Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin • Hacker News Board

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#121

Post by PragmaticPulp » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

ketamine__ wrote: post #15

presiozo wrote: post #2

I'm kind of hoping this puts the nail in the coffin with researchers trying to separate the psychedelic effects from the anti-depressant effects so that they can turn it into some kinda pill people have to take every day.

I take a prescribed ketamine lozenge every day. I don't experience any psychedelic effects and I'm fine with that.

> I take a prescribed ketamine lozenge every day. I don't experience any psychedelic effects and I'm fine with that.

Many of the researchers and clinics are gravitating toward ketamine regimens that avoid hallucinations entirely, like your current treatment regimen.

Ketamine has some inherent anti-depressant effects that don't depend on hallucinating. Unfortunately, many psychedelic proponents have tried to push the narrative in the opposite direction to emphasize the trip.

It's unrealistic to expect depressed people to routinely go on psychedelic trips to keep their depression at bay. It's also unrealistic to expect people to trip frequently and not have part of the population start to accumulate weird, irrational ideas from their trips.

A medicine that captures the anti-depressant effects without causing a psychedelic trip or really any cognitive distortions at all would be far better than expecting people to trip regularly. I don't understand the aversion to pharmaceutical companies pushing the research in this direction.

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#122

Post by ta1234567890 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

pharke wrote: post #88

kortex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderate does trips aren't for everyone. The HN crew is full of novelty-seeking, curious, open-minded explorers, already drawn to this sort of experience. Your average, vanilla soccer mom who is largely okay with life but struggles with panic attacks because her brain isn't great at damping the amygdala-cortical loop, may not necessarily be ready/interested in a trip through psychedelic space.

I think the answer to that is to slowly increase the dose over a number of sessions. Starting out with microdosing to get used to the body feeling, then getting used to visual disturbances and the altered mental state, and then graduating to a level that can unlock new perspectives on self and the world. This absolutely has to be done by a trained professional with personal experience with the substance and who has a…

> This absolutely has to be done by a trained professional with personal experience with the substance and who has assisted with other guided sessions. It's not going to be a prescription that a doctor can throw at the patient and then check up on in a few weeks time.

That's pretty much how every treatment, for almost anything, should be.

Unfortunately, in most professional services (not just doctors), the people providing the service just have a few "recipes" on how to solve certain types of problems and then they just prescribe that. If your problem doesn't fall into any of their predefined categories, then good luck.

The typical interaction is: you have an initial session/interview where you describe your issue, then they immediately diagnose you (unless they require some additional info - documents/exams), and finally they provide their predefined solution. They never observe you in your daily routine to see what's actually going on, they don't study you to provide a personalized solution.

It's as if programmers would never debug a program, only get told by someone what the issue is and then they provide some library/api/piece of code that deals with what appears to be the issue from the outside.

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#123

Post by joncrane » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #64

joeberon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think that the psychological harm, much like some other drugs, can be underrated. Another example of a drug people see as harmless is cannabis, which can reliably give people (including myself) intense anxiety and panic attacks. It is conjecture on my part but I can't think that it is healthy for your mind to subject yourself to intense feelings of anxiety. These days I steer clear of all drugs except for my S…

Powerful psychoactive substances shouldn't be taken by people who are not mentally 'balanced', meaning just fine, happy with themselves or similar. I know its easy to say in hindsight, many of us tried those things when we didn't think about it, and it worked better for some and less for others. I think the old set & setting has some proper meaning here and can vastly bootstrap the incoming experience. Having a calm,…

It's a paradox, isn't it? What person in their right mind, who's perfectly balanced and stable, would willingly ingest powerful reality-altering substances?

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#124

Post by PragmaticPulp » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #17

deathgrips wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take an anti-depressant pill everyday and it solves your problem, why is that bad? Are you hostile to medication in general?

Daily medication, which must be taken without fail in order to have a normal life, is a liability. It can be lost, stolen, or missed. It must be obtained on a regular basis, and carried around on trips. It can be expensive. It can stop working, from tolerance. It can have unpleasant side effects. A one-time, permanent cure is clearly superior. And your closing sentence was unnecessarily combative.

> A one-time, permanent cure is clearly superior.

No research points to psychedelics being a one-time, permanent cure. That's an extreme misrepresentation of the science.

In fact, the current psychedelic research revolves around a series of intense therapy sessions, a small number of which involve psychedelics. They aren't just giving people psychedelics to take at home and hoping for the best.

And again, no serious researchers are suggesting that depression is cured permanently, let alone with a single ad-hoc dose. This should be common sense, as many people who used psychedelics recreationally still suffer from depression. Indeed, psychedelics can worsen depression for some people.

Properly replicating these psychedelic-assisted therapy sequences is going to be expensive. I'm sure the vast majority of people would prefer a daily pill that has no cognitive distortions.

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#125

Post by specialist » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

josephpmay wrote: post #67

specialist wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rough. I'm sorry you're struggling with the aftermath. My own story may be relevant to you. FWIW: I was really into zen as a kid. Part of my rebellion against Christianity and leaving my church. Once while meditating, I accidentally had a pretty bad trip. (I can describe the actual trip separately.) I was completely unprepared, didn't even know such a thing was possible. It's kicked my ass ever since. From wha…

Wait, you accidentally experienced ego death while meditating as a kid!? That's fascinating If you're willing to share, I would love to hear more. How did you get so deeply into meditation? What was your practice like? What were you doing that got you to such a "bad trip"

I don't know that it was ego death, precisely. I just inferred that from comparing the impact on me with what others reported experiencing. I've heard it also called 'epiphany'.

