351–360 of 397 posts
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Really? name one.
When you don't know what a psychedelic experience is, any mind altering substance could do. For someone who never got drunk, it could even include alcohol. It is very hard to describe in words what a psychedelic experience is, so without a reference point, it is hard to tell if what you experienced is one or not.
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> Suffered serotonin syndrome for a few days afterwards. What sort of physician diagnosed you with Serotonin Syndrome? What symptoms did you describe to them, and what criteria/evidence did they use to arrive there? Were they able to use differential diagnosis to rule out other conditions? Did you return to the same physician after the symptoms ceased?
Not OP, but the answer is probably what you expected. That being said, as someone prescribed multiple serotenergic drugs concurrently who was knocked on their ass by an errant Vit D dose, the symptoms are pretty obvious (and terrible) and do a good job of convincing one to “not do THAT again”.
In fact, Wikipedia's fatal flaw is that we're forced to take medical claims at face-value when they're made by the subject himself.
Personally, my HCPs are very conservative and reluctant to diagnose -- particularly something they can't treat, and especially adverse, untreatable side effects such as "gynecomastia" or "tardive dyskinesia", etc. (Those could contribute to material grounds for lawsuits!) What physician in their right mind would formally diagnose "Serotonin Syndrome", other than one who's on the payroll of a tort/malpractice attorney?
It's interesting for me to balance a distinct tendency for Somatic Symptom Disorder (also shall never be formally diagnosed) with an impulse for self-knowledge, but an aversion to shitty "treatments" that invariably do more harm than good.
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> we do not know, really, what goes on in there when you take a drug like Psilocybin FYI, same goes for SSRIs. The scientific consensus is that the serotonin deficiency theory of depression was wrong. When SSRIs actually work, we still don’t know why. I’ve had bad trips, too. Very bad, but I still think that psilocybin (in a controlled, supportive setting) is a better bet. My bad trips were all due to being in bad se…
SSRIs barely work. For mild to moderate depression a placebo works similarly or better. Only for severe cases of depression are SSRIs found to be helpful because they surpress all emotion.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
As well as the experience of many people close to me that used SSRIs.
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Notice how you downgraded your confident claim of knowledge to a tentative question . What's going on homie?
It just seemed incredibly stupid so I wanted to make sure I understood correctly what they meant.
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>Therefore, (think about the birthday paradox, doesn't matter how many people in the world, a few dozen in the room with you is an adequate sample), it should not surprise you that statistical significance is achieved through a much smaller sample size than most non-statisticians have intuition for. This response on the supposed the lack of importance of a sample size is completely wrong on just about every claim. Th…
Except that sample size doesn't matter if the set of potential results/measurements of the dependent variable are very large. Someone pointed out that you can demonstrate that alcohol impairs executive functions, balance, etc. with a very small sample size, because the effects would be so large and evident that your statistical power would be. On very large variance, where the results are dichotomous in nature (can a…
An issue with the comment I previously responded to, as I mentioned above, is that they made it out as if a small sample size could be reliable to determine a reliable statistical significance irrespective of the variables under study and tried to prove this by using an absurd analogy between statistical significance and the birthday paradox. The problem with their attempted point was that it didn't even respond to the comment above it, which pointed out that a high statistical significance is not a guarantee of reproducibility, especially with a low sample size.
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TBH there's no way to have a double blind trial of drugs like psilocybin (Scott Alexander has written a little bit about this [1] with respect to controlled trials for MDMA), for any reasonable dose size of psilocybin. Both the patient and the person administering the drug will become very aware, very quickly, if they're in the psilocybin group. 1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/05/is-pharma-research-wor...
This is wrong. You can absolutely dose psylocybin at levels that make a meaningful difference in experience (certainly enough to have an anti-depressant effect) without “tripping” or being in any way impaired. For many adults, this will be around 100-200mg of psilocybin.
There have been studies on microdosing, but it’s also valuable to know what happens at perceptible doses as well. It’s certainly a different experience.
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> The results are based on a grand total of 25 people in the psilocybin group and 21 people in the SSRI group. Statistical significance is based on sample size, and is independent of population size. Let that sink in, doesn't matter if your population is 100K or 8 billion, when you sample you are trying to understand the probabilities in your sample, not in the population. Therefore, (think about the birthday paradox…
This comment is a shining example of the phrase "not even wrong".
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> Psylocybin? Easily? Err.. no? This is from the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment: https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/340001001.pdf Page 19 onward has the charts. What do do we find at the very low end in terms of chronic and acute toxicity? Shrooms (“paddos”) and LSD. It always blows my mind how anti-drug people will do a handwavey gesture to the authority of institutes like the…
> > You have to put effort into making an experience with psylocybin meaningful and helpful. It could go wrong very easily, especially for those who are in a difficult situation or headspace. (Speaking from experience.) > What do do we find at the very low end in terms of chronic and acute toxicity? Shrooms (“paddos”) and LSD. Breaking your mind doesn't count as toxicity. You're not responding to the point you tried…
Unless you either A) already have a predisposition to something like, say, schizophrenia, or B) take stupendous amounts, you’ll be fine. And vis a vis point B, in the older days there were people who did multiple LSD hero doses, without frying their brain.
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> Psylocybin? Easily? Err.. no? This is from the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment: https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/340001001.pdf Page 19 onward has the charts. What do do we find at the very low end in terms of chronic and acute toxicity? Shrooms (“paddos”) and LSD. It always blows my mind how anti-drug people will do a handwavey gesture to the authority of institutes like the…
I'm not saying psylocybin can't be used safely, nor have I made any claims about its relative toxicity or harm relative to other scheduled drugs. If you're arguing anything else, I don't think that report says what you think it says. As for my position, I live in SF, it's decriminalized here, I support that. So there's no need for your rude presumption that I find it generally unsafe. I'm also unfamiliar with the dos…
The report also speaks to personal, social and populational damage.
> I'm also unfamiliar with the dose of SSRIs that would send you into a coma
Its not the SSRI itself, but rather anything that messes with your reuptake can put you into some deep problems. And of course the bog-standard grapefruit+medicine interaction.
> I'm also saying they should not be your first resort.
My point was that if we are talking drugs, yes, treatment with psilocybin should definitely be higher up the list than SSRIs. SSRIs would most likely be for life, daily. Psilocybin could be bi-annually or perhaps even as spot treatment only.
> So there's no need for your rude presumption that I find it generally unsafe.
Apologies for coming off too strong. I just feel that, reasonable as it is, the “let’s all just take a minute” attitude gives too much ammunition to conservative hoohas to stymie these alternate treatments for another few decades. Imagine if marijuana had been more accessible to people like this in the 80’s-10’s:
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Except that sample size doesn't matter if the set of potential results/measurements of the dependent variable are very large. Someone pointed out that you can demonstrate that alcohol impairs executive functions, balance, etc. with a very small sample size, because the effects would be so large and evident that your statistical power would be. On very large variance, where the results are dichotomous in nature (can a…
That other comment on alcohol is by the same guy that made the comment that I responded to here. The same issue there is that result reliability can be influenced by the effect size of the variables being tested, but this still is far from a guarantee that the results will generalize, which is more likely to be an issue with a smaller sample. An issue with the comment I previously responded to, as I mentioned above,…