Psilocybin decreases depression and anxiety in cancer patients (2016)

I don't have depression, but the first time I used psychedelics was so emotional helpful that I strongly suggested for depressed friends. I corrected that mistake hours later, after realizing that the risks are low, but life changing if it happens. However, I will never forget that feeling. I've used it again in the following years, but the results faded and it became boring for me.

The point of music during a psychedelic experience is to provide a reference for the passing of time and to help with progression of thoughts. Music guides you through your thoughts, avoiding loops, by providing a changing texture, melody, rythm, and story.

This is on top of the other effects of music, such as emotional effects.

> "get stuck in a loop"

I feel that. Thought loops are scary and it takes someone to recognize them to get you out.

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Was she in placebo group?

That makes a lot of sense. May I ask, why "limiting music"? Was it just a specific type of music, or did music in general have a negative effect?

"Just be a better person" is not real treatment advice lol.

Yes, the one time I've tried mushrooms it was a very unpleasant experience. For weeks I was left feeling like I had done some permanent damage to my mental health. I eventually got past that feeling and there might be a point I try them again, but not without professional guidance. Psilocybin is powerful and not a remotely recreational thing (for me at least.)

Similar. Was over a decade ago. Not easy, but gradually gets better. Sorry to hear about it, it's not something I'd wish on anyone.

I have way too much mental illness in my family to ever consider trying psychedelics.

Psychodelics allow brain to change, but the change is not guaranteed to be positive.

I had this exact same experience. It felt like it opened the door to panic attacks, and I had a few of them in the years that followed.

There's an argument to be made that traditional blinding and placebo techniques are not really relevant for interventions targeting mood or personality. e.g. anything that makes you feel better is an effective mood intervention, by definition. "blinding" in these studies is really just going through the motions to make certain authorities happy.

I would be more interested in polling the close friends and family of study participants and asking them about perceived changes. Instruct participants not to tell anyone about their experience in the study (whether they think they got a drug or how much).

It looks like the study tried to do something like this with "session monitors" who interviewed the participants the day after. They call it double-blind, but it's more like single-blind because the 3rd person assessment is the outcome measure.

Is it even possible to solve the issue of there being no convincing placebo? Would a different hallucinogen like 4-HO-MET work, where the visual experience component is similar, but the visceral effect on consciousness and thought patterns is less pronounced, almost sober like?

Or they could give them a different psychedelic to test the efficacy of psilocybin specifically would be my thought.

"Well everything looks exactly the same to me, and the guy over there is staring at the carpet and whispering about The Fractals, so I think I'm in the control group"

I think this says more about the usual psy drugs we're prescribed and use.

they don't do jack shit.

I think a lot of the negative reception to negative anecdotes were because they were often in the context of legalization. "I know someone who went crazy after trying $foo so we should still lock people into iron cages just for the crime of possessing it." Debate tends to get polarized when doors are being kicked down. Academic studies that are disconnected from culture wars don't tend to provoke such responses, probably because they don't tend to reach the general public in the first place.

I'm sure it's nothing like a panacea, but I've lost count of the times in which getting some context behind a report of a bad experience shows recklessness or just plain old bad decisions.

It also works the other way around, people even talk about how years of therapy didn't help but psilocybin did, and few seem to consider that maybe it was a combination of both? Perhaps all of that therapy that "didn't help" set the stage for something else.

General problem with anecdata I guess.

Psychedelics are basically like shock therapy.

The whole ketamine thing though is even crazier at least with psychedelics there is a forced introspection and very little addictive nature.

>Welcome to year 30 of trying to prove psilocybin works for psychiatric illness.

That is true, but it misses some important nuance: the war on drugs has effectively eliminated the ability for legitimate researchers to do significant research on these criminalized drugs.

For example, for me personally, a mild dose of marijuana is as effective as Zolpidem (Ambien) as a sleep aid, but without the lethargy and mental fog the next morning.

Most people involved in it are aware at some level that this is at best suspect and at worst a deception designed to push legalization. Same as the “health benefits of marijuana” crowd who violently deny the risks, addictive nature, potential to induce schizophrenia (temporary or permanent), tendency to make people lazy and obese, etc.

Legalization has never been a question of “is this good for people?”

FDA approved in 2018 for (treatment-resistant) depression?

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...

?

To better appreciate his point, read “The Control Group Is Out Of Control”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...

Why do you say the effect sizes are inflated?

Thank you for this. I am neither an advocate nor against psychedelic use in therapy but as a person who has consumed these things in the past, my own experiences make me entirely skeptical of people who put on an advocacy hat around any particular chemical. Especially psychedelics like psilocybin which are extremely unpredictable.

When I was a teen a friend gave me an analogy that stuck with me. In much older computers (e.g. C64, Vic-20, etc), they'd behave "interestingly" when you mucked around with the physical circuit board or there was a fault. E.g. if something short circuited because a screw was loose in the board, or a cartridge was halfway in or a chip partially desocketed, etc. Characters would appear in random places, or the machine go through odd loops and so on. And to someone who didn't know how the machine worked, there could be a certain "magic" and a "pattern" to this. But clearly you'd be missing the point if you thought you had "enhanced" the machine this way.

LSD and psilocybin are kind of like that, but for your brain. They short circuit and alter pathways. In ways that can be entertaining but you're entirely missing the point if you try to assign a higher meaning to them.

Our brains are expert pattern-finding machines, and produce causes and reasons even when there are none. For some there may be value in the experience of altering the operation of your brain to get yourself out of a stuck pattern, I guess. But I am not sure the very random stochastic nature of the whole thing is ... medicinal.

Psilocybin is about the 180-degree opposite of a lobotomy, just from a purely mechanical perspective. And it certainly feels that way qualitatively as well.

A patient doesn’t metabolize a lobotomy.

This happens in every depression study: Placebo effect is extremely strong for depression.

You can even collect depressed people, do nothing at all, and when you survey them 6 months later the average scores will improve. This is because depression is, on average, an aberrant condition and the average patient will tend to revert toward the mean.

However, psychedelic studies have a bigger problem: Psychedelics trigger false feelings of amazement and wonder, feeling like something magical has happened. This is like turbo placebo when you tell people that it’s a depression treatment. Maybe that’s a valuable therapeutic effect, or maybe not. There’s a lot to explore, but from all the studies I’ve read I’m not as bullish on mushrooms for depression as the headlines would indicate.

Not defending that - some times just knowing you are trying to better yourself helps make things seem better.

As far as I know antidepressants and even pain killers are the most susceptible to placebo effect.

A good ballpark for dried shrooms is roughly 1% psilocybin by weight of dried shroom, so about 3g. That said, it's going to vary a lot shroom to shroom, genetic to genetics, and species to species. Could be as high as 6g for more mild strains and as low a 1g for something like pan cyans.

That is the problem with clandestine pharmacy by Florida man, as people may get the wrong dose or a mixture of various other poisons like arsenic (see dark web article.)

When ready, please talk with your doctor first. =3

2 to 5 grams dried psilocybe cubensis, per chatgpt.