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Psychedelics and mental illness

stuartritchie.substack.com

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Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#151

Post by tsol »

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…

Psychedelics are just in with this crowd IMO. Microdosing was a big thing in silicon valley for a while

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#152

Post by int_19h »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #22
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…

It's fun to send this "MAYBE YOU JUST HAVENT TRIED THE RIGHT STRAIN" [1] image to friends who don't like weed because it's a pretty hilarious embodiment of the downright anxiety the stuff engenders in a lot of people. I'm pretty sure it's like a genetic thing. I think I remember hearing something about the COMT gene being potentially affected if you smoke too much too early in life as a teenage stoner or whatever, an…

For most of my life, whenever I say that I hate beer, the stock response is "you just haven't tried the right one" (and no, the actual root cause is that bitter things are much more bitter for me). Humans are hardcoded to project.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#153

Post by int_19h »

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…

One of the effects of psychedelics is that they allow you to perceive, for a while, just how incoherent many of the things we take for granted really are, both about ourselves and about the society around us.

This can be hugely beneficial to figure out the root cause of some mental health issue one suffers, because they often lie in those two areas - mistreatment of oneself, and/or traumas caused by other people's behavior that we're conditioned to treat as normal. But that knowledge is also something that'll nag you ever after, and might make you more politically active, which is its own can of worms in terms of mental health.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#154

Post by int_19h »

nonbirithm wrote: post #131
mountainriver wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

It does stimulate empathy among other things, which is something that's very lacking in politics (meaning genuine empathy, not the virtue signalling performance variety).

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#155

Post by operator-name »

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…

You may find this recently released video facinating as I did: https://youtu.be/2rUV4TAP46U

The idea that cannabis would have inconsistent effects, or the effects of different strains was always a mystery to me until I watched it.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#156

Post by Fnoord »

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…

(Speaking a bit from experience given past drugs use.)

Isn't the same true for stuff like SSRIs? We don't know if/how they are going to affect the patient.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#157

Post by lozenge »

uoaei wrote: post #145
hosh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 muc…

Psychedelic research is heavily biased by people who have tried it. Physics research is heavily biased by people who live in reality. Oncology research is heavily biased by having study participants who have cancer. Am I missing something?

The author, Stuart, dismisses the entire study based on: expectancy bias, and participants being able to tell whether they are in the treatment group or the control group.

What if this were applied to everything? "95% of participants preferred the meal of pizza to the one that was hard tack and water. However, participants might have just had pre-existing bias that pizza was tasty, and they were able to identify whether they were eating pizza. No conclusions can be drawn whether pizza is actually tasty or this is simply a placebo effect caused by the participants' expectations."

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#158

Post by lozenge »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #26
slibhb wrote: post #16

I like the article. With psychedelics, it's clear that much of the excitement comes from people (including scientists) who have used them and found their experiences helpful. That's not science but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Not everything is amenable to clinical study and this doesn't mean we should disregard it. And the issue isn't just psychedelics being hard to study. Mental health is hard to study. An overwei…

> 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 problem is most of these things are not easily and correctly measured by a questionnaire. You need more expertise to get this information out of a patient.

It sounds like you're agreeing. Mental health is subjective feelings. When we want to study it, we reduce it to an objective measure of a few dimensions, like those diagnostic questionnaires. This removes its complexities, but also allows some level of standardisation across studies.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#159

Post by h2odragon »

Fnoord wrote: post #156
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…

(Speaking a bit from experience given past drugs use.) Isn't the same true for stuff like SSRIs? We don't know if/how they are going to affect the patient.

Yes, but talking about that makes one a "science denier" etc.

My wife has a good one: she burns opiates different, so they don't really benefit her. she just gets nausea from them. They've got her down as a "drug seeker" now cuz she refuses them.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#160

Post by Epiphany21 »

slibhb wrote: post #16

I like the article. With psychedelics, it's clear that much of the excitement comes from people (including scientists) who have used them and found their experiences helpful. That's not science but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Not everything is amenable to clinical study and this doesn't mean we should disregard it. And the issue isn't just psychedelics being hard to study. Mental health is hard to study. An overwei…

>That's not science

Why can't it be? Why can't we just start doing studies on people who have already had positive experiences with these drugs? Why is there an assumption that one size has to fit all? The data collected from them would useful as a control group regardless.

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