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The BBC reports on a small trial (12 patients) that used psilocybin to treat "moderate-to-severe, unipolar, treatment-resistant" depression:
A hallucinogenic chemical in magic mushrooms shows promise for people with untreatable depression, a short study on just 12 people hints. Eight patients were no longer depressed after the "mystical and spiritual" experience induced by the drug. The findings, in the Lancet Psychiatry [open, DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(16)30065-7], showed five of the patients were still depression-free after three months.
Experts cautiously welcomed the findings as "promising, but not completely compelling". There have now been calls for the drug to be tested in larger trials.
From the study:
Psilocybin's acute psychedelic effects typically became detectable 30–60 min after dosing, peaked 2–3 h after dosing, and subsided to negligible levels at least 6 h after dosing. Mean self-rated intensity (on a 0–1 scale) was 0·51 (SD 0·36) for the low-dose session and 0·75 (SD 0·27) for the high-dose session. Psilocybin was well tolerated by all of the patients, and no serious or unexpected adverse events occurred. The adverse reactions we noted were transient anxiety during drug onset (all patients), transient confusion or thought disorder (nine patients), mild and transient nausea (four patients), and transient headache (four patients). Relative to baseline, depressive symptoms were markedly reduced 1 week (mean QIDS difference −11·8, 95% CI −9·15 to −14·35, p=0·002, Hedges' g=3·1) and 3 months (−9·2, 95% CI −5·69 to −12·71, p=0·003, Hedges' g=2) after high-dose treatment. Marked and sustained improvements in anxiety and anhedonia were also noted.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday May 18 2016, @06:01PM
Electroshock is something that's not well understood by the public. Judging by TFS (yeah, small sample size) and Wikipedia's ECT article [wikipedia.org], psilocybin appears as effective and has fewer side effects. Side effects of ECT are commonly amnesia and confusion. Contrary to most perceptions, it's not simply electrocuting the patient, and it doesn't cause the patient physical harm or injury (as much as some proponents of it wish). Patients can be put under or given muscle relaxants. Some other things I've read in the past about ECT as a depression treatment indicate that there's a bit of voodoo to it such as whether triangle or sine waves work better and which have fewer side effects.
Simply as pure conjecture, I'd tend to think that psilocybin and ECT may be working along similar mechanisms: scramble parts of the brain to upset established neural patterns reinforcing depression. However, ECT strikes me as the equivalent of "This is your brain. *cracks egg and scrambles it* This is your brain on drugs." It scrambles the whole brain. Psilocybin seems to be more targeted and doesn't require specialized equipment or a trained medical staff to administer (set and setting more of a concern for psilocybin).
I would also like to see more research. I have a feeling that honest, objective, scientific research will prove the existing government propaganda parading as research wrong. If/when the propagandists are proven wrong, I would go so far as to say they have blood on their hands.
As for Hemingway, here's what Wikipedia says:
Ernest Hemingway, American author, committed suicide shortly after ECT at the Mayo Clinic in 1961. He is reported to have said to his biographer, "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient...."
Oh! One other comparison between ECT and psilocybin. ECT has proven worthless at curing heterosexuality. Psilocybin on the other hand....