Very much anecdotal but I can say that psychedelics helped me and several friends a lot with depression. They don't just magically make you feel better - at least not long-term - but they give you the neuroplasticity you need to adjust your internal filters and behaviour. As such, if the purpose is truly healing and recovery, they're best paired with professional therapy, preferably from somebody who's experienced with psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically.
tuesdaynight · 1h ago
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.
Aurornis · 3m ago
> after realizing that the risks are low, but life changing if it happens.
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 common for people to discuss their negative experiences and not get downvoted or attacked for sharing them.
rjxc · 50m ago
What are the low-but-life-changing risks?
causality0 · 36m ago
Some people report personality changes, some as radical as "I found I didn't love my husband anymore."
BiteCode_dev · 6m ago
That's not a risk, that's a realization. You need those.
You may have saved 20 years in an unhappy marriage.
FollowingTheDao · 49m ago
Many people say the first time they use Prozac that it was so helpful they recommended to their friends but then after a while it wore off.
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.
milchek · 3h ago
Anecdotal, but about a year ago my wife participated in a psilocybin trial at a university here who were looking at patients with severe anxiety. It was her last hope after trying therapy, various supplements, as well as dietary and lifestyle changes, etc
It has been life changing for her, but one thing she tells people now is that what also helped was that it was facilitated with a trained therapist there during the session for guidance to make sure she didn’t “get stuck in a loop.” There was also many sessions pre dosing day to optimize the result.
She would highly recommend the treatment and hopes it becomes mainstream soon.
ThinkBeat · 10m ago
If I understand what you wrote correctly,
Your wife did not try any traditional medication to treat her anxiety?
Or is that included under "supplements"?
If so the term "lost hope" is not in my opinion accurate.
I am quite happy that it worked and it is a better alternative than
medication, I certainly do not think that medication is the cure all,
or optimal.
sampl3username · 2h ago
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.
Levitating · 3h ago
> "get stuck in a loop"
I feel that. Thought loops are scary and it takes someone to recognize them to get you out.
AndrewThrowaway · 3h ago
Was she in placebo group?
yesseri · 2h ago
Is it possible to have a placebo group when doing a study on psilocybin? Would participants in the placebo not notice the lack of psychedelic effects?
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.
AndrewThrowaway · 2h ago
Then again what if showing some funky hallucinogenic images/movies would have the same effect on some people? We surely know that people can go crazy (so have psychological effects) in cults and similar settings. What if intense visual/sonic/etc stimulation, visual distortions etc. together with messaging like "it will change your life and cure your anxieties" is the key in this therapy?
nemomarx · 52m ago
That's not so much a placebo as a head to head test of different effects? I think you'd do it in a new study entirely
cassianoleal · 2h ago
> intense visual/sonic/etc stimulation, visual distortions etc. together with messaging like "it will change your life and cure your anxieties" is the key in this therapy?
I sincerely hope this is not at all how any of this works. That sounds like a recipe for paranoia.
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
That isn't how these studies are being done... because yeah, it'd probably confound the results.
OldfieldFund · 1h ago
One way is using niacin in high doses, also known as vitamin B3, as an active placebo to induce a sensation of heat and cause the skin to flush red, which is a typical reaction to tryptamines.
The rest is a regular placebo. It can be a really strong thing when you are feeling hot.
mock-possum · 2h ago
sounds like in that case you’re not testing the efficacy of high versus sober, you’re testing heroic dosing versus micro dosing.
sorcerer-mar · 1h ago
There are also studies that test against placebo. There have been lots and lots of trials on these things with different designs that make different cost/benefit tradeoffs.
A difficult one with psychedelics is as-mentioned: people can easily "break the blind". But if you want to eliminate that problem you can instead do a micro vs macro dose, in which case you're measuring a slightly different thing.
sibeliuss · 18m ago
I have a family member who participated in this trial and their life was utterly transformed, from top to bottom. And it resolved a lot of _other_ unrelated issues in a totally unexpected way.
