An fMRI study has found evidence of a reduction in depressive symptoms after treatment with psilocybin:
A hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms can "reset" the brains of people with untreatable depression, raising hopes of a future treatment, scans suggest.
The small study gave 19 patients a single dose of the psychedelic ingredient psilocybin. Half of patients ceased to be depressed and experienced changes in their brain activity that lasted about five weeks.
However, the team at Imperial College London says people should not self-medicate.
There has been a series of small studies suggesting psilocybin could have a role in depression by acting as a "lubricant for the mind" that allows people to escape a cycle of depressive symptoms. But the precise impact it might be having on brain activity was not known.
Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression: fMRI-measured brain mechanisms (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-13282-7) (DX)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:33AM (18 children)
Of course nobody should ever self-medicate with something as dangerous as *omg* Drugsā¢.
They should wait until big pharma can create a molecule with roughly the same effect that's also highly addictive, unlike psilocybin mushroom, and most importantly, patentable.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:37AM (13 children)
Government types don't want people to have the enlightening experience of psychedelics. They want people to stay stuck in their mental prisons and physically-addicted. That's where big pharma's opioids and readily-available CIA heroin come in.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:15AM (9 children)
I think Government types are mostly concerned with psychedelics infiltrating things like the water supply - with such tiny doses having such dramatic effects, a one gallon jug dumped in a lake could be a serious problem.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:20AM (6 children)
Or things like people on psychedelics freaking out and murdering innocent people... you know shit that normal people are concerned about.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=high%20on%20mushrooms%20kills [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:32AM (4 children)
Oh, hey, Reefer Madness [wikipedia.org] style propaganda has been put out on every schedule 1 drug in almost every media channel available.
I think the junkies on Meth, PCP, and desperate to score their next rock of crack/push of H are a bigger concern than LSD users and the like - but, it's all relative, and thanks to propaganda the public's perception has no correlation with reality - but that's what's going to be addressed: the perception of problems.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @06:51AM (2 children)
Yeah it's propaganda. [deadspin.com] Not shit that actually happens. Fake news, huh? Yeah and I'm sure the headline makes it sound a lot worse than it actually was.
You have something missing in your cortex if you thing people should ever be allowed to take shit that makes you do these type of things. Or you could just be deceptively evil.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:05AM
People do this same type of shit on alcohol. Or without drugs because they are just psychotic to begin with.
If there is such a thing as responsible alcohol use, there is responsible mushroom use. Millions have done it without murdering their friends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @09:56AM
Look, let's keep it real, if we really cared about collateral damage we'd do something about guns. But no, that's our precious Freedom(tm) and this is teh bad drugs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @01:29AM
Be careful of not being a self-seeker. A century or so ago, would you have been on the British side in the Opium wars?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday October 15 2017, @09:56AM
Chantix occasionally causes things like that too, but nobody in government seems too concerned about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @11:59AM (1 child)
Won't somebody think of the fish!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:18PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqWSzv7ESJY [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:52PM (2 children)
Psychedelics don't lead to enlightenment. If they did there would have been enough enlightened people that prohibiting them wouldn't have be been necessary.
In truth, they're used in some traditions as part of the work towards enlightenment, not as the whole trip.people that claim otherwise are just using spirituality as an excuse to do what they already wanted to do
What's more, there are other traditions that don't use drugs and outright ban all of them including legal ones not being used for medicinal purposes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @08:14PM
A fair response but:
That was just stupid and illogical. I can't even.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday October 15 2017, @09:23PM
Probably not, but what mushrooms at least do is alter your perception enough so that you see everything with equal importance. Look at your faded jeans, they are actually more made up of white fibers than blue, you are just trained to perceive them as blue. Shadows become as important to your perception as the item casting the shadow. If you think about relationships (people, job,whatever) in your life at the time you'll maybe find you see things for what they are, not what you are trying to believe they are. Lots of little things like that. Hallucinations perhaps are simply your mind trying to reorder these various equalizations of perception into something "acceptable", I remember being briefly startled by a couple odd sights before I realized they were something familiar seen with a different perspective. Perhaps "bad" trips come to those whose perspective of the world is so fixed and important to them that any such reordering is perceived as an attack (or they just take too much) rather than something to experience and learn from, my guess would be that more introspective people would enjoy it more. If you can hold onto these newly equal perspectives you may end up enlightened, whatever that is, most likely though the euphoria from the experience will fade away and you will slip back into your normal ways.
Be nice if one could legally experiment more, as things are I would have no idea how to get this sort of stuff any more.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:13AM (3 children)
Early electro-shock therapy for extreme depression was surprisingly low-tech: 60Hz 120VAC applied directly to the temples. That also performed a kind of "reset" erasing quite a bit of memories. The joke is: you forget that your life sucks, so you're not depressed anymore. Generally, the effects are temporary, people in truly sucky lives, with a comorbid predisposition to depression, will return to their depressed state once they return to their normal day to day routine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:54PM (2 children)
That's not what clinical depression is. Clinically depressed people are depressed no matter what kind of life they have. For example, did Robin Williams' life suck? Hardly!
You are referring to the blues, quite different from depression. Wife left you? The blues. Dog died? The blues. Lost your job? The blues, not depression.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:41PM
The drug companies sure would like you to think that your chronic blues are nothing but a "chemical&bsp;imbalance" that just needs the help of a hormone regulator; you can make a lot more money treating someone for the rest of his life than you can curing him.
What if psychedelics allow for the brain to process depressing thoughts without getting stuck in a useless cycle? Well, that might be a very good thing for a lot of people!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 15 2017, @10:29PM
Clinical depression is defined as a state that impairs your normal daily functioning, regardless of whether your life actually sucks or not.
The people we followed long term in the approval studies, ones who had failed 4 previous medication trials, often really did have sucky lives when you got to know what they were putting up with.
Of course, it's all relative - even if you're Robin Williams you can't always do what you want to do, fix all the problems you want to fix, change all the things you want to change, and fixating on those aspects of life is what often spirals people into a completely ineffective / self-destructive pattern. Our CEO's family members' who committed suicide didn't have Robin Williams' fame pressures, but they did have his level of money and more, and that didn't stop them from spiraling down all the way to successful suicides.
🌻🌻 [google.com]