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Psychedelics and mental illness

stuartritchie.substack.com

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Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#131

Post by nonbirithm »

mountainriver wrote: post #112
ada1981 wrote: post #19

I liked the article and tend to agree there is a lot of pressure to rush psychedleics to the mainstream. This is from a person who used MDMA to heal bipolar / schizophrenia in an underground setting; ran an underground clinic for 3 years; took funding from Dr. Bronner to found a non-profit to decriminalize plant medicine; and was featured in a PBS documentary administering MDMA in an underground setting. Also, the au…

Yeah I have the same impression. The author wouldn't have even written the article if he had tried psychedelics, which are often reported as the most significant experience in peoples lives. This is just reductionist thinking, which can be good to temper things and reduce harm, but the authors bias is pretty readable

I have to wonder how many of our strongly held beliefs can be rendered irrelevant to our own minds by something as mundane as a few micrograms of a chemical.

I also have to wonder how many of those beliefs can only be corrected by something as drastic as a foreign substance acting on it against our will.

In some other universe, the world might become a very different place if the people in power chose to take LSD with an open mind. If so, there would be no "meaning" we could attribute to that radical change except that it was the result of a chemical formula.

It feels like there is something profound about that related to the meaningfulness of all things, but since I haven't taken psychedelics, I guess I am still blind to what it is.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#132

Post by tasty_freeze »

mountainriver wrote: post #108
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.

Give non-alcoholic beer to 100 people who don't drink beer. I don't know the number, but I would be surprised if there weren't at least 10% who reported feeling tipsy and acting in stereotypically drunk ways.

I know that some psychedelic researchers use a suitable dose of niacin as the control arm. The person will experience some flushing and a faster heart rate. If they are new to psychedelics, they don't what psychedelics are supposed to feel like, and so they assume it is the real thing.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#133

Post by perardi »

h2odragon wrote: post #2

I know a lot of cannabis fans (and count myself as one). Very, very few of them acknowledge that cannabis affects people inconsistently; one person's reaction to it can be very different than others. This is inconvenient for calling it a "medicine" so let's just ignore it. Psychedelics are even worse. The same dose of the same drug can produce wildly vary effects in the same person depending on factors we have troubl…

Yup, from experience, you can give the same dose from the same batch of a hallucinogenic drug to people who are broadly similar in terms of age and overall mental health, and you can get a real wild range of results.

(Except maybe ketamine. Ketamine seems pretty consistent, in my anecdotal experience.)

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#134

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #34
seanwilson wrote: post #30

> A few years ago, John Ioannidis (RIP) published an article on conflicts of interest in nutrition research. The conflicts you get in this field, he said, are different from those in, say, Big Pharma-funded trials of new drugs. Not only are there those usual kinds of financial conflicts—some research is paid for by the food industry; nutrition scientists have diet books to sell—but there are “nonfinancial” conflicts,…

> If you become known for producing highly biased research that can't be replicated this is surely going to impact your career so there's a strong incentive to keep this in check? I would strongly say no. If the vast majority of studies in the “soft” sciences are already not reproducible, the risk to a person’s career is minimal. This is before accounting for the pattern of prioritizing short term gains over mitigati…

> If the vast majority of studies in the “soft” sciences are already not reproducible, the risk to a person’s career is minimal.

Let’s not be so arrogant as to say this is isolated to the soft sciences. Soft science is only the most obvious because it’s much harder to run science experiments in the real world. Let’s not forget the fact a computer science PhD student committed suicide because of the degree of academic fakery he was being forced to participate in at an elite institution. That we still have nonsense like unreproduceable ML papers, and physics has multiple examples of older models being wrong and only being held up by the political power of the academics who built their careers off them.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#135

Post by jasonvorhe »

h2odragon wrote: post #2

I know a lot of cannabis fans (and count myself as one). Very, very few of them acknowledge that cannabis affects people inconsistently; one person's reaction to it can be very different than others. This is inconvenient for calling it a "medicine" so let's just ignore it. Psychedelics are even worse. The same dose of the same drug can produce wildly vary effects in the same person depending on factors we have troubl…

All of medicine has a lot of possible side effects depending on the person taking them. Current anti depressants can have severe side effects, whether just until they're properly dosed or not. No one says we should start handing out shrooms to everyone over lunch. But either we allow illegal, unhealthy, corruption-causing criminal markets to flourish with a lot of negative effects on society or we legalize and control it.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#136

Post by listless »

Anecdotal but I did LSD when I was 19 and have been a been a huge consumer of mental health services, antidepressants and anxiety meds ever since. Prior to that horrific incident, I had no issues to speak of.