They describe their participation as the most meaningful event of their lives, second to the birth of their children.
(Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer -- and still kicking nearly 10 years later ;)
mehphp · 2h ago
Anecdotally, I didn’t get severe anxiety and panic attacks until immediately after trying mushrooms. I didn’t even have a bad trip, but the next day something was off and I never truly recovered from that.
kbos87 · 1h ago
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.)
n4r9 · 2h ago
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.
selectodude · 2h ago
I have way too much mental illness in my family to ever consider trying psychedelics.
landl0rd · 1h ago
Ditto. They contributed to long-term trashing the psyche of a relative and we have a really strong history of such issues, stuff like schizophrenia that they can trigger. It’s an under appreciated risk.
Joel_Mckay · 1h ago
In general, even with genetically inherited disorders your chances of developing most conditions drop from 54% to less than 18% in low stress environments.
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
landl0rd · 1h ago
“18% chance you go from depressed to schizophrenic” (in reality this risk is going to vary across a distribution of risk) is still not favorable odds the way I see it.
Joel_Mckay · 1h ago
I have a buddy that ended up in a ward, and still phones from time to time.
The 3rd generation medications keep his cycles under control fairly well. Note, prior to being processed by our medical system. These same a--hole sycophantic dealers would target vulnerable people with BS treatments all the time.
Talk with your doctor, get out for a walk every morning, and try out cognitive behavioral therapy when you are ready. =3
Psychodelics allow brain to change, but the change is not guaranteed to be positive.
Trasmatta · 45m ago
Exactly. This is why I hate it when psychonauts push the "there are no bad trips" angle. It's a lie, and psychedelics can have a long lasting negative impact on the brain in some cases.
immibis · 6m ago
Following the logic, though, it could be undone with a positive experience on psychedelics...
spiralcoaster · 2h ago
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.
phyzix5761 · 1h ago
Anecdotal, but I know someone who suffered major depression and was hospitalized multiple times. Their medication wasn't working and neither was therapy.
They discovered mindfulness meditation and in combination with becoming a more moral person, limiting music, eliminating social media and unwholesome entertainment, and practicing small acts of charity multiple times per week they were able to overcome their depression. It's been almost 15 years since they've had any symptoms.
echelon_musk · 12m ago
Pali terms for anyone interested in the "source code" of the modern Mindfulness Movement that allows you to look up the original Pāli technical terms:
> becoming a more moral person
sīla
> mindfulness
sati
> acts of charity
caga / dana
seneca · 1h ago
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?
phyzix5761 · 58m ago
The way they've explained it is that we listen to music because we have a desire for sensual pleasure. And constantly giving in to desires, in general, creates a dependence where we're never satisfied with what we have. This dissatisfaction, when it becomes strong enough, leads to depression.
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.
echelon_musk · 4m ago
Pali terms for anyone interested in the "source code" of the modern Mindfulness Movement that allows you to look up the original Pāli technical terms:
> guarding their senses
indriyasaṃvara
> calmed down their mind down
samādhi / samatha
mezzie2 · 33m ago
Music I like is a huge dissociative trigger for me. I definitely am 'better' the less I listen to it. Luckily, I'm not usually that fond of music of the type that plays in public areas.
vonneumannstan · 1h ago
"Just be a better person" is not real treatment advice lol.
sctb · 25m ago
You added the "just". Becoming a better person is probably the best thing you can shoot for, though obviously it's not a trivial process and requires significant effort and intention. I mean, what else can you do? You're the one that has to live with yourself.
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.
phyzix5761 · 1h ago
The way they've explained it is that immorality is usually based on desire and aversion. And constantly giving in to these things creates a dependence where we're never satisfied with what we have. Having a structured moral code that allows for observing these mental qualities without giving in to them eventually leads to their reduction because we're breaking the habit pattern. Once your desires and aversions are reduced then you become more satisfied with what you have; ie eliminating depression in their case.
tux3 · 3h ago
The study design does try to mitigate blinding issues and expectancy effects, but with half of the participants reporting past use of hallucinogens, this is not going to be very effective blinding.
