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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday October 29 2019, @02:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the fun-with-psychedelics dept.

Submitted via IRC for soylent_red

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the clinical application of classic psychedelics in the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders. Researchers of the University of Zurich have now shown that mindfulness meditation can enhance the positive long-term effects of a single dose of psilocybin, which is found in certain mushrooms.

[...] Researchers at the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich have now for the first time examined the potential synergistic effects of combining mindfulness meditation and psilocybin. The scientists recruited 40 meditation experts who were taking part in a five-day mindfulness retreat. In the double-blind study, the participants were administered either a single dose of psilocybin or a placebo on the fourth day of the group retreat. Using various psychometric and neurocognitive measurements, the team of researchers were able to show that mindfulness meditation increased the positive effects of psilocybin, while counteracting possible dysphoric responses to the psychedelic experience. "Psilocybin markedly increased the incidence and intensity of self-transcendence virtually without inducing any anxiety compared to participants who received the placebo," says first author Lukasz Smigielski, who conducted the study directed by UZH professor of psychiatry Franz Vollenweider.

[...] "Our findings shed light on the interplay between pharmacological and extra-pharmacological factors in psychedelic states of mind," says Vollenweider. "They indicate that mindfulness training enhances the positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin, and can increase empathy and permanently reduce ego-centricity. This opens up new therapeutic avenues, for example for the treatment of depression, which is often accompanied by increased self-focus and social deficits."

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191024075003.htm

Journal Reference: Lukasz Smigielski, Michael Kometer, Milan Scheidegger, Rainer Krähenmann, Theo Huber, Franz X. Vollenweider. Characterization and prediction of acute and sustained response to psychedelic psilocybin in a mindfulness group retreat. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-50612-3


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:19PM

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:19PM (#913406)

    That sentence doesn't actually appear in the actual paper, but is something that the people over at Sciencedaily.com came up with. They do mention something similar in the abstract but not exactly the same thing.

    While I'm not exactly down with the drug induced psychology lingo (it's very far away from my field) I, from reading the paper at a glance, am not certain that that is what they wanted to show primarily. But I can't be entirely sure. I can read parts of it as wanting to show both things --- both that drugs enhance meditation and that the meditation somehow prolongs the positive effects of the drugs (via the 4 month checkup) -- or that meditation might have alleviated potential negative side effects of the drugs. Perhaps more that at the post-drug-4-month-checkup a lot of the involved people seem to have rated the experience highly enjoyable and they had not suffered any ill effects from the drugs. That said perhaps they should also have a had a group of non-meditation experts they pumped with drugs to see if they felt like crap after four months or not. But it's still a highly subjective matter since in the end it all comes down to the quantification of the meditation experts feelings.

    Perhaps we just shouldn't read to much into it. Except to say and note that it apparently did have some kind of "positive" effect at the time they did do drugs and meditate, figure 5 showed more attained this higher state but then at the same time figure 1 seem to indicate that they all came crashing down to the level of the placebo people after just one day. So the supposed four month effect might have been all in their minds, which I guess is the whole point of meditation. But at least they didn't suffer any horrible flashbacks during the time, or whatever the side effects of Psilocybin usage are.

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