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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: 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.
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(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.
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