A majority of your low dose 1st group likely very much realizes that they're on the inactive dose.
alphazard · 2h ago
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.
sorcerer-mar · 1h ago
The issue with relying on placebo effects is not that they aren't real/don't work (everything you said also applies to e.g. a painkiller), but that they are very context-sensitive. Deploy that drug to an individual or population with a different belief framework or contextual information about the therapy or their condition, and you won't get the desired results.
The design you mention is really interesting! Have you seen this done anywhere?
demiters · 3h ago
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?
hattmall · 1h ago
Or they could give them a different psychedelic to test the efficacy of psilocybin specifically would be my thought.
voidUpdate · 3h ago
"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"
josh-sematic · 2h ago
Of course things get really complicated when this guy is messing with your control group https://xkcd.com/790/
bedane · 3h ago
I think this says more about the usual psy drugs we're prescribed and use.
they don't do jack shit.
voidUpdate · 2h ago
Mine have definitely helped me, as if I miss them for a day I get noticeably worse
Bluestein · 3h ago
The very apparent effect these things have makes you wonder if they do not (somehow) correct for what otherwise could be a built-in deficiency we carry with us, by "design" correcting some sort of built-in imbalance ...
jenkstom · 2h ago
Sorry, but I'd be dead without mine. I'm going to have to disagree with you.
hattmall · 1h ago
The interesting thing with mushrooms is that you could eat a handful, realize you are already dead, and then maybe not need the other meds at all.
Taking psychedelics allowed me to shed years of guilt and my own historic personality to become a more open and grateful person. I think some people have psychologies built on strong foundations that if shaken by psychedelics, cause more harm than good. The people who psychedelics help are those with more suggestible psyches that want change.
jtrn · 2h ago
Welcome to year 30 of trying to prove psilocybin works for psychiatric illness. And still in the pilot stage.
Even taking the data at face value, the trial cannot disentangle the drug effect from expectancy, psychotherapy, and statistical noise. The enormous effect sizes are almost certainly inflated, multiple-comparison error is uncontrolled, and the participant pool is highly self-selected. Until a preregistered, parallel-group, active-placebo, adequately powered study with blinded independent raters replicates these findings, their practical value for routine cancer care remains minimal.
It’s so interesting to see how strong the drive to prove something works is, overriding everything. As a clinical psychologist, I would welcome this kind of therapy if it worked. But this is just sad. It’s just like listening to people claim that ivermectin can cure everything.
Show me one place where this therapy is conducted by people who haven’t "drunk the Kool-Aid," and I’ll be impressed. It’s so frustrating to work with actual patients and see how much these therapies really don’t work in reality. These kinds of biased studies pop up all the time without actually panning out. I’m starting to think that people promoting therapy, giving false hope, and spending money on research like this should be viewed as corrupt and evil.
throwaway330935 · 31m ago
>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.
pas · 2h ago
FDA approved in 2018 for (treatment-resistant) depression?
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?”
Due to a small, self-selected sample, biased toward educated, prior hallucinogen users, inadequate blinding, p-hacking via uncorrected multiple tests on 17+ outcomes, and crossover design flaws that confound long-term effects with intensive therapy.
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.
cmrdporcupine · 2h ago
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.
Aurornis · 1h ago
Anecdotally, I know several people who have tried mushrooms and/or ayahuasca for depression in recent years and their results are nothing like the glowing Internet reports.
The worst case is a friend who became disconnected from reality for a very long time. Went from atheistic to believing in mystical ideas. He thought he was able to see and sense things that we could not, like auras and secret messages. He was getting better last time we checked but he’s hard to get in contact with now. No prior hints of psychosis or family history, just a psychedelic induced mental illness.
