Why has the stereotype of the coked-out stock trader or ketamine addicted delusional billionaire not held the same place in popular culture? Vagely functional coke heads are very, very common in certain circles
- mikert89 2mo ago
  anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. sure they dissolve some kind of prison, but many people never make it back from that dissolution and end up somewhere worse
  - virgil_disgr4ce 2mo ago
    > did Psychedelics more than a few times If you want to specify LSD, you should do that, not "psychedelics." There are many, many psychedelics. They have sometimes radical differences. You cannot generalize that word into "many people never make it back." That is flat-out wrong, not to mention harmful.
    - mikert89 2mo ago
      i disagree. i have a unique view of this type of drug use. i was part of a large social circle of psychedelic users, over the course of many years. i very rarely took part. i watched close friends change.
    - jdietrich 2mo ago
      >There are many, many psychedelics. They have sometimes radical differences. Psilocybin is a more selective 5-HT2A agonist than LSD and is more rapidly metabolised. At normal recreational or clinical doses, they really aren't very different. LSD isn't quite as well-researched as psilocybin as a psychiatric drug, but the data we have suggests that it isn't meaningfully different in terms of risks or benefits.
  - bossyTeacher 2mo ago
    > anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. sure they dissolve some kind of prison, but many people never make it back from that dissolution and end up somewhere worse Way to generalise. I also know people who drank water, went to sleep and never woke up. Ego dissolution is dosage dependent and you don't need to reach that point to get positive benefits. Also, many people do psychdelics that probably shouldn't.
joinjune 2mo ago
Drug use changes the way you vote. The people who were running the country during the Vietnam war recognized this and, along with the people who owned industry/media, didn't want that kind of change to go mainstream.
- tokai 2mo ago
  That was not why they started the war on drugs, and we have that on record.
  - guerrilla 2mo ago
    Always beleive the record...
  - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
    Yeah, Disenfranchise the hippies and the blacks by targeting those communities with heavy policing. Sorta like today where there's similar drug use levels between white and black populations, but one side is more heavily policed than the other.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Crack cocaine and cocaine are the same drug with a different delivery method but we all know exactly why one is punished more harshly. There's a federal policy that a given quantity of crack cocaine is to be treated as 10 times that quantity of regular cocaine, IIRC?
    - deburo 2mo ago
      Perhaps you'd like to dig down into the stats using AI to find out that the gap in policing isn't really due to race. Check by poverty level, and perhaps by geographic areas.
      - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
        I was trying to hide my power level but yeah, the point is to maintain a permanent "underclass" that can't pick and choose what work they take. If everyone was truly free, we'd have to pay the real price to clean up shit and that would mean an inversion of our pyramid scheme.
ASalazarMX 2mo ago
Every time I see "does {PSYCHEDELIC} cure {AILMENT}" studies, I fear a recreation of the opioid crisis. They need to be studied as a treatment, yes, but people, doctors, and pharmaceuticals will abuse them given the opportunity and lack of oversight.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Psychedelics aren't even remotely addictive. People who take them usually don't want to take any more of them for months.
  - ASalazarMX 2mo ago
    While most won't give you withdrawal symptoms, they can cause psychological addiction.
    - IAmBroom 2mo ago
      In the same sense that Pinterest can do so.

jhoechtl 2mo ago

We hear a lot of psilocybine lately, it cures altsheimer, people in coma awake miraculously. As long as we do not understand the workings, it reminds me of the days when radium or other nuclear substances were the cure for everything.

inigyou 2mo ago
It's a drug that makes your neurons more susceptible to forming new connections. Of course it's going to be useful for a lot of brain treatment. In addition, it's highly illegal which means these things didn't get found out a lot sooner.
- exhumet 2mo ago
  upside is that in most states you can just go buy the spores and they just so happen to conveniently have spawn bags right nearby. BUT DONT EVER COMBINE THE TWO AND WAIT A FEW MONTHS
  - Denatonium 2mo ago
    Here on the east coast, you can just wait until May comes around and it rains a couple days in a row. Then, you can just go for a walk by your local river/creek and wade through the seas of Japanese knotweed, lesser celandine, and box elder maple while looking for mushrooms growing out of the wet woody debris. Between them and nearby mulch beds, SWIM has allegedly found psilocybe ovoideocystidiata pretty consistently for the past several years, in Minecraft. Just don't try and take any shortcuts with the identification. It's better to throw out questionable specimens than risk needing a liver transplant.
    - exhumet 2mo ago
      thats awesome, also on the east coast but northeast so nothing of note besides the nice fall weather to help cause a flush if they just so happen to get the process started this year... or something, not like id know
2mo ago

llm_nerd 2mo ago

This feels like a case where Betteridge's law of headlines applies, or at least should be presumed. [Recreational Drug] solves [malady] is such a hopeful go to and has recurred countless times. I've partaken of 'shrooms a number of times: Fun times. I've even grown them (protip - not worth the trouble. It's amazing how something that grows in literal shit is suddenly the most fragile process imaginable when you try your PFTek method, and contamination will always be ruining your process). But people keep trying to make psilocybin a magic solution, and the studies have been extremely weak if not contradictory, and these stories always lean on worthless anecdotes.

