What's missing from this article is that people are reaching for this because the standard medical treatment for these disorders, SSRIs, are pretty terrible. In the mild case, the common side effects are blunting of your emotions and sexual dysfunction. So you don't have panic attacks, but you live in a gray fog and your relationships suffer. In the worst case, they cause suicidal ideation. Psychedelics also have psychiatric risks that can be severe and unpredictable, but they don't require prolonged, daily dosages to be effective.
Counterpoint: SSRIs were transformative for my depression. Side effects were minor and manageable (eg, Wellbutrin worked well to prevent any sexual dysfunction). I was on them for several years and had no problem tapering off. My understanding is that this is a pretty typical experience. Rhetoric like this was actively harmful in dissuading me for years from trying what ended up being by far the most effective treatment for me.
(yes, I've tried psychedelics; they're fascinating and super promising, but at least for me, not transformative in the way that fluoxetine was)
No individual depression treatment works for everyone. SSRIs are not a magic bullet. Neither are psychedelics. But if you're depressed and haven't tried SSRIs, you owe it to yourself and everyone in your life to at least test the hypothesis that they might help.
Scott Alexander's page on SSRIs is a great, relatively objective resource, from a psychiatrist who regularly prescribes them:
https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/25/ssris/
Same. I'm a big time psychedelic advocate, and relatively frequent consumer.
Prozac actually saved my life. Psychedelics since have certainly enhanced it, but they could not accomplish what prozac did. I can go into more detail if interested.
Please do, I’m genuinely interested in your experience because, in my experience (!!) with family and acquaintances, I’ve only ever see Prozac as a part of a turn for the worse. I do acknowledge I might not be aware of cases where it was neutral or positive, however.
What was your experience like? And do you still take it?
> I’ve only ever see Prozac as a part of a turn for the worse.
You might be interested in the book "Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty"[1] by Patrick Radden Keefe. Although it focuses on Oxycodone and other painkillers it touch on Prozac and other SSRI's. Quite the eye opener...
Ditto with family. One antidepressant led to another, and then to another, and on to deeper depression, suicide attempts and more. Finally landed through the prescription pill grapevine on Xanax, which by far, without any comparison whatsoever, was the most persistently destructive and frightening. Like dropping a nuclear bomb on the whole family, for years and years.
I don't mean to bring other classes of drugs in, only to note that it is _very common_ for someone to go in for one thing, find it doesn't work, and then to start tweaking / adding / combining in an attempt to find a solution, and that's where the real problems often live.
When mental health is so bad it messes with work and personal relations one may feel obligated to share. When things start going well there's no need to explain what's going on. I've seen many that it works for and some where they just had to keep looking at other options.
Fully agree SSRI:s probably saved my life. SSRI:s are supposed to be used as part of therapeutic regimen with therapy and regular checkups with doctor, not as over-the-counter remedy like aspirin. I’m guessing that using them detached from any therapeutic context increases the prevalence of negative experiences.
That certainly could be a factor in some people having bad experiences in America at least–as I understand it insurance coverage for mental health is often limited or bad, and appointments with doctors are hard to come by and often only last 15 minutes.
Well the issue is finding a therapist you like that is also covered. I just moved and have been looking for a new therapist. All the ones that I’ve been recommended are not part of an insurance network. You can file for reimbursement, but it’s slower and the coverage isn’t as good as in network doctors. I went from a $20 copay for my last therapist to paying $200-300 per session out of pocket (depending on who I go with).
Psychiatrists can have similar issues but you don’t meet with them nearly as often. Once I got on meds that worked for me, we’d have a 30 minute meeting every two months just to check in and see if any adjustments were needed. That was fine by me because I was going to a therapist weekly, the two were aware of each other and would communicate if needed, and it saved both of us time.
I think in my part my negative reaction is, like many people, having observed the effects of SSRIs on young people. It's well known that risks like suicidal ideation are actually higher among those under 25, and in general it is awful to see the mental health crisis among young people dealt with primarily via instantly reaching toward semi-permanent medication, rather than considering other treatments.
I don't know if reacting to current events to offer medical advice is the best way to go. SSRIs were of great help to me when I was in the throes of my anxiety disorder, but psychadelics had given me harrowingly bad trips before I started a meditation practice (the mental fortitude has really helped.) One particular trip made me feel like I just came back from hell and I didn't feel "back" for days afterward. Mental health is tough and nobody seems to have the answers. As with everything, following the beaten path will lead you to surfaces well-trodden, and answers at this point in time are more personal than known science.
The most reasonable conculsion (though tentative) seems to be that SSRI and the more "traditional" option may help some, while psychedelics may help others. (And we have to imagine other drugs in the future will be found.) The trick will to figure out which person will respond to which. But I think all can agree having more options is better.
Yes. My root comment is not giving medical advice, but stating the unspoken truth in the original article that people are reaching for psychedelic therapy because existing standard medications do not work for everyone. Real medical advice should be tailored to an individual's history and needs, which is what any good physician or psychiatrist would actually do.
I take Wellbutrin and I’m not sure what it does for other people, but for me, it gives me a buffer of patience to draw from that I didn’t really have before. Negative or frustrating events don’t feel quite as urgent and I’m able to calmly move forward better than I can without it. Which is very helpful when you’re taking care of kids.
This is my experience, too. Bupropion (Wellbutrin) seems to dampen the spike of cortisol or adrenaline or something that I can get when something really irritates me. As a single father of two middle school age boys, it has helped a lot.
Btw, have you noticed exposure to sunlight to make you even more laid back? I've recently been casually tracking a correlation in that for myself.
This has been my experience with citalopram as well. The negative side effect though is that natural highs are lower, so I view it very much as a mood stabilizer.
A lot of medical treatment is like this. Everything has side effects, but at least with regulated, approved treatments, they're well-known side effects with a large-sampled quantified probability profile, thanks to decades of use following years of clinical trials. If you just heed the Internet for anecdotes, though, all you ever hear are the horror stories and your personal risk assessment becomes biased away from statistics and toward compelling stories.
For what it's worth, synthetic opioids and spinal fusion saved my life. If I'd listened to the Internet, I'd have likely never pursued treatment or maybe just taken Kratom and gotten massages or something, fearing I'd end up a drug addict with a worse spine than I started with.
How did you decide to stop? I’ve been on Escitalopram for a few months now after suffering depression and anxiety that affected (and was affected by) my work relationship. My GP tried to get me down from 10mg to 5mg but I felt terrible again. I’m now on 7.5mg and feel ok. But I can’t imagine stopping. Like ever. I wonder how I could stop. Or perhaps just accept and take them forever?
I was on escitalopram for a while. Then I added Wellbutrin, took away the escitalopram, added fluoxetine, and now I’m off all of it.
My advice is to take a breath and focus on the present. Chip away at what’s causing your anxiety. Don’t shy away from working on yourself. Use your medication as a tool, not as a solution.
I’m painfully aware that these are all much easier said than done. It was a three year journey for me. And who knows - I may start having panic attacks again. If I do, I’m going to try buspar.
Also. Don’t be afraid to switch medications. Don’t just live with severe side effects. Sexual dysfunction, lethargy, significant weight gain - this is no way to live your life. I found the Prozac - Wellbutrin combo to be pretty tame in that department.
Prozac is my fun drug. It makes me hypo manic with one 20mg dose.
I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type So I am prone to being more sensitive to SSRI. This is mostly to do with my genetically odd 5HT2A receptors.
Depression is no longer really a part of my life anymore after I found I was zinc deficient. But now I do tend towards the manic and have issues with psychosis still so I need to be careful with my serotonin.
How do you get the right amount of zinc? Are there other minerals you're supposed to take with zinc? I know that sometimes balancing one thing causes another thing to go out of balance.
Same for me. It's hard to say exactly what SSRI's are doing for me but I definitely feel better.
The bad sides of of SSRI's are as overblown as the good sides of psychedelics are. It's easy to form an opinion from reading personal experiences online but that doesn't reflect the real world imho.
I don't think Scott Alexander's page is a 'relatively objective resource'. He is, as you point out, a 'psychiatrist who regularly prescribes them' and also used to take them. It is full of special pleading where he relitigates extremely high quality meta-analyses to overlay his own opinion:
> That is, there are a bunch of tests that ask you a bunch of questions about your feelings and symptoms, and you can add them up and call that a “depression score”, and if you do that, antidepressants have an effect size of 0.3. Or you can ask patients “how depressed do you feel on a scale of 1-10”, and if you do that, antidepressants have an effect size of 0.5. I think the latter is better, because it’s what we actually care about (how patients are doing), and the tests are kind of dumb and ask about a lot of symptoms most people realistically aren’t experiencing.