The other anecdotes were not as dramatic, but also not as positive or free of side effects as studies like this one would make you think. Multiple stories of extended periods of derealization or anxiety attacks that started after the trip. There are similar comments here throughout this comment section.
There was a time when sharing these negative stories was met with disbelief and downvotes. I think as it’s becoming more common people are realizing that the interaction between psychedelics and depression isn’t as great as it seemed for a few years when they were virtually being promoted by podcasters and social media influencers as a novel cure for depression.
chuckadams · 1h ago
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.
Aurornis · 1h ago
> 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."
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.
landl0rd · 1h ago
Which is a terrible strategy actually. People did the same with marijuana. “Dude it’s medicine lol. Dude it can’t possibly contribute to schizophrenia. Dude weed lmao.”
All this does is create a credible argument that the pro legalization crowd are objectively lying to people and therefore untrustworthy.
Levitz · 1h ago
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.
hattmall · 1h ago
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.
neom · 1h ago
FWIW: Got me sober and I think: kept me sober. Psilocybin is some powerful stuff tho, do recommend if people want to try it for "issues" - you seek someone who knows what they are doing first.
thisismyswamp · 2h ago
To be fair, so did a lobotomy. I believe close attention should be paid to any unintended outcomes of a therapy that the patient themselves would no longer be able to identify due to the nature of the treatment itself.
sebmellen · 2h ago
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.
thisismyswamp · 1h ago
organic systems seek points of equilibrium, with veering too much off in any axis being detrimental
itomato · 1h ago
A patient doesn’t metabolize a lobotomy.
thisismyswamp · 1h ago
they don't have to as there's no ingestion of the therapeutic agent
hellohello911 · 3h ago
Figure 3 is suspicious. Even the placebo arm has much better scores for depression and anxiety from baseline?
Aurornis · 1h ago
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.
FollowingTheDao · 36m ago
Thanks for this. Great insights.
Depression is a symptom, and for symptoms there are many causes.
Personalized medicine will fix this but that costs money and time and caring.
hellohello911 · 1h ago
Setting aside the psychedlic aspect, do you think figure 3 supports the study's conclusion?
Aurornis · 1h ago
If this is your first time reading depression studies then it’s going to be surprising to see both groups improve. This is normal and expected.
The key indicator of efficacy is the difference between groups. In this case there is some difference between groups but it is small.
ketamine · 3h ago
Not defending that - some times just knowing you are trying to better yourself helps make things seem better.
hellohello911 · 3h ago
Sure - but I don't see the authors mention group convergence anywhere.
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...)
AndrewThrowaway · 3h ago
As far as I know antidepressants and even pain killers are the most susceptible to placebo effect.
hellohello911 · 3h ago
Agreed. If I saw an SSRI with those curves I would doubt the efficacy of it. But this might be why I am not in charge of clinical trials. Just a layman taking pot shots.
yewenjie · 2h ago
The study mentions they administered 30 milligrams of psilocybin for 70 kg of body weight. Does anybody know how many grams of dried mushrooms that is equivalent to, roughly?
awithrow · 2h ago
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.
Joel_Mckay · 2h ago
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
adamgordonbell · 2h ago
2 to 5 grams dried psilocybe cubensis, per chatgpt.
TrackerFF · 2h ago
You’ll be tripping balls on that amount. 5g is close to a heroic dose.
EDIT: Never mind, didn't see that it was cubensis - which might take more due to being weaker than regular wild semilanceata.
throwaway330935 · 43m ago
I've been doing some recent research and testing, and here's what I have found: I'm talking about the "Penis Envy" strain, which is quoted as being ~30% more potent than typical. 2g is the edge of where I start getting visual artifacting, and only sometimes. 3g, which I have not tried, was quoted as being towards the upper end of a "theraputic dose", and 6g as the upper end of a recreational dose. Some friends with much more experience consider 1g to be microdosing, FWIW. 0.25g I can't feel at all. .5g I start to feel some euphoria and 1g to 1.5g I start to feel "high" but with no noticeable psychedelics or just minor visual artifacting when I'm reading.
