SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Interesting) by devlux on Wednesday May 18 2016, @10:19PM
To answer your questions...
#1 This is just personal belief.
#2 I don't know, I merely suspect.
So that you can understand where I'm coming from, here is a bit of background.
I was raised as strong church going christian lad and it was instilled in me from my earliest years that we were God's elect, that our church was the one true church and in the year 2000 Jesus Christ himself would come down and whisk us all away while he purged the whole earth with 7 terrible afflictions, plague, fire, famine etc.
Now clearly that did not happen. But well in advance of that, I'd say around 1989, the "one true church" I was raised in began to fall apart and die.
This left me in a crisis of faith. The was no possibility that what I had been taught my whole life could be true. Yet according to every theology on earth, God is truth.
Ergo I came to the conclusion that truth is god, but that no religion could be correct. I decided to adopt the philsophy that should there be some supreme personage, i.e. a deity that should he be seeking for my attention, then he knows exactly how to contact me and at that point I decided to shut out anything which claims to be truth but which cannot be proven. In order that I could listen for only truth.
I divided my world into two buckets. That which is provably true, and that which is merely belief.
Because their are so many disparate and unprovable beliefs, I created a magic bucket to hold them all in, that has infinite capacity and renders anything in it completely weightless.
Whereas truth must bear it's own weight.
Nevertheless I cannot dispute that everyone I know who has had a spiritual experience has been changed by said experience.
Usually in powerful and positive ways.
The drug addict who collapses from an OD in the shower and pleads to god for one final chance to turn their life around, then gets "saved" and makes something positive of their life.
The drug dealer / gang banger who takes a gunshot running from the police, sees something on the operating table, then does his time and comes out of prison and runs a center for at risk youth.
If the examples were limited to the dregs of society I might be able to dismiss it, but that's not the case at all.
Look at Ramanujan nothing particularly rough about his life or upbringing, an entire life spent in devotion to a deity and he redefined mathematics with no formal training in the subject matter.
For a more mundane example look at Gary Busey who was dying from a mixture of drugs, alcohol and cancer despite having a successful acting career, then had a motorcycle accident and came back to become a motivational speaker.
Myself on the other hand. I drowned in a swimming pool. I remember it clearly because it was my 5th birthday. I was underwater nearly 30 minutes. Yet I don't remember a thing about the time I was "dead". Just the clock showing 1:30 (I was proud because I had just figured out how to read a clock the day before, which is what caused me to stop paddling for a minute) and then the number 5 indicating the depth rolling past as I sank to the bottom. I remember struggling for air then pitch black. The next thing I remember is people screaming and crying that I'm dead and then I coughed up a ton of water and asked what the fuss was all about, then I looked at the clock and it was 2:00. I was proud I could read the clock. A whole bunch of fingers and questions. Paramedics etc. I remember the whole incident but not a thing about being dead. For me dead was just dead.
So I'm left with the conclusion now looking back, either I suppressed some profound spiritual experience, or I did not have one.
I consider myself to be extremely open to spirituality and spiritual experience. I believe the divine to be plausibly real, but I am unable to state that there is a deity.
If anything I find as I grow older my view on divinity is beginning to sway into the idea that perhaps we are divinity. Little tiny threads of a much greater tapestry that is spun across all possible worlds at all possible times. Stitching and weaving existence itself into being. What we perceive ourselves to be in this world is sort of a middle point in the stitch. We are neither divine here, nor are we "not quite divine". We can look down and we can see the non-sentience and yet we can and do anthropomorphise them into at least a form a semi-sentience. For example when your computer "acts up" rather than "malfunctions". I don't think that's just a trick of the language.
Yet we can also look up and imagine a sentience much greater than ourselves.
I don't know what this means or that it even has a meaning, but to me at least it feel like there is a meaning.
Sorry if this isn't clear, it isn't always clear to me either, but it's the best words I have to describe what I see in my minds eye.