Once upon a time, I took a (by my standards) pretty large dose of mushrooms while rather depressed (although I did not realize it at the time). The trip itself was rather dark, but the next day, my depression was entirely gone, I was actually happy for the first time in months, and it lasted for quite a while.
The first time I took LSD, my mood was significantly improved for weeks afterwards, even though I don't think I was depressed before. But I did notice that things that normally annoy me tended to annoy me less, and things that made me happy made me happier. Again, this lasted for at least a month.
Considering how often antidepressants tend to be a hit-or-miss game (not to speak of side effects), I am a bit annoyed psychedelics don't get more attention for medical use.
> Considering how often antidepressants tend to be a hit-or-miss game (not to speak of side effects), I am a bit annoyed psychedelics don't get more attention for medical use.
Psychedelics are actually extremely hit-or-miss as well. Anecdotally, psychedelics don't always send someone in the right direction post-trip. If you scroll the comments in any popular psychedelics-for-depression post on Reddit, there are almost as many negative experience reports (including some long-lasting) as there are positive reports. The positive reports receive the bulk of upvotes, though, so you have to scroll down to see them.
Perhaps less anecdotally, any medical professional will see a non-trivial number of people with significant negative effects of psychedelics, from worsening depression to HPPD to existential crises or psychoses. An actual doctor had a great comment on the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30995831
"If you scroll the comments in any popular psychedelics-for-depression post on Reddit, there are almost as many negative experience reports (including some long-lasting) as there are positive reports."
Those trip reports are almost never done in a therapeutic context.
Psychedelic therapy is what research has shown to be very helpful with depression.
When people trip on mushrooms outside of therapy, they often do so:
- with a poor set and setting
- without intention
- with little if any preparation (almost certainly without therapeutic preparation)
- while mixing them with other drugs
- without trusted, experienced trip sitters (much less therapists) there to reassure and help out if need be
- without any integration or therapy afterwards
- without being 100% certain that they were getting real psychedelic mushrooms and not something else (like poisonous mushrooms)
- while believing all sorts of myths about psychedelics (which might be cleared up by trained therapists in the pre-therapy preparation)
So no wonder quite a few people have "bad trips".
Even so, just because someone has a "bad trip" (or difficult/negative experience) doesn't mean that their experience couldn't be of value to them.
It's quite common for people to report that their difficult experiences were actually very valuable to them. My own have been more valuable than my good experiences. The good experiences were fun and all, but the bad ones were incredibly insightful.
When done in a therapeutic context, with trained psychedelic therapists and the right preparation, integration, and followup therapy, there should be many more positive outcomes than in the anecdotal trip reports that you'll read from people tripping casually.
> Those trip reports are almost never done in a therapeutic context.
> Psychedelic therapy is what research has shown to be very helpful with depression.
Exactly right, which is why I mention it. A lot of people are going to read this thread and head off to do some self-experimentation at home, alone. We need to point out that the research and therapy environment is extremely different than DIY.
A McKenna style heroic dose in silent darkness is something I'd recommend any for human, at least once in their life, if they're not at risk of schizophrenia. The experience is profoundly and deeply human.
In a therapeutic context, though, make plans with professionals. Go on a trip to a doctor guided psychedelic session, involve your personal doctors and therapists.
Exploratory, experiential uses of psychedelics aren't appropriate when you're depressed, stressed, or anxious. Psychedelics notoriously kick you into positive feedback loops, which amplify your internal state, sometimes in extreme ways.
Reddit and erowid and tripsit sites aren't rigorous sources of data suitable for science, but they're great for personally understanding the range of possible effects you can experience.
Most doctors have a massive fear of iatrogenic illness. It is understandable - they don't want to be responsible for a problem. So they will allow lots of suffering that cannot be linked to their action. That's the flip side of primum non nocere: suffering is permitted so long as it is not tied to my action.
That's why they opposed cardiac catheterization research and it needed someone who would violate the ethics of the time to invent. Medicine progresses one renegade at a time.