(In other words, if you ask a patient with depression how they are feeling, and they say 'great', and then you ask them questions like "are you managing to shower every day", or "did you think about suicide a lot this week" and they give the same answers as a depressed person, they are cured!)
Does weird napkin math which clearly can't be justified:
> For those people, they will have a large real effect size of 1.0, plus a large placebo effect size of 0.9, for a very large total effect size of 1.9.
(How do you get to add the placebo effect back on to the postulated 'large real effect size'??)
Says that extremely common side effects are 'very unusual':
> It can be any or all of decreased libido, difficulty orgasming, difficulty getting an erection, difficulty enjoying sex, or decreased sensation in the genitals. These usually go away a few weeks to months after stopping the medication, but in rare cases they might linger for months or years, and there are a few people who say their sexual side effects never went away. These cases are very unusual and still not well understood.
(Note that in the same article he points out that, in general, the medication only improves mood or anxiety while you keep taking it, when you stop taking it you still have the depression or other conditions. So the fact that sexual disfunction usually gets resolved after stopping taking the medication isn't much relief. For most people SSRIs will never lead to a steady state where you are stable with regards to your mental health issue and also are able to enjoy sex.)
Makes armchair psych connection between well-studied things which are not the same:
> When everything goes right, SSRIs blunt negative but not positive emotions. But many people even at reasonable doses will notice that their most extreme positive emotions become a little less extreme (this may be part of the problem with sex).
(Difficulty getting aroused or orgasming or feeling in the mood for sex is not the same as "most extreme positive emotions becoming a little less extreme")
Personal anecdatum, different SSRIs affect people differently. Some that others here have praised didn't help, or had bad side effects.
What I am on now (Lexapro) was life changing in a good way, with only minor sexual side effects that more or less went away.
As such, studies that day "SSRIs have this effect on people" or "have these side effects" are fundamentally flawed. Despite belonging to a common class, there isn't a universal experience.
Ok, so the middle-brow infotainment psych blogger's essay is valid, but meta-analyses are 'fundamentally flawed' because 'different SSRIs affect people differently'?
This news will probably come as a huge surprise to the psychiatric epidemiologists who carried out the peer-reviewed research that Alexander mangles! They probably thought all SSRIs were exactly the same!
I was with you up to this. What even is a “psychiatric epidemiologist” I had to look it up,
“It is a subfield of the more general epidemiology. It has roots in sociological studies of the early 20th century. However, while sociological exposures are still widely studied in psychiatric epidemiology, the field has since expanded to the study of a wide area of environmental risk factors, such as major life events,“
Yeah, I don’t know, I’d sort of go with an experienced clinician when it comes to advice about pills. Sociology/epidemiology is cool, but there’s a lot to say for the importance of “practice” in medicine.
Good rebuttal. The person who did the peer-reviewed statistical research is wrong because Wikipedia describes their discipline as related to sociology.
No, I’m just saying that for me personally, if I wanted advice about taking psychiatric medication, I would prefer a clinicians view over the view of a epidemiological researcher, _even if they have the exact same level of training as medical doctors_. I don’t know about the researchers in question, maybe they too are practitioners. If they are, you should qualify that they aren’t merely epidemiologists. Epidemiology as a field has a problem with replication not unlike psychology or nutrition research.
A meta-analysis of SSRIs isn't very useful, since it draws conclusions about a group of drugs that do not have similar behaviors within an individual.
It's a bit like doing a meta analysis of hydrocarbons in two and four stroke engines. Some will work better than others in some situations, but the meta analysis itself isn't illuminating when you are putting liquid propane into a gunked up carburetor.
Wellbutrin also excarcbates OCD symptoms with typical responses including paranoia, hallucinations, eventually inducing psychosis. The article you post the author admits they don't really understand how SSRIs work. Why should putting such things in your body be any different than psychedelics or heroin or eating chocolate when you are sad? Simply put, it's not. This kind of science is based on collecting the minimum number of people to establish a p value and effect size larger than 0. You do that enough times then you can give your pills to whoever you want. Psychiatry provides a physiological change, i.e. they give you pills, based on a diagnostic criteria that removes all physiological reasons for the presented symptoms. This all seems rather backwards to me. Especially when modern psychology has developed therapies like cognitive behaviour therapy, schema therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, which all basically can be summed up to state "your thoughts and feelings don't matter and probably get in your way. What matters is how you organise your mind and actions." So modern psychology has arrived at stoicism as the answer to a variety of problems such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and personality disorders. This isn't to say that pills don't help. It's just that they are not a panacea nor are they well understood by the psychiatrists who are motivated to give you pills since their training as a medical doctor teaches them peoples problems have physiological solutions.
As far as the risks, I have a friend who's been "microdosing" acid and shrooms for a while, and recently had a legitimate psychotic break, thinking all of her life-long friends were in some kind of Truman Show-esque grand conspiracy against her. She ditched town and cut us all off for over a month.
I can't say the drug use caused it, but I and the rest of her friends are of the opinion that it contributed (we all have experience with psychedelics, mostly in our younger days). We know that the microdosing also turned into macrodosing on a lot of occasions. She's in a group of friends who follow Phish around, and it's basically part of their identity.
She's doing better now, but still thinks she's in some kind of a stimulation, and has described feeling like she's on a never-ending acid trip. She's always been one of my most solid friends, and this came completely out of left field.
We can't get her to see any psychiatrists who would want to put her on anti-psychotics (which is basically all of them). So we just tell her we love her, and try to convince her that if this is all a big simulation, we're not in on it either.
Well, it is a big simulation. She's discovered Plato's cave firsthand; no way could any brain handle the constant barrage from the senses. Once you start tripping you see that we are tripping all the time but we filter most of it out, thank goodness. Feeling like time is looping is pretty freaky regardless; once your mind starts short circuiting and you start heavily believing in symbols, patterns, alignment etc., it gets pretty scary.
I think the best you can do is be a calm friend and imagine you're dealing with a two year old without being condescending.
There are organisations that work with people who have had challanging psychedelic experiences, but without taking the psychiatric approach. One such project is: https://zendoproject.org/
There are also therapists who work with people before and after psychedelic experiences, called psychedelic integration therapists. They usually have legit mainstream psychotherapy qualifications.
There are also integration circles where people support each other. For example, https://acerintegration.com/ This was set up by a researcher in psychedelics. Not sure if it would be appropriate for someone experiencing psychosis though. You could also try contacting the researcher directly for recommendations: https://www.drrosalindwatts.com/
Thank you. I have saved all of this for if this thing comes roaring back. Right now things seem more or less okay.
Another contributing factor in all this is she lost her job, which gave her a lot of satisfaction. She has savings, so she's not hurting for money. But sitting around all day in her head and getting depressed isn't good.
> We know that the microdosing also turned into macrodosing on a lot of occasions.
It's pretty easy to slip into this. I don't have a good answer for solving this but criminalization is definitely a bad answer, so we will have to find a way to discourage such tendencies. It may be that it is mostly or entirely a cultural thing in which case public understanding of the drug is a prerequisite, so I'm glad more are starting to learn about it as a result of decriminalization and legalization.
I hope she can find some way to be comfortable again.
Could this be the manifestation of an overdose? I'm not a medical professional, but this got me curious what the "LD99" would be for avoiding this (not literally lethal, but long term dibilitation), or if it's statistically unclear?
More likely too frequent use. Psychedelics twist reality, doing them too often definitely leaves a mark. Eventually you have trouble telling what's real and what's not even when you're sober.
It's very very unclear. One person can hit heroic doses (200-1000 micrograms of LSD or equivalent of mushrooms) and be completely fine afterwards, another can have a small, usually safe dose and have long-term issues.
There are studies done to detect who will be susceptible to this, but there is no clear answer yet (aside from people with family history of bipolar or schizophrenia).
This thread found me at the perfect time I swear. A friend of mine just gave me a huge amount of shrooms. I've always been excited about microdosing, so I tried my first .4 grams the other day and felt a great layer of good vibes that day. I was going to increase the dose, knowing it's not really microdosing and figuring I could do this on a regular basis. I'm now taking this thread as a sign to slow my roll.
