Psychedelics and mental illness

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, and how this can lead to mental illness down the line... There's a lot we really don't understand yet fully about these things.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/mJrlu1C.jpg

LSA is naturally occurring in Hawaiian Baby Rose seed. LSD is not naturally occurring anywhere afaik.

> 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.)

It’s pretty easy to record the number of panic attacks or how often the person has suicidal ideation.

ADHD can be measured by asking the individual to preform tests under specific conditions.

Significant changes in psychosis and paranoia can readily be determined with structured interviews.

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.

Personally I think it's valid to consider selection-bias effects in authorship -- in general, things are written by the people who are the most excited about the topic, which leads to there being a bias towards excitement. I don't think it invalidates the research but it feels like a valid point.

I think an interesting observation is that this anti-psychedelics post is written by someone who doesn't even want to try them, so this argument of his also says to treat this blog post with skepticism.

> 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, too. If you’re a strong adherent to the particular kind of diet you’re researching (vegan, Atkins, gluten-free, etc.), Ioannidis argued, you should disclose this at the end of the paper, so readers can be fully informed about how the research was produced.

I find it's common to see forum comments like "we know this researcher is a big advocate of X so this study is bias". I find this critique is usually very shallow and sets an impossible standard.

Where are you you going to find researchers pouring years of their life into researching a subject they have no interest in or opinions of?

If you were studying vegan or Atkins diets for example, it's an ongoing personal choice in your day-to-day life if you're going to switch to/from that diet or not, where either choice could be used to imply bias in your future studies. And after a few years of research, how could the evidence you collect not impact your personal choice? And if it doesn't, what would that say about your belief in your own research?

Researchers are trained to be aware of their biases, to devise experiments that reduce these biases, and peer review helps identify problems here also. Another part of peer review where the media jumps the gun is that other researchers should be able to replicate the studies themselves to check the results - if you become known for producing highly biased research that can't be replicated this is surely going to impact your career (e.g. less citations, less funding, distrust from peers) so there's a very strong incentive to keep this in check?

I think in general, the real problem here is the dysfunctional click-bait approach the media has with scientific reporting (exaggerated, sensationalist, premature, lacking any nuance/caveats/details) and the public's understanding of the scientific method is very broken e.g. the notion that scientists are always changing their minds, little understanding of how to evaluate how strong evidence is before accepting it as true, which includes dismissing everything about a study because they can create a story about one researcher being bias.