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Psychedelics and mental illness

stuartritchie.substack.com

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Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#101

Post by mountainriver »

hutzlibu wrote: post #29
suction wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue starts with the moniker "shamanic", which does not sound like a place many people would trust their health to.

Well, I would rather say there are probably way too many people, who would totally trust such a place with their whole health, just because of the name and some other esoteric buzzwords like indigenous, ancient wisdom. I do have great respect for "real" shamans. But I met way too many fake ones, handing out horrible and dangerous advice, while glowing in their self declared illuminative state of higher consciousness.

Yeah its interesting because I've had absolutely game changing experiences with real shamans, and then bad experiences with phony ones. If you find a good one, stick with them

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#102

Post by drooby »

eric4smith wrote: post #52

I’ve always wondered… Do psychedelics cause mental illness or treat mental illness? Our minds are so weird that I have a simple theory that we are all slightly insane in at least some small way. But from what I have observed from friends who take them - they cause them to cope with troubles that are normally difficult to deal with. I guess I’m not brave enough to try them to deal with my own troubles myself right now…

If it is true that the mind is "anti-fragile", in that, appropriately dosed stressors make it stronger, then perhaps its not "or", but "and".

Psychedelics treat mental illness and cause mental illness. They treat it by causing it.

Regardless, mental illness seems highly relative to societal norms. And psychedelics have a way of minimizing the importance of societal norms, so maybe thats a factor too.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#103

Post by leemoore »

One challenge around studying these drugs is efficacy is often linked to expectation. Some speculate 1 key mechanism at work is an amplification of the placebo effect. If this is the case then clearly testing of these drugs using traditional techniques to eliminate the placebo effect will be problematic

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#104

Post by wackget »

cmehdy wrote: post #11

The article makes a lot of good points. I'm a lover of psychedelics, I've apparently managed to be wired in a way that has made every single experience one that I don't regret (whether joyous, superficial, or intricate, unexpected), but I would never make the mistake of assuming my experience directly translates to other people's. Hype, cultists and people thinking in absolute only do a disservice to what we could ex…

Is it true what they say about psychedelics helping people to come to terms with their own mortality and death?

Occasionally I'll get crippling anxiety when I think about how one day I'm going to stop existing and there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop that.

I've heard people say that [some drug] has shown them how to no longer fear death and always wondered about that.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#105

Post by [deleted] »

drooby wrote: post #95
umvi wrote: post #89

Why are these articles so popular with HN? Any article about treating mental illnesses (including depression) with LSD/shrooms/cannabis/[drug] immediately shoots to the top, and I see articles like this every other day at the top of HN. Is it just people wishing for a silver bullet that will cure their mental problems? At any rate, the number of mentally ill people on the internet must be much larger than I am estima…

Did... you read the article? It's highly critical of the hype around psychedelic research and how we have been interpreting it. Anyways. In general, HN is a community that is highly focused on emerging technologies, and undervalued, overlooked or novel solutions. Psychedelics, in my opinion is fertile ground for discovery and just super interesting, so it gets my upvote.

[deleted]

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#106

Post by mountainriver »

lioeters wrote: post #8
sn00tz00t wrote: post #6

https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Mushrooms.shtml Neat list of mushroom trip experiences. Ranging from schizophrenic horror unimagined to unenglishable religious experiences. I've had both experiences in the same trip. I'd hate to be on my deathbed and have a bad trip tho.

> deathbed and have a bad trip Reminds me of a recent report that human sacrifice victims in the Inca empire were given ayahuasca and coca: Ritual drug use during Inca human sacrifices on Ampato mountain (Peru): Results of a toxicological analysis https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23524...

Yeah I visited some of their sacrificial sites out there, weird vibe. They believed the person being sacrificed would be reborn as royalty basically. Parents viewed it as a great honor to have a child sacrificed

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#107

Post by tsimionescu »

banannaise wrote: post #39
kayodelycaon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mental health depends on subjective feelings. This isn’t correct in a lot of places. There is a number of diagnostic criteria. The most important being how much it affects your quality of life. This can be directly measured by looking at how the individual functions day to day. An example is “Was the person able to shower regularly?” (This assumes the person wishes to shower if they have the ability and opportunity…

> The most important being how much it affects your quality of life. This is unique among illnesses. Whether or not I have a cold does not depend on how much it affects my quality of life. Why is mental illness different?

Mostly because we know very little about mental illness, so we are just guessing.

Previously, we had a terrible habit of identifying "mental illness" by external factors, such as meeting social and moral norms (so being gay was considered a mental illness, as was being troublesome).

To avoid this, and given that our understanding of the fundamentals has barely improved, if at all, we have chosen to take an approach that is much less likely to cause extraordinary distress to people who are perfectly well.

Remember that being labeled mentally ill can durectly rob you of your most basic human rights, so this is not a diagnostic that should be easily applied.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#108

Post by mountainriver »

drooby wrote: post #70

I don’t fully understand the issue with blinding. How is it different than trying to double blind talk therapy. Obviously someone knows that they are getting talk therapy, likewise, people obviously know they are getting psychedelics. Yet we are still able to get experimental results supporting talk therapy and no one complains, right?

Also don't get this, how would you ever possibly isolate that? Give them a drug which kinda feels like MDMA? But what about the individualized effects of that drug?

It feels more like they are just looking for a critique. All in all it looks eons better than most SSRIs we prescribe willy nilly every day.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#110

Post by mountainriver »

zwkrt wrote: post #58
eric4smith wrote: post #52

I’ve always wondered… Do psychedelics cause mental illness or treat mental illness? Our minds are so weird that I have a simple theory that we are all slightly insane in at least some small way. But from what I have observed from friends who take them - they cause them to cope with troubles that are normally difficult to deal with. I guess I’m not brave enough to try them to deal with my own troubles myself right now…

My strong-man description of your (I think correct!) feeling is that we all have a very specific lens through with we look at the world. Because all of us have very very limited lenses, but the world is actually quite large and complicated, we each end up with our own neurotic worries that are in a way over-blown when compared with the chaotic complexity of actual reality. Just think of that friend you have that alwa…

Yeah this seems intuitively correct. Psychedelics are largely playing with your beliefs of the world, which is why it can go a lot of ways and is hard to study.

In a good setting with good guides it can be wildly transformative in a positive direction.

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