Psilocybin decreases depression and anxiety in cancer patients (2016)

People in power fear losing their power, and they saw these drugs as a threat.

The weirdest part of the whole thing to me is that they outlawed Cannabis, Psilocybin, and LSD, but kept cocaine legal with a prescription under schedule 2.

I think these risks are more common than was previously discussed on the internet. For a long time reports of very negative experiences were dismissed, laughed at, downplayed, waved away as symptoms of something else, or excused as something positive but mysterious.

It’s becoming more acceptable for people to discuss their negative experiences and not get downvoted or attacked for sharing them.

How do you think psychedelics work? They activate the serotonin 2a receptor. It’s nothing but a different drug that effects serotonin. Except it does it more intensely but like all these drugs that act on receptors they wear off because of something what’s called receptor density changes.

For 70 years, we’ve been trying to manipulate receptors into making people feel good. It’s a losing proposition and it’s time to. We changed our thinking. For instance, if these people do have serotonin deficiencies, which is still possibly the case, what is it? That’s causing these deficiencies? Is it low, zinc, low B6, genetics, infection? There’s so many other things that we know that this could be, but we don’t try it.

What an absolutely asshole statement, which also shows an absolutely profound misunderstanding of suicide prevention and care.

Edit: Core belief of suicide ideation is that hope is gone. This is often (but not always) a perception. There may always be more things to try - but that's irrelevant to the person that is dead because they could not see another way.

EDIT: In the original link it says the placebo group received a much lower dose, so that seems to be one way of doing it.

Epigenetics are weird, but if you are past 35 without symptoms than you should be fine without medication (know several people that weren't as lucky.)

Stay healthy friend =3

They practiced something called guarding their senses where they limited the amount of sensual pleasures they exposed themselves to and this calmed down their mind down to the point where even small things like the taste of ordinary food or having a conversation with a friend felt really satisfying.

Even if the whole world is going to shit, if you desire the happiness and wellbeing of others, as a deep internal orientation, this itself is its own form of happiness which is not subject to anything external. Since this thread already has Buddhist vibes, you don't have to take my word for it and can refer to metta (loving-kindness) as its own practice in addition to mindfulness.

The design you mention is really interesting! Have you seen this done anywhere?

Psylocybin isn’t the most studied because it’s likely to be the most effective drug. It’s because the therapists/grad students can work an 8 hour day instead of providing 12+ hour care for LSD or multi-day treatment with Ibogaine.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06204-3

Besides, he's kind of a closed off person who has a lot of emotions he just avoids dealing with, even more so since the cancer diagnosis. He definitely needs a trip sitter, but he has few friends (certainly none who could do that competently), and no one in our family could fulfill such a role for him. Maybe I could for someone else, but my relationship with him is too complicated for me to do that job well, I think. :-\

To top it off, my dad's cancer is in his liver, even though he never drank much at all for dietary reasons (he was on a strict keto diet for ages). I would worry about the possibility of toxicity with introducing new drugs without medical supervision.

Breakthrough Therapy designation means they can continue to study it with support.

It does not mean it’s approved for depression.

Similar psychedelic therapy claims—for LSD/psilocybin alleviating cancer-related anxiety/depression—have echoed since the 1950s-1970s, yet they've never panned out into practical, scalable clinical therapies. This alone should raise a MASSIVE Bayesian statistics red flag, due to prior discount: with decades of unfulfilled hype. At this point new evidence requires extraordinary proof to update our view.

If such massive effectiveness were true, it would blow what we already have out of the water, and I would be the first to promote it to my patients. But you know what they say when something sounds too good to be true.

Depression is a symptom, and for symptoms there are many causes.

Personalized medicine will fix this but that costs money and time and caring.

While the first 5 week post treatment actually looks impressive, I don't think the treatment arms being essentially the same after 6 months supports the conclusions of the study. Unless we backpedal and say the inactive grouo was microdosing (which has its own baggage...)

EDIT: Never mind, didn't see that it was cubensis - which might take more due to being weaker than regular wild semilanceata.

"[...] psilocybin converts to psilocin in the body at roughly a 1:1 ratio by active effect [...]

Psilocybe cubensis (most common): Contains about 0.5-1.0% psilocybin by dry weight. Since psilocybin converts to psilocin in the body at roughly a 1:1 ratio by active effect, 30mg of psilocin would be equivalent to roughly 3-6 grams of dried P. cubensis.

Psilocybe semilanceata (liberty caps): Much more potent at 1-2% psilocybin content, so you'd need only about 1.5-3 grams dried.

Psilocybe azurescens: Even more potent at 1.5-2.5% psilocybin, requiring roughly 1-2 grams dried.

Important caveats:

- Individual mushrooms within the same species can vary by 3-5x in potency Growing conditions, harvesting time, and drying/storage methods all affect potency

- The caps are typically more potent than stems

- Fresh vs. dried makes a huge difference (fresh mushrooms are ~90% water)"

Have to note that the paper is from 2016; for those really interested, it's good to read recent review papers.

All the recent studies in the last decade have proven it's the opposite. What's your point exactly ?

A Star Trek reference?

I think that’s what people thought when reading negative anecdotes, but I definitely didn’t see a lot of suggestions that we lock people up.

The same thing happened for marijuana: Any mention of negative effects would bring downvotes, scorn, and disbelief pre-legalization. Then once it was legal it became acceptable to say that marijuana wasn’t a panacea and using a lot of it was actually a problem.

Before this change, it was common to read highly upvoted anecdotes here and on Reddit claiming everything from medicinal properties to fixing depression to improving driving skills (an actual claim I saw here and on Reddit multiple times). Now it’s widely acceptable that frequent marijuana use is not good for mental health and wellbeing, but that was once a thing you could not say on the internet.

All this does is create a credible argument that the pro legalization crowd are objectively lying to people and therefore untrustworthy.

Was the setting different? Different people around, different location …

After all learning from mistakes can be just as helpful as the positives in life.