For what it's worth, from my understanding, you've got a lot of room before that even hits what's considered a "normal" recreational dose -- which I think is around 3.5g of dried psilocybin. Broadly speaking, if you don't have a history of bipolar / schizophrenia, it sounds like you'd be pretty safe from lasting consequences. Separately, "bad trips" mostly seem to happen when you go towards higher than normal doses, as you lose conscious control of your thoughts...
I don't, sorry. I know people who do, but I don't have direct personal experience with doing so. None of them had any negative outcomes from it with occasional larger doses, but as far as I know none of them went too extreme on those doses.
The guy who did the most to transition the world to EVs, created a global internet satellite network, and gave us reusable rockets is a massive problem.
Yeah I'm not arguing shrooms should be illegal. I don't think they're any worse than pot, and actually are the one drug I think everyone should do.
But I think there are some serious risks to heavy, prolonged use that probably aren't well-studied or understood. Also for all I know her problems stem from the acid and not the shrooms.
They are certainly an order of magnitude more powerful than pot. You can fairly easily have a psychologically very difficult experience at larger doses.
I’m all for people trying them but the effects shouldn’t be underestimated. I’ve had powerful feelings of anxiety, love, euphoria, mania or sadness on different times. Very different from pot which has a pretty uniform and predictable effect on me.
You can fairly easily have a very difficult experience with pot too. I have way worse and stronger experiences with pot than with mushrooms/LSD.
Cannabis is quite a powerful drug for many. A lot more powerful than most "hard drugs" like stimulants, empatogens, opioids or sedatives, which don't "mind fuck" at all unless you do them days on end or ridiculous dosages.
'ego-death and dimensional transcendence' and 'lots of paranoia and distress' just sound like different framings of what could be remarkably similar psychic states.
Having been in both, they are worlds apart. Sure, those descriptors might be tossed around, but that's a short commming of English to properly convey experiences.
Its distressing to spill your coffee. It's also distressing to have your house burn down. The difference is large.
Nothing wrong with experiences like what are called ego-death and dimensional transcendence if it doesn't involve paranoia or distress. Especially with dissociatives these are often the goal, and are quite pleasant.
The THC induced paranoia and distress are usually due to effects like time-dilation, memory impairment, depersonalization, thought loops etc, which I'd put into more or less same category as you get from psychedelics or dissociatives.
I think the "hardness" of different drugs, especially in how strong the effect is, is mostly a cultural and legal artifact that doesn't really correlate that much with the actual experience.
This is exactly my experience. I almost never smoke weed, and only do when I'm in a comfortable place and among friends. Shrooms is more of a mid-level body/sensory experience for me, whereas pot is a deep dark journey into the recesses of my psyche.
My experience is that I’ve seen this happen a lot to people who take psychedelics frequently (say, multiple times a month over a prolonged period). Whereas this seems to be rare with infrequent use at moderate dosages.
is she bipolar by any chance? if not, does she have a family history of bipolar or schizophrenia? or, does she have any cluster-b personality disorders?
She's not bipolar. I don't know family history other than her brother is an addict and her mom posts 20 political memes a day on FB that venture into conspiratorial stuff (but that describes a lot of people I know).
The only signs we can come up with were a few times going back 20 years, either at a party (drugs) or a canoe trip (drugs) where she thought people were talking about her/plotting against her. I wasn't on the canoe trip, but I always believed her that some people in another group of friends we know were mercilessly cruel to her. Now I tend to think it was a manifestation of whatever this is.
Other than that she's been one of my most solid friends and always had her shit together, very successful career, someone I would call when I needed life advice, etc.
I know someone who had a lesser but similar episode after taking shrooms for the first time. It was about a week of paranoid delusions (The Truman Show came up a few times). After he snapped out of it, he totally turned his life around; went from a very phlegmatic personality to totally type A, got his degree, and now owns several businesses. The human brain is just so complex.
That's uplifting to hear. So far my friend has seemed more or less okay for a couple months. Fingers crossed. I honestly had no idea if these things could just go away on their own. It sounds like it's possible at least.
> We know that the microdosing also turned into macrodosing on a lot of occasions
Do you know how frequent the macrodosing became? I have never seen or heard (anecdotal) of microdosing leading to a psychotic break. But frequent use (more than once every three weeks) of large quantities will almost certainly harm you in the long run.
The last time we hung out before all this went down, we had a few drinks then she broke out the acid, saying we would just microdose and it would be mostly like a really strong cup of coffee. Of course we ended up doing another microdose, which I'd estimate ended up at about 1/4 of a serious acid trip.
I assume stuff like that happens a lot in her Phish group. Other times we've hung out at a party she's broken acid/e/shrooms out and I'm thinking, "We're not 25 anymore, we don't have to do this."
At the time I kind of admired her for still being willing to go to those deeply introspective trippy places, whereas I'd rather just get a nice buzz and not plumb the depths of my soul. But now I'm thinking it's probably a good thing to hang that stuff up after a while, or at least not keep doing it regularly.
Honest Q: How much weed does she smoke? Because if she smokes a considerable amount then that is certainly more likely than the psychedelics to be a factor.
I can't say the drug use caused it, but I and the rest of her friends are of the opinion that it contributed (we all have experience with psychedelics, mostly in our younger days)
I mean a cup of coffee might push the wrong person over the edge if they’re already in the midst or about to enter a serious mental health crisis?
Of course you’d have to assume a psychoactive substance might contribute but maybe not?
I’ve had serious depressive stints of existential crisis where the world felt like it was telling me I don’t need to exist anymore and I’ve had them before and I’ve had them before and after smoking pot, did it contribute maybe ? Maybe not. I’ve smoked pot since and never had the same symptoms.
okay, this is probably going to very weird, but I've actually had two "no-self"/"ego-death" experiences whilst on drugs (I also meditate daily, but have not have an ego-dissolution from meditation, although I've had some trippy stuff happen).
I feel like that whole "world feeling it was telling you you didn't need to exist anymore" may have been it trying to point to you towards a no-self experience, which can actually be a very beautiful experience, where the 'you' experiencing reality fades away and there is just reality.
I hope this comment was okay with you, and I apologize if it disturbed you. Still, if you've got nothing better to do with your time, no-self may be something to look into.
Actually, what I didn't mention is, the whole thing turned out really positive for me because I didn't self-harm, but I kind of came to a similar peaceful conclusion, but through studying philosophy.
At some point I kind of just agreed with this new idea and have been running with it since.
Buddhism often tells you to let your pain and suffering be your guide, and it works,at least in my experience.
> the standard medical treatment for these disorders, SSRIs, are pretty terrible. In the mild case, the common side effects are blunting of your emotions and sexual dysfunction. So you don't have panic attacks, but you live in a gray fog and your relationships suffer. In the worst case, they cause suicidal ideation.
As others have stated in this thread, this overt generalization is harmful. SSRIs and psychedelics have both been studied, and both have outcomes that we don't really understand. To say one is better or worse than the other in most cases is pure ignorance.
We all have roughly the same physical properties to our brains but how they develop is truly unique to every individual, which leads some methods of treatment for mental health disorders more or less effective than others. I am 100% onboard with pursuing psychs for treatment if you want, but its not for everyone and neither are SSRIs.
I'd downvote this if the responses weren't so full of instructive counterpoints.
They're terrible for some people, but they work well for others. I don't think they should automatically be disregarded.
> In the worst case, they cause suicidal ideation
Is this actually true? My understanding is that people in severe depression can have suicidal ideation but not actually be able to put in the effort/energy needed to go through with it. SSRIs initially give you a little more boost in energy before the mood-lifting effects kick in. During that middle phase, we observer higher suicide rates because you've now enabled them to have effort to follow through with their suicidal ideas.
GlaxoSmithKline paid the Department of Justice $3 billion for covering up evidence of this while promoting their SSRI to under-18s. They paid the fine in 2012, 11 years ago. The medical trial was done in 1994-1998.
In 2003, the (UK medicines regulator) MHRA obtained full clinical data from Glaxo, and based on that data forming robust evidence of significant increase in suicidality, both the MHRA and the FDA immediately said that paroxetine couldn't be prescribed to under-18s.
The UK govt rules on how to report medical trials were changed in relation to what happened with the publication of the Glaxo Paxil trials.
GSK paid around $1 billion in the 2000-2010s to settle several hundred lawsuits, including many many suicides and several family annihilations.
