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Unfortunately, I will probably never be able to try that for my GAD even if they confirm the positive effects due to stigma surrounding psychoactive drugs! Yay!
Nitpick: you will probably never be able to try it legally.

There are lots of ways you could try LSD tho.

psilocybin is easy to find (even legally, in certain jurisdictions) or cultivate yourself.
Finding it's half the fun! Going out walking by a creek/river on a warm, rainy spring day is kind of an antidepressant in its own right. When you find a patch of Ovoids and pick a few, it's just all the better.
Why? Stigma from whom?

MM120 is seeking FDA approval and there are many more in late stage trials for GAD.

Do you mean it won't be legalized because of stigma, or you personally wouldn't try them because of stigma?

People that think psychedelics are evil are just closed minded people that probably need psychedelics in their life. You probably don't want to pay attention to what they think. If you're genuinely looking for healing there are plenty of people that practice psychedelic assisted therapy around the world that could help you take those first steps. It's underground, but not terribly hard to find with some online searching.

Like, just don't tell anybody. And there are many things you haven't tried, like metabolic ketogenic therapy as an example.
"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

-Bill Hicks

The "surprising way" is by using a derivate of LSD.

I'd argue that the surprise is rather on this: "In clinical trials, a single dose significantly outperformed standard treatments, offering hope to those who have found little relief elsewhere."

That statement is not surprising to anyone who has taken LSD. However I would be surprised if the pharma version works as good as the original.
It seems like every few weeks there's an article on how drugs are amazing hitting the front-page.
It is tragically funny to consider linking quietness of mind with LSD. It is everything but quiet
"Side effects were mild or moderatr and included hallucinations..."

Yeah....

Of course they want to repackage a cheaply synthesized substance at 100-1000x the costs even though the original likely works just as well. That's pharma for you.
You are fabricating "facts" so you can diss the experimenters.

So cool. So edgey.

This reflects a longstanding...essentially conspiracy...to suppress attention to 5HT2A-based neural regulation because it sheds such poor light on SSRIs
I land on "if it helps it helps."

But if you catch me in a get-together setting and we share a beer together, I'd say: "on the one hand you have a well-determined profitable path in the SSRIs, and on the other hand you have people giving LSD doses away for free to each other. One sits well, one doesn't. One has to wonder why the people aren't giving away SSRIs for free if they work so well, right?"

What are you talking about?
I'd argue that the results might not be from the drugs but from the fact that they were heavily monitored by other humans.

It's not the drugs that people with high anxiety need, it's people giving them attention and caring for them.

These experiments need a control where they just take the drug and they don't have medical staff around.

This is exactly what the placebo is for. Same attention and care, no drug.
That's why we have placebos ... and double-blind studies ...
I’d be afraid of a treatment like this where you’re sort of different after one treatment. From experience taking ssris, I took one one that worked so well that I had to stop taking it because it removed stress to the extent that I wouldn’t get to class on time or get my homework done before deadlines. Eventually I found a medicine that worked for me. But, if there’s a “before” vs “after” one shot treatment, you have to hope the new you is the one you want assuming you could be stuck there permanently.
I think curing GAD will mean changing your personality. There's always going to be a before/after you, that's the whole point. The important part is being able to reliably know what the "after you" will be so you can be sure that you want that change to happen.
My experience was similar, with social anxiety suddenly removed it made me a bit of a dick for a while.
Sounds like intended behavior. Instead of keeping working in shitty motivation loop (stress builds up so I will eventually get the stuff done), maybe changing habits a bit around your new me would be a better move, like doing tasks proactively as they come? Triple that if you were being cured for anxiety itself.

You got the chance for a more chill life compared to obviously more stressed one and you threw it away as 'too nice won't bother trying it'.

People underestimate the long-term impact of pharmacological treatments.

But also I get what you mean, even if its not totally rational.

These psychedelic treatments always have substantial limitations, and this is no different;

1. Low volume cohort i.e. 40 participants per dose group

2. Industry sponsored study i.e. MindMed.

3. Think about it; how do you blind psychedelics? It's pretty obvious you're on one when you take it.

Let me guess: Those limitations are ”unscientific” in this context, but when the article is about the dangers of cannabis, they are suddenly okay?
This isn't unscientific per se, it's just low quality science. No conclusions should be drawn. There are known treatments with extremely robust, good science.
I recall an experiment where the control group was given Ritalin, and the participants had presumably tried neither Ritalin or the psychedelic.

I thought it was pretty cool, since the control group will still "feel" something and potentially think "oh this is it" but since the effects of stimulants like Ritalin have been more studied, the researchers can easily account for it.

> It's usually treated with medications like Zoloft and Paxil that boost and stabilize the neurotransmitter serotonin, leading to reduced anxiety and enhanced emotional well-being

How do figure the boost and stabilize part for a patient? Do they take samples of neurotransmitters in the spinal fluid before and after and looking for neurotransmitter concentrations?

There's a divide in the marketing language vs the research language on this topic. Marketing says some handwavy statement like "Zoloft stabilizes serotonin levels", but the research on the topic basically says that we assume that's how it works based on what we know about the brain & the drug, but we don't actually have proof of the mechanism.
I always think for some reason that by now with all advancements in technology they'd eventually get to a point where they start measuring these things so going to doctor like that people might hear "your level were out of balance, here are the numbers" and then they get treatment and now, look, another lab result shows we fixed your levels. But it doesn't seems we are quite there yet.
You can't exactly pull some brain matter out to send to the lab, which makes research very difficult.
At the risk of sounding like an imbecile, can I ask why LSD-25 can't be the pharmaceutical form of LSD?
This will be like legal weed. Assuming it isn't already, the pharma bean counters will turn it into something awful.
...legal weed is awful?

Weed is better, cheaper, safer, and more diverse that it has been in my lifetime (and I happily smoked it while it was illegal also).

Legal weed has been an enormous success (not that there was ever much doubt that it was going to be).

Why can we not just get plain LSD?

I have never heard a reasonable argument.

how about treating the cause for the anxiety?
The psilocybin data tells a similar story. One or two sessions outperforming months of conventional meds. The fact that both LSD and psilocybin work on neuroplasticity probably isn't a coincidence. Hope regulators don't drag their feet on this for another decade.
As someone that has done mushrooms a dozen or so times, I would never ever take them when I’m anxious or depressed. That’s a sure fire way to have a horrible trip. Maybe these are referring to pretty small doses.
Just from personal experience I met a bunch of people who did to many psychedelics and became ego maniacs . I also had my first panic attack on acid. Also read about weird therapists taking advantage of people on psychedelics during therapy. I'm a believer in the use of psychedelic therapy but there really needs to be good protocols in place to protect patients who are very vulnerable. I really wish I could go back in time and see the Czech psychedelic clinic it sounded really cool.