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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: 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.