> It won't do anything for you if you just take it in your bedroom with no other changes happening in your life
Interestingly, that's the way many people have reported having their lives changed by it. And that's roughly how it's being used in the latest breakthrough clinical trials (for MDMA and psilocybin). There is a therapy component, but it seems to be play a relatively minor role. https://maps.org/news/multimedia-library/2379-can-a-single-p...
Psilocybin changed my life. It threw off the wet blanket of depression, which allowed my antidepressant to fully do its job. I can’t really explain it, but imagine if your depression was a jacket, and one day you just took it off.
I'm very happy to see this. I've seen people with serious depression issues be completely turned around by a single dose of psilocybin. I'm not sure I would have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but I'm hoping that these studies will become more common and hopefully the efficacy of these treatments will prove out.
There are also similar therapeutic effects from taking mushrooms (psilocybin) or LSD. In these studies and others with MDMA, it appears that the effect lasts over a year.
For any of you HNers out there hesitant to utilizing any of these of substances in your life, remember that they help change your perspective and allow you to look at problems from new angles. I will leave you with a Steve Jobs quote on the topic:
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s? another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
I agree completely and did not mean to imply otherwise (hence my phrasing of "it can help with" rather than "it can cure"). Yes, that research involved combination treatment of psilocybin alongside psychotherapy.
That said, the anecdotal effects I listed are just from personal use without psychotherapy. But of course they're anecdotal :)
I concur with this. Shrooms changed my life. I hate to say this, but it what I imagine taking the red pill might be like. Suddenly I snapped out of the depressive spiral, and saw my surroundings and myself very clearly. It’s very hard to describe. It’s like being severely depressed and miserable, and then all of a sudden a snap of fingers you feel relief. The feeling of depression evaporates. For days or even weeks afterward, waking up with something I look forward to, and I bounded out of bed instead of dreading what was to come. Truly life-changing for me.
There was a quite promising study treating depression with psychedelics. Study precipitants reported 3 months of relief from a single dose. I think it was paired with therapy. One study is hardly conclusive. I'd love to see more of those studies.
Absolutely! I hate being an evangelist for a medication, but this stuff has dramatically changed my life and entirely for the positive, so I'll be sharing my experience and my notes (I kept a journal for the first 6 months of taking the medication -- subjectively logging a variety of emotional variables and a few objective physical ones -- I hate brain drugs, so I was being overly cautious).
Um. No.
Outcomes don’t “vary widely” Studies of Psilocybin treatments for depression show remarkable success rates. In some cases a single dose paired with one session of talk therapy provides relief for 3 months. Compared to the next most viable treatment SSRIs that take 3 weeks to start working and come with danger of opposite effects if the treatment is stopped. Studies using MDMA to treat PTSD work surprisingly well.
The few studies done on using those two drugs in psychiatric settings show phenomenally positive results. I don’t know where you’re getting your information from but it’s not by reading the scientific studies.
As someone with experience with both therapy and psilocybin (while severely depressed), I would guess the psilocybin is the main ingredient in this concoction, and the therapy is just being added to make the study more palatable, the same way medical cannabis use had to precede recreational cannabis use.
Survivor bias alert; as someone who cured themself of clinical, multi-year depression with one, self-administered dose of Psilocybin in 2005... this is real. This can work.
Unclear. I have close family that is having marked and unprecedented success in treating serious depression by microdosing psilocybin below the psychedelic threshold. The result is profound, sustained, and after trying a dozen different approved psychiatrist prescribed drugs to find help can not be a placebo effect as surely any of those would have been just as effective.
I've suffered from this shit for ~20 years, and have damned near zero hope that the government's going to so much as acknowledge the medicinal utility of psilocybin, let alone legalise mushrooms.
But here's a patented little pill that you can take every day for the rest of your life just to feel human.
Yes! Anecdotally, I have known people with similar issues who were helped by mushrooms or mdma. They seem to experience some fundamental change in their perspective. However, that benefit came with one or maybe a few trips, not ongoing consumption.
What an amazing story and not the first time I have heard such results with psilocybin. I really hope and pray that my family member could experience even half of this transformation. To literally continue walking forward while your depression and guilt stay behind!
With all of that in mind and research indicating that you will continue to have this net benefit for up to 6 months, why try something new vs just take another trip?
Also… the dozens of meds is so demoralizing and exhausting. I hear you loud and clear on that front. Not to mention the years that go by while tweaking them… ugh.
> It won't do anything for you if you just take it in your bedroom with no other changes happening in your life
Interestingly, that's the way many people have reported having their lives changed by it. And that's roughly how it's being used in the latest breakthrough clinical trials (for MDMA and psilocybin). There is a therapy component, but it seems to be play a relatively minor role. https://maps.org/news/multimedia-library/2379-can-a-single-p...
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