Fortunately, America now has alternatives. We won't suffer for long under the thumb of gatekeepers. The COVID-19 pandemic has moved lots of prescription to online providers who do the bare minimum to diagnose. This has moved power into the hands of patients. For long-tail conditions, this is a superior model to a medical professional.
Since this is necessary to say: I'm not a doctor hater - my parents are both surgeons and almost everyone in the extended family excepting me is in medicine.
EDIT: to vmception, I only said that because there's lots of people who have some sort of grudge against medical professionals for some reason or the other. I don't. I love my family and I'm quite happy in my belief that they're good at it. When I go to a doctor, I usually trust them. Can't reply since rate-limited.
> my parents are both surgeons and almost everyone in the extended family excepting me is in medicine.
I don't think thats necessary to say, I’ve heard the wildest fringe perceptions over the last two years from people who tried to qualify their post the same way, or by mentioning they were a nurse or medical professional.
I think whatever you have to say has enough weight to the people that matter without the disclaimer.
I've had some experience with HPPD but luckily mine went away. My experience ranges from 'oh that is pretty cool to look at' to 'this visual distortion is hurting my ability to focus on an important conversation'. I wish we better understood HPPD.
I'd be curious to see one such thread, but pretty sure you're just talking out your ass. My experience, and recent search, indicates these are usually about 80% positive, and most negative experiences stem from predictable abuse patterns. Of course there are dangers, risks, and bad experiences, but psychedelics might well be qualitatively better for depression than traditional pharmaceuticals.
It was inappropriate language, but I think there is a valid point to be made.
Assuming good faith (ie: not lying) is similar but distinctly different from assuming that someone is speaking truthfully/accurately.
>> Considering how often antidepressants tend to be a hit-or-miss game (not to speak of side effects), I am a bit annoyed psychedelics don't get more attention for medical use.
> Psychedelics are actually extremely hit-or-miss as well. Anecdotally, psychedelics don't always send someone in the right direction post-trip. If you scroll the comments in any popular psychedelics-for-depression post on Reddit, there are almost as many negative experience reports (including some long-lasting) as there are positive reports. The positive reports receive the bulk of upvotes, though, so you have to scroll down to see them.
> Perhaps less anecdotally, any medical professional will see a non-trivial number of people with significant negative effects of psychedelics, from worsening depression to HPPD to existential crises or psychoses. An actual doctor had a great comment on the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30995831
Looking at some of the discrete claims:
> Psychedelics [are actually] [extremely] [hit-or-miss] as well.
This asserts that results (across all instances of usage, not only those that have been studied under formal conditions) are highly random/inconsistent, in fact.
This is highly contrary to my personal experiences, as well as the reading I have done on others' experiences.
(Of course: we should keep in mind that it is unknown what percentage of experiences get posted, whether positive trips are more likely to get posted than negative, etc. - but "both sides" suffer from these problems.)
> Anecdotally, psychedelics don't always send someone in the right direction post-trip.
This true statement notes that they don't always do something positive, but it might be interpreted as being logically supportive of the preceding assertion, even though it is not.
> If you scroll the comments in any popular psychedelics-for-depression post on Reddit, there are almost as many negative experience reports (including some long-lasting) as there are positive reports.
This makes a quantitative claim that is extremely inconsistent with my fairly substantial experiences reading trip reports, which lines up with what /u/rileyphone said:
>> My experience, and recent search, indicates these are usually about 80% positive, and most negative experiences stem from predictable abuse patterns.
-
> The positive reports receive the bulk of upvotes, though, so you have to scroll down to see them.
This seems to imply that the negative trip reports are hard to find, which leads to people having a false impression of what is true. If one reads forums regularly, it seems unlikely that all negative reports were downvoted to oblivion before being seen by regulars, which is inconsistent with my experience on most forum software.
Same experiences. Dropped drinking, started exercising. The LSD dose was much higher and the after effects listed lasted for weeks. However, the mushrooms dosage was lower and while the after effects were similar, it didn’t last as long. Truthfully, I felt a deeper connection with the moment post-LSD.