I was just reading books and pondering. Sci fi, Sagan, Fritjof Capra, Taoism, Zen, some Buddhism. I didn't know any one who knew anything about this stuff.

I started meditating because I was struggling, had a lot time, nothing to do, and was trying to psyche myself up to start working again. I hadn't been diagnosed yet, so didn't know my failings were health related. I thought I just had a bad attitude, was being lazy.

I got pretty good at reaching a trance state. I was stuck on the notion of "no thought". Best I could do was let thoughts float away. So I started my notions of mental exercises. Visualize a sphere. Think of a color and try to see it with my mindseye. Imagine the center of my ego was my sternum and not my head, imagine the world from that perspective. Float above my own body.

So I was just doing my thing, pretending to have an out of body experience, and I slipped into a different state. The idea was really simple. It was like being able to actually internalize a trillion. Or like Fritjof's epiphany of seeing all the grains of sand on the beach.

I had the full impact of how big the universe is and how small I am, the briefness of my lifespan.

It terrified me. I reflexively pulled back, popped out of trance. And then I laid on the bed for a long while, trying to figure if I was back in my room, if I was dreaming, what's real or not.

I came out of it very different worldview. That whole ecological, holistic awareness, everything is connected, and other woo-woo descriptions. Popping that ego-centric bubble for just a moment.

Again, I'm just using other people's words for what best matches my experience. "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him." and all that.

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#126

Post by joncrane » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

raducu wrote: post #69

joeberon wrote: post #6

Totally anecdotal but LSD made my depression significantly worse than improving it in any way. I had two proper trips and had a seizure kind of thing at the start of the second one due to the overwhelming visuals (not experienced anything like that before or since). EDIT: to expand, it made me very questioning of my own consciousness and gave me severe and persistent existential dread and fear of death to the point w…

If you used to be on SSRIs and they worked, then LSD doesn't sound like a good match. I regret not taking psychedelics, but I hallucinated from a large dosage of hashish and had visual disturbances for a couple of days after, so I figured it's better to not mess with other psychedelics. I also got a bad panic attack from a moderate dosage of stimulants(bad idea mixing them) and I could not drink coffee for 2 years, o…

>though it does seem to cause joint pain

Wait, you get this, too? I have searched for answers to this and gotten nothing. I have long suspected that my coffee habits correspond to my joint pain, but I have associated it with many other things in a search for truth. Can you elaborate?

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#127

Post by PragmaticPulp » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #26

varjag wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you hoping for that? Is non-hallucinogenic anti-depressant a bad thing in some way?

The profit motive would clearly prioritize finding an expensive medication that must be taken regularly and indefinitely. Psychedelic research up to now is pointing to small numbers of uses having lasting positive effects. There is a fear that research driven by a profit motive will try to not just not investigate this further but actively gloss over this potential medicine.

> The profit motive would clearly prioritize finding an expensive medication that must be taken regularly and indefinitely.

The idea that pharmaceutical companies are deliberately avoiding one-time treatments is a myth.

If you assume profit is the ultimate motive, there's nothing stopping a pharmaceutical company from charging $10,000 for a long-lasting depression treatment.

It's not like pharmaceutical companies are going to stumble upon a perfect treatment and then decline to patent it.

Also, patents don't last forever. Common SSRI anti-depressants are available for $4-5/month.

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#128

Post by mrxd » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

kortex wrote: post #77

skohan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can turn it into some kinda pill people have to take every day. I feel like this model is a perfect example of how the incentive structure of the pharmaceutical industry runs counter to pursuit of the best outcomes. From what I understand anecdotally, psilocybin taken in moderate doses can have beneficial effects on depression and anxiety which last for weeks or months after the dose. This would be an amazing…

Moderate does trips aren't for everyone. The HN crew is full of novelty-seeking, curious, open-minded explorers, already drawn to this sort of experience. Your average, vanilla soccer mom who is largely okay with life but struggles with panic attacks because her brain isn't great at damping the amygdala-cortical loop, may not necessarily be ready/interested in a trip through psychedelic space.

That’s probably true some of the time, but I think there’s a mode of mental health issues that I’ve experienced personally and seen in others who approach life with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. Basically, my hypothesis is that some people have contradictory impulses of desire and fear of stimulation and calm at the same time. You don’t have two groups of people (novelty-seeking HN crew vs vanilla soccer moms), but one type of person who is both and in conflict with themselves.

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#129

Post by PragmaticPulp » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

new2628 wrote: post #29

varjag wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you hoping for that? Is non-hallucinogenic anti-depressant a bad thing in some way?

Everyone I've known who took such medication have altered their personalities in noticeable (unpleasant) ways. It may be worth it for the person in question, but one should be aware of it.

Selection bias. Plenty of people take SSRIs with positive experience.

They're just not advertising it to the world. People who have bad experiences are much, much more likely to communicate this to other people.

Re: Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin

#130

Post by bluntfang » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

stallmanite wrote: post #108

bluntfang wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Ketamine is not a psychedelic. It's a dissociative.

It doesn’t affect the same receptors as “classic” psychedelics (LSD, DMT, Mescaline) but dissociatives aka dissociative psychedelics are wildly psychedelic at high doses. It seems ludicrous to insist otherwise. Is Salvinorin-A not a psychedelic?

I think you have it a little backwards. IME, psychedelics give dissociative effects along with the psychedelic experience and the dissociative experience is solely dissociative on its own.

I think there's a lot of confusion on what a psychedelic experience is and it gets confused with a hallucinogenic experience, which both classes of substance can offer.