I don't really have anxiety or depression. I do have a fairly high stress family life, wife and kiddos have lots of issues. A few weeks ago I had 2g on an empty stomach on a Sunday and I just listened to music for ~4 hours and it was like I had a vacation. I hadn't enjoyed listening to music so much for 20-30 years. Also, I seem to feel kind of sleepy when I'm trippy, but afterwards I'm wide awake for 4-5 hours. So evening dosing is best avoided.
It's kind of great, for me personally, living in a state where it has been decriminalized.
locallost · 2h ago
I don't know if that's true or false, but I would certainly not trust chatgpt blindly in this case.
mock-possum · 2h ago
And I’d consider about an eighth to be a dose, so that sounds like it’s in the right neighborhood.
throwaway330935 · 57m ago
I learned from an episode of "The Studio" that by "an eighth" you are likely referring to an eighth of an ounce is around 3.5 grams. Dude thought he got really mild shroom laced chocolates ("an eighth of a gram") and much hilarity ensued.
scellus · 2h ago
Here's a rough breakdown from Claude:
"[...] 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.
sampl3username · 2h ago
@grok is this true????
scellus · 2h ago
lol
BlueGh0st · 3h ago
(2016)
clbrmbr · 3h ago
This. I saw the late Roland Griffiths as first author and thought the same.
mauriciokeita · 3h ago
Why is there no more recent studies on that?
Joel_Mckay · 2h ago
Because usually the "euphoria" people feel is their biology failing due to mild poisoning. It is why most people will often upchuck within a few minutes of ingestion.
People may think they are finding enlightenment, but are no different from the local deranged squirrels aggressively howling at passerby after nibbling Amanita in the fall. Apparently the squirrels use the mushroom to help preserve food stores, and it doesn't poison them as severely (often fatal for humans.)
Paul Stamets is a weird dude, but his work contains some profoundly detailed observations.
People need to think about Fungi as closer to animals that don't move on their own, and acknowledge they rapidly adapt genetically to survive. Pretty to photograph, but often far more complex than people like to admit. =3
pjerem · 2h ago
> Because usually the "euphoria" people feel is their biology failing due to mild poisoning.
All the recent studies in the last decade have proven it's the opposite. What's your point exactly ?
jfyi · 1h ago
>Amanita
It's an entirely different class of hallucinogen. I don't have personal experience with it but I have done other dissociative hallucinogens and his take is likely largely true (though I wouldn't argue with someone saying they felt euphoria on it). The problem here is it's the entirely wrong mushroom.
I can assure any doubters that psilocybin on the other hand has legitimate euphoric effects.
Joel_Mckay · 44m ago
The psilocybin containing variety also naturally grow in our yard, and the Amanita is an invasive variety. The "high" people feel is a chemical lobotomy from mild poisoning, and onset of renal failure. Hence why you feel nausea and often erupt out both ends if ingested (especially bad if allergic to a specific fungi.)
I asked for 5 citations not sponsored by dealers that he claimed were available, and my post was flagged. To be fair, I would also accept 3 double-blind medical citations of reasonable quality.
You can't argue with the irrational, as hitting yourself in the head with a brick also causes similar results. lol =3
nilamo · 2h ago
> Paul Stamets is a weird dude
A Star Trek reference?
Joel_Mckay · 2h ago
He was writing practical agricultural mycology books long before he advised the TV show.
First came across his work while modeling hermetic food and waste reclamation options. Paul looked at this area several decades prior, and documented everything in detail. He is weird, but a good scientist worthy of respect. =3
bedane · 3h ago
this stuff cured a lot of problems I had been trying for years to get rid of, overnight. (literally) mind-blowing
bonus, it made my buddy quit drinking
variance, it made my other buddy delusional and stupid. hasn't really recovered
g-mork · 3h ago
it only takes one bad trip (absolutely massive overdose in my case) to understand how badly south things can get. used to be a favourite consumable, haven't touched it in over a decade and extremely unlikely to again following that one experience. it also helped phrase 3 earlier experiences in terms of the new "peak", and made me understand how much incredible danger I had been in at all times even prior to the bad trip
Towaway69 · 3h ago
Did you ever reflect on why you had a bad trip? Did the drug change or did you change?