The LSD trip kind of hurt but after the first few hours, became a solid 6-8 hour span of self reflection. Mushrooms started out chill and evolved into a pretty painful experience before moving into that self reflection stage.
What’s happening during that self reflection stage is best described as a feeling of losing it all. Family, friends, etc. but not so much material items. In that moment, I felt complete loneliness and the fear associated with that loneliness. That fear led to asking what would make me be alone and the answer was my personal ego. It ultimately was a confrontation of personal flaws like narcissism or selfishness. Later in the trip, like 5-8 hours, a feeling of being content with who I am and where I need to improve to not lose the things that truly matter was the result.
I don’t know if I’ll ever try either LSD or mushrooms again but the reset on my personal ego made me value a lot of important things that get backburnered in the grind and stress of life.
> What’s happening during that self reflection stage is best described as a feeling of losing it all.
This reminds me of a passage from Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception:
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes...
What's being described in the study is not self-reflection but serotonergic psychedelics' effects on the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain. For example, escitalopram (Lexapro) may help with self-reflection as well but this study was specifically studying patients with treatment-resistant depression.
Your body feels exhausted but your mind is quite awake. So you’re exhausted and energetic at the same time. Your joints can kind of feel tense if you’re not moving. Walking is enough but then you can also feel overheated pretty easily. Hours 1-4 were largely uncomfortable for me on both.
LSD gave me diarrhea for a solid 4 hours. I think that’s rare but I felt better the next day than I had in years. Probably something to do with gut science but I have nothing to back that up other than my story here.
Fair question and yes. Received from a reliable individual and also personally tested. Even still, I’ll admit that even after testing I Googled symptoms of meth use a few times during the early stages of the trip.
You want to go to sleep but the final paper is due in 8 hours and you haven’t started. You are going to write this paper and nothing stops the paper from being written. As you find yourself at hour 4 or 5, well past any joy of ideation, you realize that you must still finish the paper. Caffeine is pounding in your head and you have wrestled the entire day before, now your brain is thinking at full capacity whether you like it or not.
Oh it’s not a pain that can be seen but have a migraine and say that’s not real or work a hard day and have to walk more.
It’s the hurt of causing your brain to be more active than it ever has. Similar to making someone who plays video games all day hike up a mountain. They’re gonna feel it.
I have a pet hypothesis that "curing" depression is an active endeavor, instead of a passive one. Just like being healthy in general requires at least a moderate regard to nutrition and exercising. No amount of medicine can replace those.
From anecdotal reports, it seems that mushrooms forces one into an active thought space (like dropping someone of at the gym with a program for them to follow), such that one is more likely to engage with ones own thoughts, and is capable of interpreting them, recasting them, accepting or letting them go.
The idea of "rewiring" seems a bit too far, since rewiring cannot be achieved instantly.
Have you been depressed? I can tell from experience that a depressed mind is quite active. In a bad way - constantly hurting itself with dark thoughts and hence reinforcing the bad stuff constantly.
You can't exercise depression away. At least for those situations I am familiar with.
Active is a bad word to describe what I meant. I don't mean to say that a depressed mind is not thinking, just that it may not be able to get itself out of the place it is in without "active" effort (as in therapy - self-therapy or mediated by others). The conundrum is that putting in that effort may not possible because all energy is already spent - as you pointed out.
My suggestion is that psychedelics opens space for these thoughts to be actively dealt with in a productive way.
There is also mounting evidence that depression is a symptom and not a single disease, and the symptom may be originating from multiple causes. This view is supported by the extreme between-subject variability seen in imaging studies [1].
That being the case, maybe not all causes would require an "active" approach, just as maybe not all will respond to psychedelics.
To me the point being made is that there will never be a "cure in a pill" for many things, including depression. Medication may help, but really getting past it will also take active effort.
If you're overweight, you can't get lean and fit by taking a pill (much as many would like it to be true). You will have to make some effort by eating less (actively resisting feelings of hunger) and getting more physically active.
Psychedelics used to be a fairly common treatment for depression and addiction in the 50s before the witch hunt of the US government against what was considered "street drugs". Leary didn't do them any favors either as he was essentially telling everyone to load up on psychedelics, which triggered the usual over the top uninformed response our dear elected officials are so fond of.
