Psychedelic’s definitely have potential to deal with mental health symptoms like anxiety and depression, I would like to try them again but it’s just so hard to source here
Psychedelics are the reason why i didn’t take my life when i was at my end. I was stripped of my ego and saw the beauty of life and interconnectivity and even though i still battle anxiety and depression, I’m doing better everyday and will never think in such a self destructive way again.
LSD and mushrooms completely changed my whole outlook on life. I became a better version of myself This experience gave me a lot of confidence about my self and my body. A bunch of bad thought / behavior patterns were broken. One of these was pretty bad OCD that made me wash my hands a lot. It gave me a lot of hope that things will be fine, this is the one thing that I heard throughout the trip: Everything is alright. The main reason for the trip was my severe depression and it definitely helped me (although it's not gone). Before all I could do was lay in bed. Now I am trying to rebuild my life one step at a time which wasn't possible before."
This will require a huge shift from pharma to alternative treatments. Bigpharma will continue to do everything to block holistics and psychedelics until they can cash in, but we still need this word to spread. I am a combat vet and have found Zen/Microdosing and live in Ecuador ;) peace
His account of "subjective effects" so affirms my experience! Why is it that hearing someone else articulate from their experience, background, knowledge, etc. what resonates so deeply with me is so affirming?
My own direct experience has been using magic mushrooms to stop Cluster Headache dead in its tracks (and no other treatment can come close). In the case of CH such treatment is finally moving into the mainstream. But what is really interesting to me is the hypothesis that CH, as one of so many illnesses that medical science still cannot explain (let alone find a "cure") - has some psychogenetic rooting. My own experience has been that, after 25 years of episodic CH, once I looked at it as a mind-body issue (I do NOT mean its "all in your head') involving the steady development of...lets call them "faulty"... neuro pathways, which lead to learned pain at the subconscious level etc., and once I recognized this, I stopped getting CHs completely (which is apparently relatively rare among "clusterheads"). Of course, my mind then quickly found another source of chronic, unexplained pain, but that is besides the point here. I know there are sceptics and doubters on the mind-body connection in chronic pain (and/or all the many "syndromes" that have no clear cause or treatment). But I'm pretty convinced that what the mushrooms were doing, and what I was doing in recognizing mind-body factor (i.e. addressing trauma and anxiety, with a therapist) were somehow doing the same things fundamentally, in terms of re-wiring the pathways or having them fire in "better" ways. Thus for me the idea of combining psychedelics with therapy makes perfect sense.
Surely economic viability compared to long term use of pharmacological drugs such as antidepressants and long term stays in hospitals etc and revolving door patients,not to mention long term sickness benefits. Being on prescribed pharma drugs in some cases for life cannot be cheap either..I have no idea abut costings and also do not see psychedelics as a total panacea and think there are definite risks but I welcome this research and it looks very promising. I also think alot more peer supported therapy with people who are trained and who also have gone thorugh those psychedelic expereinces and so know the terrain as it were is could also and may also be a thing,so thereby not always having conventioanlly trained therapists as it were who charge extortionate hourly rates and who also often do not help people even after many many years. I certainly do not think psychedelics are something to mess with and as mentioned the setting and context and quality of support seem to be as important but I think there has to be ways of offering and also supporting people better with mental health than the current model which lets face it has not been working for decades now and has left many people disabled by their experiences in the so called mental health system. Great podcast though,I'd like to think the future of mental health treatment and our understanding of the causes is changing and therefore so are the treatments.
Just to clarify what I said during the episode about expense/payment/etc., I think the for-profit medical model is a disaster and the fact that we even need to raise these questions is dystopic. And I completely agree with Albert that the studied interventions seem to aid entrenched, difficult to treat conditions very quickly all things considered. That said, the simple reality is that paying out of pocket for 16 hours (really 24 hours given that two clinicians are present for the psilocybin session) of one-on-one clinician time is beyond the reach of most people. So if we remain stuck with the current model the question of whether insurance will cover these treatments is an enormous one, and it represents a major block to access.
Perfect explanation. Well balanced and meaningful. I am strongly in favor of evidence-based medical development of these drugs, but at the same time the experiential dimension is at least equally as important and in my view more relevant. In the end, everyone dies alone, and it is a unique experience with common, shared aspects. The same can be said of living, and anything that subjectively improves the quality of living and the process of dying as experienced by a person should not be dismissed, but rather given the utmost attention.