Was the setting different? Different people around, different location …
After all learning from mistakes can be just as helpful as the positives in life.
bowsamic · 2h ago
For me it did the opposite, made me suicidal when I'd never felt that way before. I didn't even have particularly bad trips or anything.
IceDane · 2h ago
... In patients about to die from cancer. This title is disingenuous.
apwell23 · 3h ago
full title
Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial
- The FDA recognized psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy for treatment-resistant depression: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...
- Some more studies, such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909164/
- More widespread use in medical treatment, such as approval in Australia (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66072427) and limited approval in Switzerland
Very much anecdotal but I can say that psychedelics helped me and several friends a lot with depression. They don't just magically make you feel better - at least not long-term - but they give you the neuroplasticity you need to adjust your internal filters and behaviour. As such, if the purpose is truly healing and recovery, they're best paired with professional therapy, preferably from somebody who's experienced with psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically.
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 common for people to discuss their negative experiences and not get downvoted or attacked for sharing them.
You may have saved 20 years in an unhappy marriage.
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.
It has been life changing for her, but one thing she tells people now is that what also helped was that it was facilitated with a trained therapist there during the session for guidance to make sure she didn’t “get stuck in a loop.” There was also many sessions pre dosing day to optimize the result.
She would highly recommend the treatment and hopes it becomes mainstream soon.
If so the term "lost hope" is not in my opinion accurate.
I am quite happy that it worked and it is a better alternative than medication, I certainly do not think that medication is the cure all, or optimal.
This is on top of the other effects of music, such as emotional effects.
I feel that. Thought loops are scary and it takes someone to recognize them to get you out.
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.
I sincerely hope this is not at all how any of this works. That sounds like a recipe for paranoia.
The rest is a regular placebo. It can be a really strong thing when you are feeling hot.
A difficult one with psychedelics is as-mentioned: people can easily "break the blind". But if you want to eliminate that problem you can instead do a micro vs macro dose, in which case you're measuring a slightly different thing.
They describe their participation as the most meaningful event of their lives, second to the birth of their children.
(Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer -- and still kicking nearly 10 years later ;)
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
The 3rd generation medications keep his cycles under control fairly well. Note, prior to being processed by our medical system. These same a--hole sycophantic dealers would target vulnerable people with BS treatments all the time.
Talk with your doctor, get out for a walk every morning, and try out cognitive behavioral therapy when you are ready. =3
A funny post about what not to do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o
They discovered mindfulness meditation and in combination with becoming a more moral person, limiting music, eliminating social media and unwholesome entertainment, and practicing small acts of charity multiple times per week they were able to overcome their depression. It's been almost 15 years since they've had any symptoms.
> becoming a more moral person
sīla
> mindfulness
sati
> acts of charity
caga / dana
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.
> guarding their senses
indriyasaṃvara
> calmed down their mind down
samādhi / samatha
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.
A majority of your low dose 1st group likely very much realizes that they're on the inactive dose.
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.
The design you mention is really interesting! Have you seen this done anywhere?
they don't do jack shit.
Even taking the data at face value, the trial cannot disentangle the drug effect from expectancy, psychotherapy, and statistical noise. The enormous effect sizes are almost certainly inflated, multiple-comparison error is uncontrolled, and the participant pool is highly self-selected. Until a preregistered, parallel-group, active-placebo, adequately powered study with blinded independent raters replicates these findings, their practical value for routine cancer care remains minimal.
It’s so interesting to see how strong the drive to prove something works is, overriding everything. As a clinical psychologist, I would welcome this kind of therapy if it worked. But this is just sad. It’s just like listening to people claim that ivermectin can cure everything.
