Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Psychedelics and mental illness

stuartritchie.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 165 posts

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#51

Post by slibhb »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #49
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…

> 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 happy, not that he thinks "that's just me".

If you want to argue against that, you have to define mental illness from a behavoral or functional perspective which I don't think you've done.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#52

Post by eric4smith »

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.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#53

Post by netizen-936824 »

slibhb wrote: post #51
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

What if the subject doesn't realise they're unhappy because they've never been happy and have nothing to compare against? Your statements seem to assume everyone has the same perspective to measure against, but in reality people's perspective can be radically different

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#54

Post by slibhb »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #53
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…

What if the subject doesn't realise they're unhappy because they've never been happy and have nothing to compare against? Your statements seem to assume everyone has the same perspective to measure against, but in reality people's perspective can be radically different

Like I said, you can make that argument, but then you need to provide a criterion for saying someone is unhappy. That's where behavioralism or functionalism or something similar comes in.

> Your statements seem to assume everyone has the same perspective to measure against, but in reality people's perspective can be radically different

On the contrary, I think people have different perspectives. Two people can be in the exact same situation and their subjective feelings can be radically different.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#55

Post by the_only_law »

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…

I don’t think the brain or the drugs themselves are are simple enough to be reduced to one or the other.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#56

Post by asdff »

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…

IMO the tolerance factor is huge with cannabis. Even for experienced daily smokers if you were to take a few days off, the effects are very noticeably more powerful. When you have zero tolerance, the drug feels like on another planet compared to something more familiar like alcohol. When you have a lot of tolerance, its a comfortable buzz you can be productive on, like a workingman's whisky drunk but without the slop.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#57

Post by cmrdporcupine »

newbamboo wrote: post #46
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…

I agree LSD may be more predictable than mushrooms, but it is also a crazy intense 12 hour voyage that leaves one with at least two days of recovery time after. Vs 4 hours for mushrooms.

Both are extremely "set and setting" sensitive. Take either on a bad mood day with bad weather, a dirty house, and stuff on your mind... and you won't have a good time.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#58

Post by zwkrt »

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…

My strong-man description of your (I think correct!) feeling is that we all have a very specific lens through with we look at the world. Because all of us have very very limited lenses, but the world is actually quite large and complicated, we each end up with our own neurotic worries that are in a way over-blown when compared with the chaotic complexity of actual reality. Just think of that friend you have that always brings up the cost of something, or that person in your life who seems to always bring the conversation to how their political viewpoint would alleviate the problem, or the person who seems to always have a new and exciting reason to not have a kid yet.

Psychedelics just allow us to step out of our rigid framework for a few hours. For people with flexible/creative minds it might not be such a big deal as they are used to looking at reality and asking "but what if it were this way...", but lots of us have rather rigid conceptions of reality. Taking mushrooms and realizing that most of our worries are 'made up' in the sense that they don't relate to our basic needs can be eye opening.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#59

Post by kayodelycaon »

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?

The symptoms of a mental illness can overlap with normal variations of personality. It is very important to note this is overlap, *not* a spectrum!

A person’s baseline can be altered by mental illness but not severely enough to be indistinguishable from a personality difference. Telling the two apart is damn near impossible.

Since we don’t have blood tests, we cannot tell the difference. So we need to fall back on want little objective criteria can be found.

Behavioral criteria can be skewed due to environment. An active kid who wants to run around isn’t going to do well being stuck in a classroom for six hours. A curious kid with ADHD, who would otherwise be a good student also won’t do well because they can’t stay on task. These look identical. (This is why ADHD is both over and under diagnosed.)

This results in family history and quality of life being more objective than self-reported feelings.

Re: Psychedelics and mental illness

#60

Post by supertofu »

asdff wrote: post #56
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…

IMO the tolerance factor is huge with cannabis. Even for experienced daily smokers if you were to take a few days off, the effects are very noticeably more powerful. When you have zero tolerance, the drug feels like on another planet compared to something more familiar like alcohol. When you have a lot of tolerance, its a comfortable buzz you can be productive on, like a workingman's whisky drunk but without the slop…

This is an anecdotal and slightly off topic response to your note on cannabis tolerance. I am a frequent cannabis user and have been for a long time. While I no longer use psychoactive cannabis regularly (not in a fully legal state anymore) but I do use CBD, which purports to be non-psychoactive and, by law, has THC delta-9 levels of below 0.3%.

What I find fascinating is that CBD absolutely has a psychoactive effect on me. I suspect that this is because of my prolific use of typical cannabis. The components of CBD must tickle the same pathways that are so accustomed to psychoactive cannabis.

The result is that I often get reasonably high from CBD hemp and CBD tinctures.

A high tolerance for cannabis seems to create a stronger response to CBD, at least in my case!

Post reply on HN