{"id":72656,"date":"2020-06-17T16:46:09","date_gmt":"2020-06-17T16:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/72656"},"modified":"2020-06-17T16:46:09","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T16:46:09","slug":"how-lsd-and-shrooms-could-help-treat-anxiety-addiction-and-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/72656","title":{"rendered":"How LSD and shrooms could help treat anxiety, addiction and depression"},"content":{"rendered":"It was the most peaceful, joyous, incredible,\nlife changing experience I've ever had in my life. There were scary parts, foreboding\nparts \u2026 I always knew there was beautiful and joy and peace on the other side of it.\nIt was freeing, it was really freeing. This is Alana. She\u2019s describing what she\nfelt after she took a dose of this stuff \u2014 psilocybin. It\u2019s a naturally occurring psychedelic compound,\nthe kind you find in magic mushrooms. But she wasn\u2019t tripping in a dorm room or\nat Woodstock \u2014 it actually wasn\u2019t recreational at all.\nIf anything became unreal or I was feeling nervous or not in touch with reality, I would\nsqueeze his hand and he would squeeze mine back just to reassure me that I was okay and\neverything was alright. It was part of a controlled medical test to\nsee if psychedelics could be useful in helping people quit cigarettes. Alana had been smoking\nfor 37 years before her session with psilocybin, and she hasn\u2019t had a cigarette since. Research on psychedelics for medical use is\npreliminary. Most studies suffer from really small sample sizes.

That\u2019s partly because the\nfederal government lists LSD and psilocybin as Schedule 1 drugs. So researchers face extra\nred tape, and funding is really hard to come by. Vox writer German Lopez reviewed dozens of\nstudies that have been done. He found that psychedelics show promise for treating addiction,\nOCD, anxiety, and in some cases, depression. One small study of 15 smokers found that 80\npercent were able to abstain from smoking for six months after a psilocybin treatment.\nIn a pilot study of 12 advanced cancer patients suffering from end-of-life anxiety, participants\nwho took psilocybin generally showed lower scores on a test of depression.\nAnd smaller study suggested psilocybin treatment could also help people with alcohol dependence\ncut back on their drinking days.

We don\u2019t have all the answers as to what\nexactly these treatments are doing in the brain. But they seem to work by providing\na meaningful, even mystical experience that leads to lasting changes in a patient's life. The issues that I talked about, or thought about, or went into during my experience were transformative in the sense that I got to look at them through a different lens. I know this sounds weird, I feel like I have more connections in my brain that I couldn't\naccess before That feeling that Alana is describing is actually\npretty spot-on. When you take LSD your brain looks something\nlike this. You can actually see a higher degree of connectivity\nbetween various parts of the brain, it\u2019s not limited to the visual cortex.

This communication inside the brain helps explain visual hallucinations \u2014 and the researchers argue that it could\nalso explain why psychedelics can help people overcome serious mental issues.\nThey wrote that you can think of psychiatric disorders as the brain being \u201centrenched\nin pathology.\u201d Harmful patterns become automated and hard to change, and that\u2019s what can make\nthings like anxiety, addiction and depression very hard to treat. That\u2019s Albert Garcia-Romeu, he\u2019s a Johns Hopkins researcher who worked on studies of\nof psilocybin and smoking addiction, like the one that Alana's involved with. He says that when participants take psychedelics, One of the big remaining questions here is\nhow long these benefits actually last after just the one-time treatment.\nA review of research on LSD-assisted psychotherapy and alcoholism found no statistically significant\nbenefits after 12 months. And a recent study on psilocybin and depression\nfound that benefits significantly dropped off after three months. And of course are some big risks to using\npsychedelic drugs. It\u2019s hard to predict a patient\u2019s reaction\nand some might actually endanger themselves.

Those predisposed to psychotic conditions\nare especially at risk for having a traumatic experience while on the drug.\nIt\u2019s difficult to draw solid conclusions from the existing studies.\nBut there\u2019s more than enough promise here to merit further research and further funding\nfor that research. As Matthew Johnson of Johns Hopkins said,\n"These are among the most debilitating and costly disorders known to humankind.\u201d For\nsome people, no existing treatments help. But psychedelics might. One thing you might still be wondering is why so much of this research is so new, when we've known when we've known about psychedelics for thousands of years. Well since these drugs are so old, they can't be patented, which means that pharmaceutical companies don't really have any incentive to fund any research into them.

So that really leaves it up to governments and private contributors to fund all these studies. And there actually was a lot of research done into these drugs in the 50s and 60s, but there was a big enough backlash to the abuse of psychedelics in that period, especially around events like Woodstock, that funding really dried up, and research stopped. And that's why it's only now that we see this research happening, with private, not government contributions..","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was the most peaceful, joyous, incredible, life changing experience I've ever had in my life. There were scary parts, foreboding parts \u2026 I always knew there was beautiful and joy and peace on the other side of it. It was freeing, it was really freeing. This is Alana. She\u2019s describing what she felt after … Continue reading How LSD and shrooms could help treat anxiety, addiction and depression<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":72659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,5,781,4771,409],"tags":[38133,34232,43560,696,518,953,2164,43576,43575,43558,471,43562,38106,5176,36212,957,43569,38138,38127,36548,5375,517,43571,34376,43572,34041,43581,43579,984,43574],"class_list":["post-72656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anxiety","category-causes-and-prevention","category-crime-justice","category-disasters-accidents","category-health","tag-acid","tag-addiction","tag-albert","tag-anxiety","tag-brain","tag-depression","tag-drugs","tag-explained","tag-explainer","tag-garcia-romeu","tag-health","tag-johns-hopkins","tag-lsd","tag-medicine","tag-mental","tag-mental-health","tag-mushrooms","tag-psilocybin","tag-psychedelic","tag-psychedelics","tag-research","tag-science","tag-shrooms","tag-study","tag-treat","tag-treatment","tag-trip","tag-tripping","tag-vox","tag-vox-com"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/72656_maxresdefault.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}