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Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

scientificamerican.com

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#51
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.

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately, I think repeated psychedlic use has deterministic and predictable changes to peoples personalities. its not some "awakening", its a structural change in the brain. i watched many close friends fade away after too much use

Surely, that's dosage dependent and frequency dependent. One per week vs once every three months vs once per year. Low dose vs medium dose vs high dose. Plus, these things are illegal which means that most of the time you are not getting the real but instead pharmacologically similar substances that might have secondary effects. This is way you can't reliably imply a correlation because it is a black market and often…

Pills and white powders get mixed up and adulterated that way, but I think everyone who eats mushrooms and hallucinates ate the right mushrooms. LSD is sometimes but rarely substituted for other hallucinogenic drugs that can be delivered on blotter paper, of which there aren't many.

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#53
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately, I think repeated psychedlic use has deterministic and predictable changes to peoples personalities. its not some "awakening", its a structural change in the brain. i watched many close friends fade away after too much use

Surely, that's dosage dependent and frequency dependent. One per week vs once every three months vs once per year. Low dose vs medium dose vs high dose. Plus, these things are illegal which means that most of the time you are not getting the real but instead pharmacologically similar substances that might have secondary effects. This is way you can't reliably imply a correlation because it is a black market and often…

no these people are deeply tied into the scene

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#55
post #3

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.

I think the main difference is that radium was new and people have been using psychedelics forever.

Yeah exactly, such "comparison is my passion" vibes from parent comment given radium was not used for ritualistic practices for thousands of years before Radium was even discovered

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

unfortunately, I think repeated psychedlic use has deterministic and predictable changes to peoples personalities. its not some "awakening", its a structural change in the brain. i watched many close friends fade away after too much use

maybe they outgrew you.

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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?

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.

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People tend to view these things as "pop the drug, and you're cured" but if you really want to make the most of the neuroplasticity, you need to make a conscious plan ahead of time so that you can guide the trip and focus on the problems you're genuinely facing. The drug won't magically give you the answer but you may reach some more profound general breakthroughs regarding your own behavior, patterns you fall into u…

Yes, for me it felt like the substance facilitates it so you do the mental work and introspection, allowing you the capacity to slow down and think through things, which won't miraculously happen if you aren't in a proper headspace.

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 tr…

Thank you for your service

Re: Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

unfortunately, I think repeated psychedlic use has deterministic and predictable changes to peoples personalities. its not some "awakening", its a structural change in the brain. i watched many close friends fade away after too much use

when you say your friends faded away, do you mean like they stopped being your friends, or like they became zombies? Because those are two very different interpretations
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