jgalt212 2mo ago
SciAm really should prefer a headline such as: Psilocybin opens up new pathways to treating anorexia
- phoronixrly 2mo ago
  Not even that... One quoted study says it 'provides preliminary support for the feasibility, safety and potential efficacy' of the drug. The other study is funded by a company selling psychedelics as potential medicines...
mosburger 2mo ago
Here's yet another anecdote of near-zero real value to add to the pile: I treated my severe treatment-resistant depression with ketamine infusions. It's obviously not the same as psilocybin, but I believe the current thinking is that psychoelics and dissociatives both have some positive effect on neuroplasticity, and that sorta checks out in my case. I'd say you need to combine it with some good cognitive behavioral therapy - it seemed to make CBT a lot more effective for me where it failed in the past because my brain was more open to rewiring. I haven't been re-treated in a few years now, but I still feel a lot better. But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.

cainxinth 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/r7Rbt https://archive.ph/r7Rbt

ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago

I lost a family member to anorexia, and the only thing I really regret is that I didn't suggest that we try psychedelic therapy now that everything else had failed and things looked pretty grim. I mostly blame myself for not pushing the idea. But I am also angry at the war on drugs which has caused all use of psychoactive drugs to be associated with such taboo.

mikert89 2mo ago

Psychedelics arent that far from turning your brain off and then turning it back on again but anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. clearly they are doing some kind of unraveling that doesnt fully bounce back

temp0826 2mo ago
Why would you want your brain to ravel back up? I've worked at ayahuasca retreats and know many people who do it for a living (who are many of the most grounded people I know). Using these things in a therapeutic manner is a completely different thing than using them recreationally, might as well be a different substance. I'd guess those people who "permanently changed their brain" (whatever that means) were not in a context for actually healing.
- mikert89 2mo ago
  I believe that the drugs cause structural changes to the brain that make it more difficult to function in the reward structure of society. You can claim through a philosophical lens that society is flawed and so this is okay, but ive seen it derail peoples lives, such that they are just living in some rural area with limited participation in real life ive barely taken them, but i watched many people change over years of use.
  - nathan_compton 2mo ago
    > just living in some rural area with limited participation in real life They might say the same thing about your lifestyle. The "reward structure of society" is highly abstract these days, arguably disconnected from "real life". You could say monks are disconnected from "real life." This is a weird take, I think.
  - temp0826 2mo ago
    I guess it depends on what "derail" means (meaning, do you actually know one's internal state and if they are happy?). Is something wrong with living alone in a rural area if you are happy? (This sounds great to me, for reference!). I've watched hundreds of people take them in great containers with great support. It's never a good idea to make big changes right away, but we take small steps to adjust our lives so we can actually be happy. Yes, even if that is less "productive". Why do we do the things we do anyways?

bbayles 2mo ago

Anecdata, but an acquaintance of mine struggled with lifelong anorexia. Severe enough that he was hospitalized a few times. With great effort he could cling to the bottom of the "normal BMI" range, but his life was generally ruled by the eating disorder - he couldn't have meals with people, he had to do various exercise rituals. He was an early participant in one of these psychedelic studies a few years ago. After the first treatment, he said he couldn't really tell if it had any effect. But six months later, he was totally changed - able to function almost normally. We should exercise our usual amount of skepticism about miracle treatments, but my hope is that his experience can be replicated.

Taronar 2mo ago
Science generally works on IF Then statements when it comes to treatment, IF you take this drug your blood pressure will increase, IF you exercise more your life expectancy will increase, with mental health issues there very few IF then treatments, there are only if maybe treatments, this is for a slew of reasons such as how we don't really understand it, symptoms can be caused by many different underlying issues, and legal risk of prescribing something that isn't proven effective. That being said, the IF maybe treatments are the only way to treat mental health, Psilocybin falls in this category.
- Anonbrit 2mo ago
  Just about all common psychological medication (by which I mean antidepressants, antipsychotics, ADHD meds, etc) have a pretty weakly measurable effect and effectiveness. If you take them, your symptoms might improve. In some casesthey'll get a lot worse. In many cases it will have no effect on your symptoms. There are lots of side effects. What's the difference here?

jdietrich 2mo ago

Sorry, but the answer is almost certainly no. We now have good quality data on psylocybin as a treatment for depression; at best, it's slightly more effective than existing treatments, at the cost of a small but significant increased risk side-effects (primarily severe acute anxiety and psychosis, possibly HPPD). We have less data on other psychedelics and other conditions, but none of it looks spectacular when you take into account the usual biases affecting small trials of novel treatments. Psychedelics are likely to be a good option for some patients, it's good to have another tool in the armamentarium, but the idea that they're a revolution in psychiatry is simply no longer credible. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39627679/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39627679/ Disclosure: I have participated in a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and did not see any meaningful benefit.

Taronar 2mo ago
This is a treatment that can help people. just because it didn't help you does not mean it's ineffective in totality which is the stance you seem to take.
- jdietrich 2mo ago
  The question posed is "Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?". Psychedelics are effective in treating some psychiatric disorders - I've been clear about that - but they are (at best) only marginally more effective than most existing treatments. That's a good thing, it will help some patients, but it's a million miles from being the key treatment.

firebot 2mo ago

Mushrooms have always made me vomit... So treat anorexia with bulimia? Hmmm.

stephenitis 2mo ago

I attended a presentation at the maps conference in ‘23(?). The presenter said that the effect was not enduring for those on already on a path to recovery. She hypothesized that the body need nourishment and a lot of ancillary support to sustain that kind of neurological change. (I’ll try to search for it when I have free time) Psychedelic trips are taxing on the body and I think I agree with the hypothesis nutrients are underestimated in supporting a healthy mind in these states, from personal experience.