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Psychedelics and mental illness

stuartritchie.substack.com

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Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#41

Post by slibhb »

standardUser wrote: post #35
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…

"Lots of people used LSD in the 60s and 70s" That's an overblown stereotype. The vast, vast majority of people did not use any drugs in that era.

"Lots" is not the same thing as "the vast majority". Millions of people used LSD between '66 and '80.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#42

Post by kayodelycaon »

slibhb wrote: post #32
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…

It's worth it to study these things from a behavoral or functional perspective but that is also very hard. If only because, ultimately, people seek treatment or don't based on subjective feelings. I think there's unavoidably an element of subjectivity here. You can attempt to minimize it but it's always there.

> If only because, ultimately, people seek treatment or don't based on subjective feelings.

Well… yes? You’re not going to seek help for mental illness if you don’t think you have a problem. You’re also not going to enroll in a study, either.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#43

Post by carlob »

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?

Uh? If the cold didn't affect your quality of life we would call it an asymptomatic infection. But active symptoms do affect your quality of life...

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#44

Post by vehementi »

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…

> as I can tell they didn't usher in a new age of love, peace, and tolerance.

Things did improve, but of course how would you attribute it to that, and of course, how would you account for the effectiveness of the counter forces? Just because something didn't succeed completely doesn't mean we can conclude it has no effect, especially if it wasn't actually tried at the suggested scale. We have this problem in Vancouver with opioid addiction and there are some services in place but they are mostly shit and the government's overall plan is direly incomplete. Then people say "Wow, we spent money on harm reduction and still have addicts".

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#45

Post by dwaltrip »

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…

I really hate the mental health questionnaires. They did a poor job of assessing my difficulties when I was in the thick of it (I’m doing much better now). I also found them quite stressful to fill out.

I remember getting scores of “mild anxiety” or “mild depression” and just kind of sitting there confused and somewhat dismayed, thinking… “Why am I having such a hard time? What is actually wrong with me?”

Turns out some of my core issues were difficulty knowing and connecting with my emotional state, constantly trying to meet intense expectations that I believed were necessary regardless of how I was feeling, putting (what I imagined to be) the needs of others above my own needs, and having deep fractures in my sense of self-worth.

Five years ago, I was largely oblivious to all of that. All though some pieces of the puzzle had been slowly coming together for some time.

Some potentially more informative labels for what I’ve been dealing with: C-PTSD, emotional neglect, and / or highly sensitive person.

C-PTSD isn’t even in the frickin DSM! I had taken online questionnaires (the anxiety and depression ones mentioned earlier were from medical professionals) for PTSD. It didn’t really match up, which makes sense. There is less material for C-PTSD compared to PTSD. I did try one or two assessments I found online for c-ptsd and I think I got a score that was very close to the “clinical threshold”. Which was a little helpful. But it took me quite a while to get to that point and I was still confused and uncertain.

All that to say… The ”best in class” assessments, as well as our general ability to classify and understand the mental health difficulties that people experience, are not very good.

We can do much, much better. And doing so would alleviate an immense amount of suffering.

P.S. My advice for anyone who relates to this is to find a good somatic therapist who knows how to work with complex trauma / emotional neglect. It’s very difficult to work through this on your own. I was pretty skeptical about therapy… It took me 4 tries to find a good therapist. The first 3 were not that helpful. The somatic approach is important. If you haven’t found a good therapist, keep looking!

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#46

Post by newbamboo »

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…

Some psychedelics are more unpredictable than others, and incidentally these seem to be the ones that are hyped the most. LSD is much more predictable than mushrooms for instance, and is well researched partially because of that. The seems generally true for synthetic vs naturally occurring substances across the board, though there are plenty of horrible synthetic drugs like bath salts, synthetic weed. Advocates seem favor this as it allows them a no true Scotsman defense. “You didn’t get real ayauasca”, or with cannabis the hand wavey talk of the “entourage effect.” The biggest problem facing psychedelic research are the researchers involved. They have little credibility, almost like that’s their intention.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#47

Post by zafka »

sam2426679 wrote: post #24
lighttower wrote: post #7

The author says > Quite a few psychedelic drugs are naturally-occurring, and have been used for hundreds of years (this doesn’t include synthetic ones like LSD, obviously). LSD occurs naturally in the Ergot mushroom: > The ergot fungus contains a number of highly poisonous and psychoactive alkaloids, including lysergic acid (LSD), which was synthesized from the ergot fungus in 1938 by chemist, Albert Hoffmann [1] Wha…

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

LSA is also found in quite a few Morning Glory seeds "Heavenly blue" is one of the commonly mentioned varieties.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#48

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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?

If you go to a doctor and say "I think I have cold" but then you say you have no symptoms I don't think they are going to take you seriously...

By definition symptoms affect your quality of life.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#49

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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…

> An overweight man with no friends who plays computer games all day is not depressed unless he feels bad about it.

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.

If you talk to sufferers of serious and disruptive mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar with psychotic features, most of them will deny they're ill at all and rationalise their behavior. They'll generally talk about it by saying "well my doctors say..." and suggest that their doctors have been mislead or have misdiagnosed them.

It's much more complicated than it seems. It's all part of the perniciousness of mental illness.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#50

Post by [deleted] »

vehementi wrote: post #44
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…

> as I can tell they didn't usher in a new age of love, peace, and tolerance. Things did improve, but of course how would you attribute it to that, and of course, how would you account for the effectiveness of the counter forces? Just because something didn't succeed completely doesn't mean we can conclude it has no effect, especially if it wasn't actually tried at the suggested scale. We have this problem in Vancouv…

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