The main investigative news TV show in the UK, Panorama, reported on this in 4 shows between 2002 and 2007.
The Boston Globe did significant investigative work on this around 2005, including a book published by their reporter.
In view of that, your question comes across as at best, uninformed and naive.
Sometimes I feel foolish for being skeptical about safety claims for food additives/cosmetics/pharmaceuticals/etc, then other times it feels completely rational.
I took Sertraline (one kind of SSRI) to treat anxiety, never had depression.
No panic attacks anymore, sexual drive was still good, after 3 months I felt superhuman and like my life changed, 3 months after that the suicidal ideation started.
I thought it was something I could power through, so I gave it another three months before it became unbearable, and I couldn't book an appointment with my treating doctor for another two months so I quit cold turkey.
The withdrawals were so terrible, I was basically a zombie for two weeks.
Took me a few months until I felt like myself again.
I no longer experience anxiety to the same degree I did back then, no use of other SSRIs or any other drugs.
This isn't meant to scare people into not trying SSRIs, just sharing my experience.
I think had I been more informed of the potential risks and changed my attitude of toughing it out, it could've probably been more beneficial.
I found that dosage of Sertraline made a notable difference for me. Too high a dose would get me in a hypomanic state. That may be where you were at when feeling superhuman. But mania can't last forever and is inevitably followed by a low.
Stopping cold turkey was bad news for me, too. I got the "zaps" any time I turned my head. So, I decided to taper down, which worked fine.
I had exactly the same side effect when turning my head, and 150 mg would also make me agitated. Also, my vision worsened a bit. But without sertraline, depression wouldn't have gone away, so the drawbacks were worth it.
> Is this actually true? My understanding is that people in severe depression can have suicidal ideation but not actually be able to put in the effort/energy needed to go through with it.
It seems like you forgot the word "ideation" is in the original claim you're disputing, based on your description. Yes it is true that SSRIs can cause suicidal _ideation_. And the first step to suicide is suicidal ideation.
I have noticed ssri withdrawal causes suicidal ideation but not enough to go through with it. It's like it causes the thoughts but not the action from thoughts.
That’s excellent to hear that for you personally, the ideation did not become reality. However, suicide starts with ideation, so any suicidal ideation must be taken as a potential precursor to suicidal, even if in the end it might not actually progress.
> SSRIs, are pretty terrible ... you don't have panic attacks, but you live in a gray fog and your relationships suffer
Comments like this -- and there are an awful lot of them online -- dissuaded me for a very long time from taking SSRIs. And that was a terrible mistake: SSRIs have been a life-changing good for me. I am on a high dose of Lexapro, and in no way do I live in a gray fog, and my relationships are markedly better. My GAD is gone, completely.
A few years ago, a doctor tried to convince me that they were causing sleep apnea, so I came off them, slowly, over many months. I didn't have cessation symptoms. My anxiety slowly returned, in proportion to the dosage, my sleep apnea didn't improve, and I was glad to start them again.
This comment is dangerous and incorrect. Many people have exceptional responses on SSRIs - myself included. I went from having regular panic attacks to living a very normal life with absolutely zero side effects, just from taking the lowest dose of Zoloft (25mg generic sertraline). I don't live in a gray fog, my relationships do not suffer, and I have not had any suicidal ideation. You're cherry picking very rare/extreme instances and noting them to be commonplace.
It took me MONTHS to even consider SSRIs because of rhetoric like this that is online and pervasive in our culture.
Psilocybin works in sort of the same way as SSRI. SSRIs will keep around the serotonin we make, but the problem is, if we’re not making enough serotonin in the first place they won’t be effective.
Psilocybin on the other hand acts kind of like the serotonin molecule itself. It attaches to most of the serotonin receptors, including the two receptor. The reason why it works for so long is you get such a huge and strong attachment to the serotonin receptors that the body ends up, reducing the serotonin receptors in response. It’s this lack of serotonin receptors that make us more sensitive to what little serotonin we make.
There’s nothing non-pharmacological about the effects of mushrooms.
I believe the only thing we are pretty sure about is that we don't know why SSRIs work.
What we believe we know is that low serotonin in the brain does not directly cause depression, and artificially lowering serotonin in individuals does not induce depression (at least not in the way researchers have done so, within the time limits they measured).
None of this necessarily means that SSRI activity downregulating the reuptake of serotonin is not the primary mechanism of action (pharmacologically speaking, it definitely is the main thing this class of drug is doing in the body).
It's worth noting that we also have a ton of serotonin receptors in our GI tract, and SSRIs do have notable activity there as well, to the point that they can relieve chronic constipation in some individuals. Although levels of serotonin outside the brain (which represent 95% of serotonin produced by the body and our microbes) generally get ignored in analysis of depression, since serotonin cannot cross the blood brain barrier, it may well be very relevant to human health, both physical and mental, for as yet unknown reasons.
You know why SSRIs work for some people and don’t work for others, because the people who it doesn’t work for don’t have depression caused by serotonin deficiency. Their depression is most likely caused by too much GABA.
My wife had multiple talks with a psychiatrist about them to threat depression, and the experience of the psychiatrist was that it's the rare few that can stop taking them without issue. Hell, it's the rare few who find the right kind of antidepressant in one go, most of the time you need to try a few different kinds for a few months, with all the side effects that come with it.
> Horowitz experienced a prolonged antidepressant withdrawal in 2015 that caused intense panic attacks and, he says, even left him contemplating suicide. This personal experience has led the training psychiatrist to become an advocate for reforming antidepressant deprescribing.
> In June 2022 the UK health regulator, Nice, amended its guidance on how to support people coming off antidepressants, acknowledging the severity and length of withdrawal symptoms can vary. Nice encourages slow, staggered tapering over many months, if needed.
> In Australia, the RANZCP guidelines continue to recommend tapering by halving and quartering the lowest dose over about two to six weeks, and acknowledged that while slower tapering might sometimes be needed, it mostly isn’t possible in Australia “as current preparations of antidepressants do not allow for the dose to be reduced by such small decrements”.
There are well documented side effects of stopping SSRI usage that are not related to the original symptoms that the drug is prescribed to treat.
But yes, we all have different experiences, and there are many types of SSRIs. :-)
> psychiatrist and former RANZCP president, Prof Malcolm Hopwood, says most people who taper off a standard antidepressant dose will be able to do so without major withdrawal symptoms ... "There’s a _small_ group who really experience significant withdrawal symptoms that they really find very difficult to manage"
Discontinuation symptoms are a real risk, but people who could really benefit from these drugs absolutely shouldn't be put off by a categorization of these symptoms as being typical.
The phrasing here definitely makes you wonder how big is the group that experiences moderate side effects that are moderately unpleasant and moderately difficult to manage, and what do these qualifying terms actually mean in terms of severity and overall negative impact on a patient?
A small group that has severe side effects and finds them very difficult to manage is kind of a big deal in a class of drugs that actually have small effect size in the medical literature.
I don't think poor performance of SSRIs is really a common reason. People just love magic bullets and shortcuts. It's basically a variant of drinking bleach for COVID, except safer and more fun.
(Not a prohibitionist, just against self-medication)
You are correct about (1), but "citation needed" for (2).
Psychedelic therapies are most definitely not based on hype -- there's real research being conducted by real doctors, and it's only becoming more prevalent.
Not to be a pedant, but if you examine the particular word choice in each of your competing propositions, you'll see that you both managed to find a way to be technically incorrect.
Let's hope language doesn't have something to do with how humans perceive reality! (Or, maybe I have that backwards.)
If you don’t quantify these things and perform cost-benefit analysis, it’s like saying we shouldn’t drive cars , because in the worst case you burn alive.
SSRI side effect prevalence is a hard thing to measure for a large variety of reasons. But in [1] only 1/4 patients report the side effects as ”very bothersome.” Given that 100% of patients are so anxious/depressed that they want to try psych meds, it seems like SSRIs are a great treatment option for many.
Gotta love the language there. "Very bothersome" sounds so much less problematic than other potential phrasings. Like, "oh dear, I get brain zaps, feel like a zombie, and am having persistent intrusive thoughts that interfere with my ability to think and perform during the day. Gee golly, what a nuisance."
