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- Hacker News
- This feels like a case where Betteridge's law of headlines applies, or at least should be presumed. [Recreational Drug] solves [malady] is such a hopeful go to and has recurred countless times.
I've partaken of 'shrooms a number of times: Fun times. I've even grown them (protip - not worth the trouble. It's amazing how something that grows in literal shit is suddenly the most fragile process imaginable when you try your PFTek method, and contamination will always be ruining your process). But people keep trying to make psilocybin a magic solution, and the studies have been extremely weak if not contradictory, and these stories always lean on worthless anecdotes.
by llm_nerd - SciAm really should prefer a headline such as:
Psilocybin opens up new pathways to treating anorexia
by jgalt212 - Here's yet another anecdote of near-zero real value to add to the pile: I treated my severe treatment-resistant depression with ketamine infusions. It's obviously not the same as psilocybin, but I believe the current thinking is that psychoelics and dissociatives both have some positive effect on neuroplasticity, and that sorta checks out in my case. I'd say you need to combine it with some good cognitive behavioral therapy - it seemed to make CBT a lot more effective for me where it failed in the past because my brain was more open to rewiring. I haven't been re-treated in a few years now, but I still feel a lot better.
But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.
by mosburger - Mushrooms have always made me vomit... So treat anorexia with bulimia? Hmmm.by firebot
- by cainxinth
- We hear a lot of psilocybine lately, it cures altsheimer, people in coma awake miraculously. As long as we do not understand the workings, it reminds me of the days when radium or other nuclear substances were the cure for everything.by jhoechtl
- We hear a lot about LLMs lately, they solve reasoning, mimic empathy, and awaken consciousness miraculously. As long as we do not understand the workings of the mind and brain, it reminds me of the days when machine learning or Bitcoin were the cure for everything.by cachius
- I think the main difference is that radium was new and people have been using psychedelics forever.
- It's a drug that makes your neurons more susceptible to forming new connections. Of course it's going to be useful for a lot of brain treatment. In addition, it's highly illegal which means these things didn't get found out a lot sooner.by inigyou
- We don't fully understand the workings because it is (was?) classified as a drug, making research into it a lot more complicated. Thankfully there are charities and organizations that lobbied to make it more researchable.by Cthulhu_
- Sorry, but the answer is almost certainly no. We now have good quality data on psylocybin as a treatment for depression; at best, it's slightly more effective than existing treatments, at the cost of a small but significant increased risk side-effects (primarily severe acute anxiety and psychosis, possibly HPPD). We have less data on other psychedelics and other conditions, but none of it looks spectacular when you take into account the usual biases affecting small trials of novel treatments.
Psychedelics are likely to be a good option for some patients, it's good to have another tool in the armamentarium, but the idea that they're a revolution in psychiatry is simply no longer credible.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39627679/
Disclosure: I have participated in a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and did not see any meaningful benefit.
by jdietrich - This is a treatment that can help people. just because it didn't help you does not mean it's ineffective in totality which is the stance you seem to take.by Taronar
- I attended a presentation at the maps conference in ‘23(?). The presenter said that the effect was not enduring for those on already on a path to recovery. She hypothesized that the body need nourishment and a lot of ancillary support to sustain that kind of neurological change.
(I’ll try to search for it when I have free time)
Psychedelic trips are taxing on the body and I think I agree with the hypothesis nutrients are underestimated in supporting a healthy mind in these states, from personal experience.
by stephenitis - Psychedelics arent that far from turning your brain off and then turning it back on again
but anyone i have met that did Psychedelics more than a few times, permanently changed their brain chemistry in a way that was obvious. clearly they are doing some kind of unraveling that doesnt fully bounce back
by mikert89 - Clearly it impossible to observe brain chemistry by looking at a person.
Psychedelics does however have longterm behavioural effects that are statistically significant and to some extent observable.
Using a definition of brain chemistry that defines brain chemistry at an atomic level you may assert that a change in behavioural patterns reflect a change in brain chemistry. But with such a definition anything that a person experiences does that.
- Why would you want your brain to ravel back up? I've worked at ayahuasca retreats and know many people who do it for a living (who are many of the most grounded people I know). Using these things in a therapeutic manner is a completely different thing than using them recreationally, might as well be a different substance. I'd guess those people who "permanently changed their brain" (whatever that means) were not in a context for actually healing.by temp0826
- I lost a family member to anorexia, and the only thing I really regret is that I didn't suggest that we try psychedelic therapy now that everything else had failed and things looked pretty grim. I mostly blame myself for not pushing the idea. But I am also angry at the war on drugs which has caused all use of psychoactive drugs to be associated with such taboo.
- Psychedelics open your brain up to rewiring in some way, and can be used under direction to treat a lot of things. But of course, people who didn't like the Vietnam War used them recreationally, which is why the US government made them globally illegal.by inigyou
- Drug use changes the way you vote. The people who were running the country during the Vietnam war recognized this and, along with the people who owned industry/media, didn't want that kind of change to go mainstream.by joinjune
- Psychedelics desolve the conceptual prison your mind is in, the government made them illegal because they build those prisons.
Charitably, you could argue a functional society involves some amount of indoctrination into a set of shared beliefs and a large percentage of people losing that indoctrination would destroy society. Could the US function if everyone was a pacifist, anti-capitalist, hippie? I think that was and still is the primary concern.
by an0malous - Every time I see "does {PSYCHEDELIC} cure {AILMENT}" studies, I fear a recreation of the opioid crisis. They need to be studied as a treatment, yes, but people, doctors, and pharmaceuticals will abuse them given the opportunity and lack of oversight.by ASalazarMX
- Anecdata, but an acquaintance of mine struggled with lifelong anorexia. Severe enough that he was hospitalized a few times. With great effort he could cling to the bottom of the "normal BMI" range, but his life was generally ruled by the eating disorder - he couldn't have meals with people, he had to do various exercise rituals.
He was an early participant in one of these psychedelic studies a few years ago. After the first treatment, he said he couldn't really tell if it had any effect. But six months later, he was totally changed - able to function almost normally.
We should exercise our usual amount of skepticism about miracle treatments, but my hope is that his experience can be replicated.
by bbayles - Science generally works on IF Then statements when it comes to treatment, IF you take this drug your blood pressure will increase, IF you exercise more your life expectancy will increase, with mental health issues there very few IF then treatments, there are only if maybe treatments, this is for a slew of reasons such as how we don't really understand it, symptoms can be caused by many different underlying issues, and legal risk of prescribing something that isn't proven effective. That being said, the IF maybe treatments are the only way to treat mental health, Psilocybin falls in this category.by Taronar