Show me one place where this therapy is conducted by people who haven’t "drunk the Kool-Aid," and I’ll be impressed. It’s so frustrating to work with actual patients and see how much these therapies really don’t work in reality. These kinds of biased studies pop up all the time without actually panning out. I’m starting to think that people promoting therapy, giving false hope, and spending money on research like this should be viewed as corrupt and evil.
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.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...
?
Breakthrough Therapy designation means they can continue to study it with support.
It does not mean it’s approved for depression.
Legalization has never been a question of “is this good for people?”
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.
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.
The worst case is a friend who became disconnected from reality for a very long time. Went from atheistic to believing in mystical ideas. He thought he was able to see and sense things that we could not, like auras and secret messages. He was getting better last time we checked but he’s hard to get in contact with now. No prior hints of psychosis or family history, just a psychedelic induced mental illness.
The other anecdotes were not as dramatic, but also not as positive or free of side effects as studies like this one would make you think. Multiple stories of extended periods of derealization or anxiety attacks that started after the trip. There are similar comments here throughout this comment section.
There was a time when sharing these negative stories was met with disbelief and downvotes. I think as it’s becoming more common people are realizing that the interaction between psychedelics and depression isn’t as great as it seemed for a few years when they were virtually being promoted by podcasters and social media influencers as a novel cure for depression.
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.
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.
The whole ketamine thing though is even crazier at least with psychedelics there is a forced introspection and very little addictive nature.
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.
Depression is a symptom, and for symptoms there are many causes.
Personalized medicine will fix this but that costs money and time and caring.
The key indicator of efficacy is the difference between groups. In this case there is some difference between groups but it is small.
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...)
When ready, please talk with your doctor first. =3
EDIT: Never mind, didn't see that it was cubensis - which might take more due to being weaker than regular wild semilanceata.
I don't really have anxiety or depression. I do have a fairly high stress family life, wife and kiddos have lots of issues. A few weeks ago I had 2g on an empty stomach on a Sunday and I just listened to music for ~4 hours and it was like I had a vacation. I hadn't enjoyed listening to music so much for 20-30 years. Also, I seem to feel kind of sleepy when I'm trippy, but afterwards I'm wide awake for 4-5 hours. So evening dosing is best avoided.
It's kind of great, for me personally, living in a state where it has been decriminalized.
"[...] 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.
People may think they are finding enlightenment, but are no different from the local deranged squirrels aggressively howling at passerby after nibbling Amanita in the fall. Apparently the squirrels use the mushroom to help preserve food stores, and it doesn't poison them as severely (often fatal for humans.)
Paul Stamets is a weird dude, but his work contains some profoundly detailed observations.
People need to think about Fungi as closer to animals that don't move on their own, and acknowledge they rapidly adapt genetically to survive. Pretty to photograph, but often far more complex than people like to admit. =3
All the recent studies in the last decade have proven it's the opposite. What's your point exactly ?
It's an entirely different class of hallucinogen. I don't have personal experience with it but I have done other dissociative hallucinogens and his take is likely largely true (though I wouldn't argue with someone saying they felt euphoria on it). The problem here is it's the entirely wrong mushroom.
I can assure any doubters that psilocybin on the other hand has legitimate euphoric effects.
I asked for 5 citations not sponsored by dealers that he claimed were available, and my post was flagged. To be fair, I would also accept 3 double-blind medical citations of reasonable quality.
You can't argue with the irrational, as hitting yourself in the head with a brick also causes similar results. lol =3
A Star Trek reference?
First came across his work while modeling hermetic food and waste reclamation options. Paul looked at this area several decades prior, and documented everything in detail. He is weird, but a good scientist worthy of respect. =3
bonus, it made my buddy quit drinking
variance, it made my other buddy delusional and stupid. hasn't really recovered
Was the setting different? Different people around, different location …
After all learning from mistakes can be just as helpful as the positives in life.