A quarter of patients reporting very troubling side effects is not great for a class of drugs with an effect size around 0.3, or about 10% more reduction in depression symptom scores compared to placebo. If you have run out of options and are desperate for relief, it may be an appealing risk/reward equation for some people. But the notion that 100% of patients believe they need these meds, rather than had the drug recommended by a doctor/psychiatrist (who maybe didn't go into great detail about the potential risks vs tempering expectations about how likely they are to help), is absurd. It totally ignores how our medical system operates in most cases. Many times, the doctors prescribing will be informed by drug company PR literature moreso than careful reading of scientific research.
As someone with Depression that has tried both SSRIs and Shrooms, my experience was badically: SSRIs keep you alive with a host of side effects or you take a shroom trip once a year and feel better without side effects.
To add to this, I think the toxic part about this is that SSRIs are the first line treatment, and are handed out like candy when they are not magic cure-alls for whichever ailment. In fact there’s a risk of SSRIs activating self-destructive mania, even in people who do not typically fall under the “bipolar” umbrella. (which, the interactions of SSRIs with undiagnosed disorders is also unsafe given their track record of being handed out like candy).
> In the mild case, the common side effects are blunting of your emotions
Isn't this the primary effect, more than a side effect?
Atleast in my case, it's been super helpful, going from jumping between a 1 to 7 in mood, to just lie around 4-5-6.
I'm a fairly drug-averse person. I have no qualms about other people using them, but it took us over 30 years to really understand the implications of legalized opioids. And that was after a lengthy and expensive FDA process.
So respect to all of the early adopters who have nothing to lose and are willing to put their own sanity at risk. I just don't understand people who in one breath curse the Sackler family but then line up to try the first batch of industrialized psilocybin from Rose City Laboratories.
Do you understand what happened in the opioid crisis, and why people are mad at the Sacklers? They weren’t hapless naive actors that didn’t fully understand “the implications” of the drugs they were selling. The effects of opioid addiction were WELL known when oxycontin was introduced, and Purdue Pharmaceuticals deliberately misrepresented critical information about the drugs they sold and had salespeople lie in a wholesale fashion on a massive scale.
It’s reasonable to have suspicion about companies and regulators in this area, but the opioid crisis is such a different situation in context.
> Dr. Janis Phelps, director of the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, said she and other researchers had been wary of the decriminalization movement. Many in the field had worked for years to remain strictly scientific, hoping to avoid government crackdowns, and to give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration time to fully review the effects of psilocybin before pressing ahead with efforts to make it legal.
> “I have changed my mind,” she said. While she remains concerned that bad actors could try to enter the industry strictly for profit, or try to take advantage of vulnerable people, she has come to believe that the open door in Oregon could advance the use of psychedelics in ways that methodical approaches cannot.
> Dr. Charles Nemeroff, the chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, said he continues to be wary. Psilocybin is powerful, with immediate effects lasting for hours, and uncertain outcomes for patients, he said, recalling one patient of his who has experienced protracted psychosis, losing partial connection to reality, after taking doses of mushrooms. The treatments ruined her life, said Dr. Nemeroff, who said he worried about the lack of required medical oversight in Oregon’s program.
Just like the Sacklers, people pursuing psilocybin are fully aware of all of these warnings and problems. And just like Purdue, anyone selling psilocybin right now are willfully misrepresenting the evidence and ignoring medical opinion. Again, Purdue did all of the things they did because they believed they were ultimately helping treat people's suffering.
I am fully aware that time may tell and the concerns may be unfounded. And I get that we are dealing with a completely different drug/mechanism. But one is right and one is wrong only through the benefit of hindsight.
The problem here is that there is no evidence. All the evidence of negative effects so far is anecdotal, which in reality calls for more research in the area [0]. In addition, only about 0.2% report having sought emergency treatment [1] when using psylocibin.
As someone who partakes in psychedelics to a moderate degree, I don’t think it makes any sense at all to dismiss the very many negative outcomes as “no evidence”. Perhaps it’s under-researched, but your comment strikes me as ideological and/or hyperbole.
Like with all treatments, it’s a careful balance of whether the risks are worth the positive health outcomes. But there’s no sense in denying that psychedelics, and thus psychedelic mental health treatment programs, have no evidence of potential issues.
While I agree with what you are saying in principle, I do want to point out that there is a massive difference between anecdotal evidence and _research_. In a purely academic sense, it is not an unreasonable statement to make that there is no evidence. In contrast, in the opioid case there existed scientific evidence of the highly addictive nature of the drugs that was more than just suppressed, they were outright _lied_ about by the pharmaceutical company behind the drug.
> Purdue Pharma created false advertising documents to provide doctors and patients illustrating that time-released OxyContin was less addictive than other immediate release alternatives. Furthermore, they sought out doctors who were more likely to prescribe opioids and encouraged them to prescribe OxyContin because it was safer. They did this because OxyContin quickly became a cash cow for the company. (https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-purdue-pharma-and-...)
A degree of malfeasance in the same realm as Big Tobacco's denials of the risks and addictiveness of smoking:
I think it is true that it is under-researched. Current clinical research on psychedelics exclude people who are previously diagnosed and/or have a family history of personality disorders, psychosis and bipolar depression. They also control for set and setting. Under those conditions, it seems that the use of psychedelics is very safe, but it doesn't give us a good idea of the risk of recreational use in the general public.
One interesting recent study I've found is this, but it's too small to conclude anything, and it also does not appear to be peer-reviewed yet: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yzmcj
Yes, you are right, what I should have written was that there is no peer-reviewed clinical evidence of long term negative effects solely caused by the toxicity of psilocybin.
> very many negative outcomes as “no evidence”. Perhaps it’s under-researched, but your comment strikes me as ideological and/or hyperbole.
Very many people have encountered aliens, but there's still no evidence of aliens. Your comment is more ideological hyperbole than the one you're replying to.
I too am fairly drug-averse. And after 40 years of avoiding all drugs but caffeine and alcohol, I dipped my toe into psilocybin and found not only was it profoundly therapeutic in terms of self-acceptence, self-love, and anxiety-reduction, I found after 3 or 4 uses, I had no further interest in it whatsoever.
Is my experience universal? Of course not, but an anecdote to consider alongside yours.
Same here. Did it once and it saved my life. Point is it was only legally accessible to rich people. I.e. I had to fly to amsterdam pay for pre and post psychotherapy and multi day care. This is so wildly different to recreational use.
Interestingly, mushrooms are actually illegal in the Netherlands, but thanks to a fun loophole the truffles are completely fine :D (for those not in the know, truffles usually have a lower % of psilocybin per gram so you have to eat more to get the same effects but the end result is about the same!)
Most people growing shrooms are not doing it at scale and are generally only selling to friends or acquaintances. For this particular drug- the risk seems pretty low.
I think they mean "was there someone guiding your trip, or did you do it alone". I have never tried psychedelics, but I've heard its helpful to have people with you, because you can have a "bad trip" where your mind goes into awful places, and having a familiar face nearby can help get you out of that state or ameliorate your symptoms.
And like caffeine and alcohol, you can make practical use of psychedelic mushrooms in low doses with far less potential of unpredictable/problematic results. The dose makes the poison.
Same experience here. I did psychedelics maybe 10 times and then simply stopped having the desire. I don't have an aversion to it either. Just kind of got what I wanted out of it.
I think an important difference is that "legal" / manufactured drugs are patented, their formulation a trade secret, production fully in the hands of one party, etc. Weed and mushrooms can be grown by anyone; likewise, alcohol can be produced by anyone, but because of the risks in distilling it's illegal in most places to do so yourself.
My point is that the vilification of 'soft' drugs like mushrooms and weed is because the powers-that-be can't make a profit off of it. Or they could, but they would have to compete with home grown.
That doesn't stop the industry though; in the past few years in my country (Netherlands, famously tolerant but in a weird way to weed) you can get CBD oils and products off-the-shelf, alongside things like melatonin and whatnot. They've made it a consumer product and much more socially acceptable.
At the moment there's trials going on for the legal production of weed in greenhouses; up until then, all production was done illegaly in people's basements / attics, or via skirting the rules: legally you can have... I forgot, 1, 2 or 3 plants in your house (it used to be 7 but then the plants got bigger). There's "companies" now (they call themselves a foundation, charity or private club) that will offer to put a grow tent in your house if you have a spare room, just needs some electricity and water, they'll come and harvest it once it's done and you get a share of it and / or paid for it.
