Posted by Hugh on February 7, 2024, at 12:20:42
In reply to Re: If ECT is the gold standard » Hugh, posted by SLS on February 6, 2024, at 15:16:00
It probably isn't necessary to take large doses of psychedelics to induce neuroplasticity. It's been hypothesized that microdoses, taken regularly, can induce neuroplasticity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01389-z
From the 1960s until the early 2000s, the United States government spent many millions of dollars to propagate the myth that LSD, psilocybin, and especially MDMA can cause permanent damage to the brain.
https://maps.org/research-archive/mdma/studyresponse.html
The following quote is from "What do we know about the risks of psychedelics?" by Bridget Huber.General safety information
In Drugs -- Without the Hot Air, David Nutt calls psychedelics "among the safest drugs we know of." He and a team of experts in addiction, drug policy, psychology and other fields ranked 20 drugs on their harmfulness, using criteria ranging from drug-related mortality (death by overdose) to environmental damage. Overall, psilocybin mushrooms were ranked as the least harmful drug, followed by LSD and the addiction drug buprenorphine, which had the same score. Alcohol was ranked most harmful (more than ten times as harmful as mushrooms or LSD), followed by heroin, then crack. Referring to mushrooms and LSD, Nutt writes:
"It's virtually impossible to die from an overdose of them; they cause no physical harm; and if anything they are anti-addictive, as they cause a sudden tolerance which means that if you immediately take another dose it will probably have very little effect."
Matthias Liechti recently published a paper in Nature that reviews all of the clinical research on LSD that's been done in the past 25 years. In these controlled settings, subjects' experience of LSD was "predominately positive," he writes, and no severe adverse reactions to LSD were reported.
> Hi.
>
> > If the link in my previous post doesn't work, this one should.
> >
> > https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-ever-psilocybin-clinical-trial-for-treatment-of-bipolar-ii-depression-conducted-at-sheppard-pratt-reveals-promising-results-302007957.html
>
> Thanks again.
>
> I am concerned that the efficacy of these psychedelics depends upon the intensity of the dissociative or psychedelic reaction to them. How whacked-out do you have to get in order to receive a clinical improvement? What are the potential permanent or persistent changes in one's psyche that psilocybin produces.
>
>
> - Scott
poster:Hugh
thread:1122317
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20230117/msgs/1122328.html