A similar situation for me. At the beginning of covid I had been struggling with depression and my own mortality. I took a large dose of psilocybin and during my trip I witnessed myself dying, decomposing, growing into flowers, being pollinated, being reborn, etc. Over and over again. The trip itself was uncomfortable and at times terrifying, but the results were immense and lasting. I came to terms with a lot of what I had been struggling with.
Most of my other experiences have been along similar lines. "Oh hey, you know that uncomfortable thing you have been avoiding thinking about and dealing with? Yeah... Buckle up"
I was effectively in isolation for months due to some health issues (pre covid). I knew I was depressed as well and decided to take some LSD. I've taken it a few times before, never had a bad time. This time, I had. I repeated this a few times with the same results, its gonna be some time before I try it again.
Nobody should just expect psychodelics "cure depression". Its possible they can deepen it in some conditions and we do not really understand it (I hope we will thanks to studies like these). They can help, but the lesson I got from this is they cannot replace support from fellow humans.
Best advice I can give is try to only do this with some good company, outside on a sunny day, and it is highly likely it will be an overwhelmingly positive experience.
> They can help, but the lesson I got from this is they cannot replace support from fellow humans.
I think what's lost in the shuffle is that the phrase "guaranteed to" - all drugs are not guaranteed to work for all people, what matters is what is the likelihood that they can help any given individual, also taking into consideration the associated risks (both of taking and not taking).
I'm just noting this because it would be easy for someone to take away from this conversation the notion that psychedelics are necessarily dangerous, as it is possible that they are as safe or even safer than the thousands of other medications people take, and, some people are in situations where not taking a chance could very well end in death (suicide), especially those who live in areas where assisted trips (legal or not) are not available.
Same for me. What happens during the LSD trip may be relatively insignificant from the therapeutic perspective (not always). It's the aftermath when the drug is out of the really interesting system.
I think annealing is a good metaphor for how the process feels. Psychedelics "break the structure" and "shake up" the brain (the trip). Then there is recovery and recrystallization into a state with less internal stresses.
"What happens during the LSD trip may be relatively insignificant from the therapeutic perspective (not always)"
I doubt that's the case, since we know a lot of subconscious material tends to surface during a trip.. and such material can be very fruitful material for all sorts of therapeutic approaches (except maybe behaviorism and its offspring).
The therapeutic effect from the trip seems to happen in first few times or after taking "heroic dose". If you have taken 5 trips over a 1-2 years, I don't think you get much material. Psychedelics seem to have hard limits of what they can reveal.
I have found that the good after effect comes even from low doses. Microdosing or just relatively low dosing that don't bring anything into surface.
"If you have taken 5 trips over a 1-2 years, I don't think you get much material. Psychedelics seem to have hard limits of what they can reveal."
I've never seen any studies to suggest this is the case. Just anecdotes of people saying they stopped taking them after a while because they weren't learning anything new. But usually such anecdotes have no information on just how they were taking them -- with intention? In a therapeutic context? What did you actually deal with in your life and what didn't you deal with?
I suspect that those that stop getting results aren't integrating what they learn during the trip in to their lives, so they're stuck on repeat.
"I have found that the good after effect comes even from low doses."
The research on microdosing is just getting started. It's quite possible that reported effects from microdosing are due entirely to the placebo effect.
May I ask you about the kind of depression ? was it a slowly creeping in or one triggered by a traumatic change (something that is linked to symbols/memories in ones brain though) ?
If it's the 2nd case I'd be even more curious about the effect of shroom chemicals on the upper layers of the brain.
The first time I took LSD, my mood was significantly improved for weeks afterwards, even though I don't think I was depressed before. But I did notice that things that normally annoy me tended to annoy me less, and things that made me happy made me happier. Again, this lasted for at least a month.
Considering how often antidepressants tend to be a hit-or-miss game (not to speak of side effects), I am a bit annoyed psychedelics don't get more attention for medical use.