We've had thousands of years experience with psilocybin. We've already synthesized more potent psychedelics for 75ish years. I'd argue that the safety is well understood, but of course effective dosage in clinical trial are not. However, there's plenty of information from psychonauts out there on how to consume shrooms safely.
But neither of these chemicals are magic. A lot of people are looking for magic pills. A lot of companies want to sell you magic pills. Take a couple pills and your problems go away; that's just not achievable anytime soon. We have to get better as a Western society of supporting people on their various, multifaceted journeys through life.
I mean, we could be saying the same thing about psychedelics in 30 years time. "Wow, everyone knew psychedelics were bad for hundreds of years! What were medical professionals doing recommending them in the 2020s?"
I understand that we are not talking about the same specific mechanism (addiction), but I also want to keep my eyes open and not blindly stumble into the same broader category of problem all over again.
Except, we have known for centuries that psylocibe is benign. The Nahua people in Mexico's Central Valley people have been using them for ceremonial purposes for centuries with no addictive side effects ever reported; its use even being described in Spanish colonial codices [0]. They are only "new" to the Western culture. In contrast, we have known for centuries that opioids are extremely addictive. [1]
>but it took us over 30 years to really understand the implications of legalized opioids.
It took the EU all of ten seconds to reject opiates for minor use -- the opioid crisis is very much manufactured and endured in North America and is a regulatory failing of the FDA. The most crucial distinction here is the addictiveness of psilocybin vs opioids, mushrooms are not remotely addictive relative to opioids.
Up until the mid 2000s, psychedelic mushrooms in their natural state were completely legal in the UK. They were banned based on virtual no evidence of harm or widespread abuse despite being used recreationally for decades, just because the government decided that they didn't seem like the kind of thing that should be legal.
That's not quite right, sadly. They banned them because careless traders in places like Camden could buy them cheap from Holland and sell them with zero responsibility to anyone who wanted, including minors.
I know this because I was in part responsible for opening up the gates, with a company that sold them very responsibly, starting in Camden.
Opiods are only legal in some circumstances: We've known about opium addiction for centuries. Heck, we had the Opium Wars.
That's not really what happened with the current pills, though. They were touted as not being addictive in the same way as opium.
And then we prescribed them, didn't (and don't) offer realistic talks about how addiction starts with them, aren't giving people sick time so they are less likely to need them, putting folks in jail for using things like pot instead, and aren't giving folks affordable and medicine-based help if they do happen to get addicted. And then, if they do happen to get addicted, we treat them like a pill-seeking addict for many years, if not for life.
We know other things cause dependency - it isn't just opioids - but we are better at having conversations around them and better at making sure to taper folks (and so on).
> They were touted as not being addictive in the same way as opium
Oxycotin was never touted as "not being addictive".
Hell they had (and still have) a big "WARNING: OxyContin is an opioid agonist and a Schedule II controlled substance with an abuse liability similar to morphine." in their label.
It was a confluence of medical professionals being taught "pain is the 5th vital sign", "pain is routinely undertreated" and "controlled release opioids have a reduced abuse potential".
This was not necessarily bad because many of those things were true and the pendulum had swung back from "just tough it out", "Tylenol is enough for most people", "just one dose of opioids will make you an addict".
Then layer on top pill mill clinics popping up where doctors were dispensing scripts for 120 sixty milligram Oxycotin without so much as a physical examination, the DEA doing nothing despite having ample data in front of them that some doctors were dispensing milions of pills each year and the massive amounts of money doctors made writing the scripts by charging addicts cash.
Sure. But there are all sorts of negative side effects we should also be worrying about besides just dependence.
And we've also known about problems from psychedelic abuse for centuries. And we're talking about dumping them on the market with way less oversight than we did opioids!
It's like that truism about the military always fighting past wars...
I love psychedelics, but this list shouldn’t include psychotic breaks or detachment from reality. I say this from first (second?) hand experience of friends I’m close with.
Not that I disagree with the contents of your list, but the effects of psychedelics are not always positive.
At least "natural" psilocybin can't be compared with opiods at all, other that both are controlled substances. Psilocybin is not addictive, it's way to exhausting and also physiologically not possible.
However, there is still a lot of potential for harm. The biggest one is triggering latent psychosis and other psychological issues followed by possibly dangerous actions under the influence of high doses.
I also believe the "recreational" potential is low but it will probably be very interesting for many people to try at least once.
This is what was said about THC until it was legal and now we know there are physical withdrawal side effects in a decent percentage of people. So I don’t trust advocates pushing this narrative at all
> I also believe the "recreational" potential is low
Laughable. Most people doing magic mushrooms are doing so recreationally. That’s what it’s known for, that’s why there has to be entire talks given about the mental health benefits. Because it’s widely used exclusively as a recreational drug
speaking as someone who has done a fair amount of recreational drug use, including shrooms -
you can totally use shrooms too much, because you're bored on summer break so you eat a bunch to spice up your day. It's honestly not the smartest use of it, but 'overuse'/spending too much time tripping is totally a thing.
We do have some understanding of the safety profile of psilocybin, even if its Schedule I status makes it hard to research. At the very least, it doesn’t have physical dependency like opioids.
However, the lack of significant safety research does make it hard to determine the incidence of development of disorders like HPPD but, unlike opioids, I can’t imagine someone wanting to continue taking psilocybin after developing HPPD.
They said the same thing about weed - that you don’t have any physical dependency.
A quick search on Reddit would show you countless people who say they’re physically unable to function without weed anymore. Withdrawal symptoms include insomnia, depression, brain fog, lack of appetite, lack of energy, shaking, etc.
This is especially true of people who started using it when they were young and people who use high THC products.
I think if you've known anyone who was an alcoholic, a tobacco smoker, or even someone who had to taper off prescription benzos or SSRIs you'd know that cannabis withdrawal symptoms are relatively benign. Caffeine withdrawal is significantly worse.
Those are MENTAL withdrawal symptoms, not PHYSICAL ones. Basically the worst the happens is "Man, I really wish I had some weed right now", not hallucinations or the shakes or seizures, as can occur with alcohol or opiods. That's what people mean by physical dependency.
Also, I'd argue that brain fog, low energy, insomnia, lack of appetite, night sweats, shaking are all physical symptoms, chest pains, heart palpitations.
> Those are MENTAL withdrawal symptoms, not PHYSICAL ones.
That is an interesting line to draw. Are "MENTAL withdrawal symptoms" not neurological in nature? Are "hallucinations or the shakes or seizures" not based in neurology?
The DTs from alcohol withdrawal can outright kill you. That’s the line I draw. Similar for other meds that have very unpleasant effects if you don’t taper off over weeks or even months.
Aside from the other comments, opioids are much more addictive than psilocybin. All drugs have risks, but the risk of death or serious issues (whether psychosis or addiction) are a fraction of what they are with opioids.
This is one of the things I love about America. Each state can run their own experiments and everyone else can watch. We don't have to wonder what would happen now.
One issue is that SSRI treatment has to be stopped before starting psychedelic therapy (interactions). This means tapering off until you're not being treated anymore, which takes weeks if not months, can be difficult and put the patient in a less than ideal state of mind, possibly even worse than when they started off.
And this is a very bad state of mind to be in when starting psychedelics. I wonder how people usually deal with that.
While nobody should do this, the interaction risk between an SSRI and a classical psychedelic is low. The primary concerns are serotonin syndrome, which requires a dose far outside the level that a responsible practitioner would administer. That said, this does mean that if an error is made, the consequence is far more severe (ie: miligrams as opposed to micrograms in dosing LSD).
I have heard second-hand reports of users who tapered their SSRI treatment, and on first exposure to psychedelics, had a severe negative response (to the point of re-traumatisation). So you're correct, this is exceptionally difficult to do correctly.
Yeah, which is why maybe these treatments are ok for people with relatively "mild" symptoms / disorders (like the guy in the article with "lingering ptsd"), people who aren't being aggressively treated with SSRIs.
That's the sad thing about those pills I guess, it's that you stay on them or you get better.
In my experience with SSRI drugs, they mask the issue by blunting the emotional response itself. Much like removing a broken leg under aesthetic, rather than setting it and casting it.
Ayahuasca contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors compounds too, those are the cause of the interaction. Dimethyltryptamine itself does not carry the same interaction risk. It's a mix of monoamine oxidase inhibitors and dimethyltryptamine to prevent the stomach acid decomposing active drug.