So we can't say that they can cure it, but they most certainly can cause it. Perhaps the sword needs to cut both ways to be effective?

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#137

Post by mountainriver »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #121
mountainriver wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the reality of the mental health field is they know very little and their methodologies are largely flawed. I've been diagnosed with so many different things based on their "scientific methods" when at the end of the day they are just making rough guesses. I get really turned off by any article that acts like we have a clear understanding of these things. Most things are actually just reactions to trauma.

I definitely agree that scientific understanding mental health is pretty low, but I don't believe the methodologies are flawed. They are the best we have at the moment and they work well enough for the common cases. (Drugs vs therapy is a different problem.) Anyone with a non-trivial case ends up in informed (or poorly-informed) guesses territory. > Most things are actually just reactions to trauma. I don't think thi…

They work okay for some basic cases. My experience and the experience of folks I've talked to they just seem like a charade mostly.

Again anecdotal, but every person I know (including myself) with some sort of mental illness has ultimately just been due to trauma. I'm sure there are other things that happen, but too many therapists jump over that toward some other diagnosis that's just a symptom, then have some specific treament/medication for that DSM-5 diagnosis.

I finally found a therapist that explained this to me and really dug in on what had happened in my life and I finally began processing it and I'm now better. This is after seeing ~7 different therapists and having ~10 diagnosis.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#138

Post by drdec »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #66
slibhb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is entirely wrong. You can suffer from depression (and anxiety) and attribute it to other things, such as personality traits. Many people think "that's just me" with those that know them thinking the same. For less acute forms of depression such as dysthymia, that's common. People can think they're entirely normal and they're just not good at certain things. My post explicitly says the hypothetical man is happ…

I don’t know of any mental illness that isn’t accompanied by intense mental distress

Psychopathy

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#139

Post by BizarroLand »

aw1621107 wrote: post #77
btilly wrote: post #61

I agree with the basic point of the article entirely. However he shows the same kind of bias that he is speaking out again by not discussing the best known branch of such research. And that is MDMA for PTSD. It is best known simply because it is, in fact, demonstrating that it works. The FDA has been repeatedly calling it a "breakthrough therapy" since 2017. It is in multiple phase 3 trials around the world that are…

> Research papers on it, like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3 , are appearing in the top science journal in the world and are no less enthusiastic than a press release. The article actually discusses that very paper : > While we’re here, it’s worth talking about the MAPS MDMA-therapy trial itself. In May 2021, to much media fanfare, they published their Phase III clinical trial in Nature Medicine.…

I think these get a lot of traction because of the interesting proposal that, should this go through, the possibility of a future where when one is feeling a little down or a little bored they might pop into their local Walgreens and get a one-night dose of OTC MDMA to liven up the boredom and sadness of their life.

It's an interesting consideration that I think is part of the excitement and buzz these articles generate. I think many people would experiment with psychedelics and other harder drugs if they knew the safety was very high and that it might correlate to other benefits such as overcoming past emotional blockages or looking forward to tomorrow with brighter eyes.

I said all of that to say that I take these articles with a grain of salt. Some of these well-known drugs may very well have amazing positive benefits for a select group of people experiencing a correlated negative existence, but I strongly doubt that any of them will be a panacea for any of the more universal ills, that is to say, I doubt casual sadness or unhappiness will ever have a treatment in pill form. These treatments will most likely be best reserved for the people who have deep and abiding emotional and psychological scars that traditional holistic approaches ("whole-body", not new age woo woo) would be entirely unable to treat.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#140

Post by hosh »

mountainriver wrote: post #99
aw1621107 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Research papers on it, like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3 , are appearing in the top science journal in the world and are no less enthusiastic than a press release. The article actually discusses that very paper : > While we’re here, it’s worth talking about the MAPS MDMA-therapy trial itself. In May 2021, to much media fanfare, they published their Phase III clinical trial in Nature Medicine.…

It feels like they actually mostly overlook this study in favor of their thesis that psychedelic research is bogus. The Nature critiques are less than convincing, either way they are doing another phase 3 trial so we will know. My guess is if this scientist did psychedelics he wouldn't have written this article.

> My guess is if this scientist did psychedelics he wouldn't have written this article.

That was my thought too, though that also runs into the author's argument that psychedelic research is heavily biased by people who have tried it. On the other hand, I think people who have not tried psychedelics have never experienced how much of what they think of as objective, rational mind is actually fairly fluid, and how much the referential frame of experience informs and influences what we'd consider objectivity.

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