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"Leon" is a young Brazilian man who has long struggled with depression. He keeps an anonymous blog, in Portuguese, where he describes the challenge of living with a mental illness that affects some 300 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Leon is among the roughly 30 percent of those patients with treatment-resistant depression. Available antidepressant drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors do not alleviate his depressed mood, fatigue, anxiety, low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts.
A new study may offer hope for Leon and others like him.
Our team of Brazilian scientists has conducted the first randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial of ayahuasca – a psychedelic drink made of Amazonian plants. The results, recently published in the journal Psychological Medicine, suggest that ayahuasca can work for hard-to-treat depression.
Source: Amazonian psychedelic may ease severe depression, new study shows
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday July 04 2018, @08:17AM (7 children)
We belong to a race that has clawed our way from dinosaur dung-heaps to stepping on the moon, yet still spends the lions share of its "scientific" output researching more advanced weapons with which to kill others of our own kind in larger numbers and more quickly. If you are a young scientist who wants to help people, your most likely path forward is to develop a new weapon which will kill your fellow men in unprecedented numbers - because that's what gets the funding. Then quietly divert some of the funding to research peaceful applications for your weapons tech. Think about that.
We belong to a race that developed digital computers many decades ago - but has yet to progress past the stage of using them to make mistakes ever more quickly. Instead of developing a solid framework and a set of programs within it which solve our programs and can be guaranteed to do nothing else, we have reinvented the wheel over and over and over again, each time with more layers of indirection, of abstraction, and of monetization; of dehumanization. We've done several times the work needed to progress to the next level here; yet virtually none of it counts towards the goal. As our abilities with hardware have progressed, our abilities with programming have in effect gone negative. Think about that.
We belong to a race that shows every sign of impending still-birth, one primed to eliminate itself before it even leaves the gravity-well, let alone the solar system or the galaxy; and at any rate one set to have a very nasty period of time ahead of it even if it manages to somehow survive the next century. Think about that.
Anyone who lives in such a world, as such a creature, and does not find themselves sometimes thoroughly depressed; such a person would be truly insane.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday July 04 2018, @08:37AM (4 children)
Headline says "ease", not "cure".
There Are 200 Million Fewer Hungry People Than 25 Years Ago [npr.org]
We have made it out of the gravity well. It happened in '69.
Pretty much everything in your comment is a matter of opinion or framed in a "cup half empty" way. But that is what happens when you comment while depressed.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:53AM (2 children)
Yes. Arik put it very well but you're right it's the "cup half empty" view of things. I've heard that so called mind expanding substances could help someone to notice many other possible ways of viewing what's in the cup. So you'd get the "cup half full" but also probably a whole load of things you never would have realised were hiding away inside folds of the cup to begin with! And if you could redefine your own place in it all, that could help too. We get depressed about our external environment because we're a part of that environment and because of how we interact with it and the ways in which we are responsible for it.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by ewk on Wednesday July 04 2018, @01:07PM (1 child)
cup half full... cup half empty...
To me it just seems you guys have too much cup :-)
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 04 2018, @01:47PM
Ah but a bigger cup makes it look like you can take more liquor. No-one knows you only ordered half -- you could have already drunk it!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:49PM
Two individuals briefly slipped, not out of the gravity well, but over the rim and over onto the lunar side of it at least, for a brief time, then they came back. A handful of individuals made that trip after. IIRC no one's even done that since ~72. And no one's gone any further, not even for a brief trip, let alone to settle.
So no, our race has not yet made it out of the gravity well, not in any sense.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bitstream on Wednesday July 04 2018, @08:51AM (1 child)
I think DSM-5 (the manual or shrinks) pretty much diagnose any human condition as sickness. And sickness needs Pharma.. Pr0fit!
Got their core story right there. Besides, most psychmeds is more or less like squirting sausage on a motor and hope it works.. eventually. Hopefully without wrecking it in the process..
Some meds are useful. But they are usually phases out because.. no patents, no profit etc. Also don't miss to see the pattern on who owns Pharma.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 05 2018, @10:56AM
Another point. Drugged population = controlled population.
Happy regardless of slavery setup..