I'm meaning the drugs themselves, rather than drug mixtures. But this is correct, and a unique case given that it is a drug mixture. You have the same problem if you ate St. Johns Wort.
My own success with battling depression had so much to do with controlling the adhd that we've talked about tapering off the SSRI's. I wouldn't be surprised if they become dramatically less prescribed over time.
Mindfulness, communication, learning how to rest and better time management techniques have more than likely done more for my mental health than the SSRIs. I'd love to taper off with them one day but we'll see.
Which pharmaceutical is going to back this clinical trial though??
What does cure mean? You just stop feeling sad? What does that mean? What happens when you're sad again after your depression is cured? What may have lead to depression? What may prevent it from coming back?
What if certain things about your brain are gonna just be like that for life and you're the only one who has the burden of dealing with it? How will you?
What if what you're striving for in life is realistically _unattainable_ and something about your brain thinks it is so you try really hard to fight reality and get depressed? You have to unlearn bad habits your brain picked up over time that it merely thought were good survival skills at the moment.
SSRI or psychedelics alone will not fully help a person. They can be a step in the right direction. The body keeps the score.
Not sure if this is where GP got them, but these are techniques straight out of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, one of the most broadly successful evidence-based clinical therapy frameworks.
Don't undersell the value of learning how to rest. It is more complex and has far more healing power than the understated phrasing implies. A lot of important processes in the body only take place when the parasympathetic nervous system is active (including proper digestion, which is where all of our neurotransmitters come from either directly or by way of precursor molecules). This is likely a big part of why chronic stress is so strongly correlated with poor health.
Here's hoping more accurate dosing will be a side effect of this. Going by rough weight of a plant that includes a lot of water always seemed kind of sketchy to me.
I've heard of tinctures made by dissolving them in alcohol, but I don't think even those are measured objectively. No idea what sort of titration/measurement you'd do to determine the mg amount of psilocybin, or if that's even well documented.
Potency can still vary drastically from batch to batch (and even within the same batch), let alone between distinct strains. Standardization and accurate testing are still quite important when we are talking therapeutic use.
It's not the water weight, since they're always dried. Not every mushroom has the same % of active ingredients vs the rest of the dry weight. You could have one big weak shroom or a tiny potent one.
> Here's hoping more accurate dosing will be a side effect of this. Going by rough weight of a plant that includes a lot of water always seemed kind of sketchy to me.
> I've heard of tinctures made by dissolving them in alcohol, but I don't think even those are measured objectively. No idea what sort of titration/measurement you'd do to determine the mg amount of psilocybin, or if that's even well documented.
You could create a tincture and test it. And like the other person who replied said, the doses will be consistent.
Personally I took magic mushrooms once. I've always been an anxious person. For at least 2 or 3 months after. My anxiety was gone like never before, I was not scared of anything or talking to anyone. I was the most free I ever was. Ive been wanting to take another dose soon, I think I should... 1g.
I make full spectrum CBD oil for myself and family. It has a very real effect too. Much more powerful than most CBD products you can purchase, because it will contain more than pure CBD. Its the same process as a tincture with a few steps after. I turn 4 ounces (112g) into 60ml. ~300+ mg/g, take 0.05-0.1g. I think the benefits should be experienced without expectations, because they can vary. Helps with stress, anxiety, blood pressure, inflammation and some pain, arthritis, and others. There are some other compounds in this plant that can help with other things. CBG/A CBN, CBDA. A tiny bit of THC, which is naturally found in tiny amounts in most CBD containing plants, increases the effects of the others greatly. Too much THC alone has a negative impact if you continue long term use, at least on me. These compounds effect the endocannabinoid system, but have some off target activity which is why a variety of similar compounds can have a lot of different effects. Those other compounds can help with different issues-digestion, sleep. Keeping a decent amount of CBD/G(A) (by not cooking/heating it) is important too.
I am a very scientific person, and I understand some people are weary of this type of medicine. But what is your alternative? Eat the pills by big pharma filled with lies to sell drugs and make money? Take an SSRI so you can kill your sex drive and feel like a zombie? Maybe that won't happen to you, and I understand that they help some or many people. But if you understood the potential negative effects, and that some of them can be permanent, would you still be okay with starting it yourself? Perhaps something that has grown in nature with us can be beneficial, we came from the same planet, we evolved together. We consider other plants and vegetables from this earth to be healthy for us, why? Coffee, tea, in moderation, are good for you too. Tea is more than just caffeine.
I find it odd that most states legalize pot before they legalize/decriminalize shrooms. Psilocybin mushrooms are native to a lot more states than cannabis. It's an odd experience to walk down the streets of NJ and see a patch of Psilocybe Ovoideocystidiata growing in a mulch bed and to think, "Wow! A natural fungal felony with freewill and a means to reproduce, turning other people's mulch beds into felonies!"
The captcha on that is ridiculous. I couldn't pass until changing to another network (from fixed residential to mobile). Tapped a checkbox a dozen times and solved a half dozen rounds identifying objects in photos before giving up. Android Chrome, PiHole, nothing else.
If the PiHole is to blame (haven't checked yet), I guess it sort of makes sense that I can't expect to read TFA when offering neither tracking nor dollars in return.
Alternative proposal, don't use Google DNS since they gather a gargantuan amount of data on you as is. Personally I use Mullvad (they also offer DNS over HTTPS/TLS), but there are many fine providers out there.
Can the set of what resolvers work be described in the inverse? What's blocked instead of what's allowed, or the nonstandard config that has hit-or-miss compatibility?
It comes at a price point many can't afford. There should be more options.
As noted elsewhere, it is powerful medicine and not without risks. But we also need to remember that many other medications come with significant risk as well, including suicidal ideation.
So yes, it's powerful and should be treated with respect, but many of those other medications don't require you to spend thousands of dollars to have a baby sitter whilst taking it.
It's justified in the context that's been set up -- certification requires a lot of time and the license is big bucks too. Add to that the length of a trip would be many hours.
Finding a friend to babysit is not always easy. I've got this crazy idea on setting up a cooperative to do something like that. Leverage existing guides from tripsitters.org and others. Develop protocol and legal indemnification, identify suitable locations (nature!), etc.
I'd love to chat this up with anybody who doesn't think it's crazy (and even those that do, to disabuse me of this notion). There's another spin on it too that I need to write out and find likeminded souls to explore...
I've been thinking of the same thing, and I think the ideal thing would be to use the psychedelics as a sacrament in the context of a weekend-long initiation ritual. Participants would travel into a remote forested location and go through activities and rituals that would give meaning to the psychedelic experience, as well as rituals and activities with the objective of integrating the psychedelic experience into their day-to-day lives.
I have written out a bit of the experience, I can share it with you if you'd like. We're still in the planning phase.
I've had "friends" in the OTO and that is something I'd like to avoid, but yes, please! My contact info is in my profile -- please ping me, as I'd love to get involved.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to have professional babysitters who have had training and experience talking people through rough patches, maybe some first aid training too.
Personally I wouldn't trust someone who has never done them before. I mean I don't know what a "professional" babysitter's training entails, but in my experience people who have never done psychedelics tend to accidentally do arbitrary things that set off a bad trip at a much higher rate than those who have done psychedelics. People who have done them before tend to be able to see how things might lead to a bad trip.
I solved a bad trip one time by turning the TV off in the other room. It was almost inaudible to me, but it was playing WWE and it was just... negative. Turned it off and everything was fine, but the other babysitter (someone who'd never done psychedelics) couldn't be convinced that the TV was the issue because they couldn't see how negativity could cause a bad trip.
This is all probably just bias on my part. No reason a professional psychologist couldn't make these connections too.
While I see where you're coming from, how do you address the healthcare gap? I agree with personal freedom of choice and choosing your own risk tolerance, but as a society we collectively pay for the healthcare costs of those who fall through the cracks and go too far. This problem isn't unique to drugs in any way, we face the same problem with e.g. excessive alcohol use, and there the problem is also largely unsolved.
The thing is, there are many things that have a statistically similar or worse risk profile than many (not all, especially not highly addictive) drugs. Many contact sports, even wildly popular ones such as football and soccer, are associated with an increased risk of dementia. Horseback riding is also quite risky compared to the use of drugs. And then there are also all the extreme sports which are also not outlawed.
We could as a society outlaw anything and everything that would statistically burden our healthcare system, but in the end we would be living in a fairly boring world.
You take a heroic dose of mushrooms, apply eye covering, and lie down in a comfortable place. You listen to music, such as the John Hopkins Playlist. Then, you journey inward. You experience ego death. You confront fears. You feel a sense of connection and oneness with the world. When you recover, you are in a very malleable state and need to talk about your experience, your thoughts and feelings. This is a crucial step in using mushrooms for cognitive change. You can't just solve problems while high. You need to process the experience with someone qualified to help you work through what came to the surface.
You're supposed to have initial therapy sessions leading up to the journey, sessions after, and two journies two weeks apart.
Psychedelics can change your mind but do them with help in the right setting.
They've had them in Holland decades ago. Tried them once, was the craziest movie experience I've ever had and didn't feel like repeating this ever again.
From a programmer's perspective, I think everyone should try them once. It's like commenting out a portion of the code to see the effects as part of debugging. It's neat to be like, "Oh, if you just turn off the image stabilization, the walls look like waves, and then the pattern matcher takes over and goes crazy."
I think this is an important distinction many people who are not familiar with the matter miss, psilocybin is not a party drug. I would say psilocybin is closer to say ayahuasca than it is to MDMA or other similar things. A good analogy I once heard is that on party drugs, you're figuratively behind the driver's wheel, whereas on psilocybin you're along for the drive and you'll see where it takes you.
I think this is a misconception about psilocybin and drugs in general. Just like "the dose makes the poison," the dose determines how much control you have. Small doses of acid/mushrooms are very common among partying festivalgoers.
If you are a woman, there is a recent recent book called the psilocybin handbook for women by Jennifer Chesak, it's concise, and organized by topics and more importantly cites sources.
It was useful for my wife and I gift it to any female friend who ventures into psychedelics.
Since millions of people have been taking mushrooms for thousands of years without this side effect, it seems unlikely we'll suddenly start finding fried brains.
Seems like it's in line with the standard US medical system inflation then. Here there are at least some additional things like the facility and the 'facilitator' that's supposed to help the trip achieve the medical goals, they're not just tossing you some dried mushrooms in a baggy and wishing you a good time.
Been there, done that. Have the postcard. I got to experience the even more fun version where you feel like your death is imminent, you watch your surroundings stop rendering chunk by chunk, and your long term friend is telling you it is indeed all a simulation that everyone but me knew about, and I really was dying (more accurately: going "offline" for an upgrade, and my "spirit" wouldn't be persisted across versions).
She later apologized and said she thought I was joking. We don't talk anymore.
As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.
It is interesting to observe, retrospectively, how the brain can adopt a new set of axioms and coerce every one of the "senses" into supporting those axioms - no matter how detached from "our typical understanding of reality" (whatever that means) they are.
> As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.
It's best not to proselytize on HN. It's ok to talk about your own experience of course, but when it starts to move into standard religious tropes, that's already a kind of flamebait and discussion quality plummets, and boy did that happen in this thread.
Would you have preferred I left out that second sentence? The parent seemed to be asking for help and that seemed to be on-topic. Though I suppose it could be inferred from the first sentence... but I think even the first sentence alone would have been likely to instigate the same response. Which then makes me wonder if it really is "ok to talk about [my] own experience" in an entirely on-topic discussion?
> It is interesting to observe, retrospectively, how the brain can adopt a new set of axioms and coerce every one of the "senses" into supporting those axioms - no matter how detached from "our typical understanding of reality" (whatever that means) they are.
Brainwashing is real. Just make people really emotionally unstable and then hit them with an onslaught of social pressure with a vision.
You're asking me to summarize years of reflection and several near-death experiences into an internet message board comment, but I'll try to scrape the surface.
In short, I had lost all faith in the "official narrative" of creation/existence/whatever as taught in schools/society/etc. that I had grown up believing (growing up I'd have called myself atheist, then agnostic). You might call this an anti-science view, but I'd counter it is more scientific to reject a theory when it does not match observations than to keep it just because it's "the standard". Anyways, this put me on a path of not knowing anything to believe, which is to say any seemingly small flashback/thought/whatever could shatter whatever worldview I had been temporarily existing in and send me into a seizure.
This continued for some time until I began to be touched by what christians would call the Holy Spirit, which guided me towards preachers of the Gospels (aka "The Word", aka "Jesus Christ" (see John 1)). I began to see the innate truth presented by The Word, as I saw how my lived experiences were consistently in agreement with it. For one, I embraced prayer and observed the Father respond to it.
Basically, I built up a new worldview around The Word (Jesus Christ) and it has been unshakable, in stark contrast to all the attempts I had made to do the same without Jesus (Matthew 7:24-27 summarizes this well).
Get behind me, hellweaver! For it is written: Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.
(For those following along, this is a cute and fun example of Scripture being used to rebuke attempts to shake the foundation. The forces that be typically aren't so overt.)
Could you explain what about my comment you consider to be a "flamewar"? As far as I was aware we were simply acting out the Parable of the Sower as an example of my prior narrative.
Can you expound your experience(s) with the Holy Spirit? What does/did it feel like? Was it auditory or a feeling, or was it a series of life experiences? Was the communication one-way or two-way? Were you ever wrong in attributing something to the Holy Spirit, and you found out later?
A general feeling of guidance to do a certain thing, followed by a full-body feeling of euphoria when doing that thing. Sometimes accompanied by "coincidental" positive interactions surrounding that thing.
Ephesians 5:18 instructs us to "not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit". And it is indeed accurate that the feeling is a higher high than wine or weed will take you. I suppose molly or heroin might be superior but I have no experience with those. And there's something psychologically nice about feeling good because you are doing the God-ordained right-thing, versus simply hijacking chemical receptors. And the Holy Spirit has no "come-down", which is nice.
> A general feeling of guidance to do a certain thing, followed by a full-body feeling of euphoria when doing that thing.
Do you have Scriptural support for that? It seems like the Holy Spirit often communicated with words (e.g., "the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.”"), unless you think that is simply the way it is recorded
Many people who struggle with things like mental health, addiction, and general life dysfunction find religion grounding. Religions answer questions about ethics, foundational reality, and other aspects of life that are riddled with ambiguity.
Yes, God may have created psychedelics for a reason, but why not cut out the middleman and just “go to the source.” What many in AA learn, the higher power is the only way. Everything else is a treadmill.
That God kinda-became human to "sacrifice" himself (with no loss, got up 3 days later to live forever, nothing was sacrificed) in order to forgive the sins of people, but only if they believe it, isn't spiritual, it's silly. You owe someone something, and someone else or that person pays it for you -- but if you don't believe that happened, it never happened. Great stuff.
I don't need to have an answer for life, the universe and everything to reject that kind of answer. It smells way too much of humans. The Bible even has a bit where it says a pot should not criticize his potter for making it crooked -- while the potter blaming and condemning the pot he made is perfectly fine and sane. If you have a problem and try to fix it with such things, you now have two problems. "Jesus can save you, if you let him" -- nope, he can just do it if he exists and gives a fuck about anything other than playing abusive games.
The Quran is no better, with God bragging how he could have made everyone rightly guided but didn't because he promised to fill hell with people and djinn and always keeps his promises.
It all boils down to "might is right". That stuff isn't insane, by definition, at least to those who actually lap it up, because God threatens the people who reject it.
If a God exists, and made clouds and sparrows and sunshine and love, I would basically be spitting in his face for even considering any that sordid stuff. You might say I know my shepherd's voice, and differentiate it from humans in a trench coat pretending to be a giant, which sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me. I can dig Meister Eckhart, anything below that is just brown shirt antics in my sight, and my reaction to it was and is "come at me, bro". Don't tell me my knee will bend, bend it. Shit or get off the pot.
And people who are fine with being saved from eternal torture through essentially random chance ("being pulled"), while others who are every bit as bad as them get tortured forever, who are crying tears of gratitude while looking the other way, are not the ones I would want to spend eternity with.
Consider you are developing a genetic algorithm with the goal of creating a cohort of entities that have the ability to pursue light. Each generation, you initialize a set of start states based on the prior generation and let things play out according to your rules. In the end, you persist those that found the light by taking their information and carrying it on in some sense in the next generation. The information of those that did not find the light is discarded.
Now, you are the author of the entire creation. At any point you can intervene in any way you want, for instance to relocate an entity that was very far from the light to be much closer to it. And you do indeed do this quite regularly. In fact a large amount of what you do as the author is go out to find the entities that are very far from the light and shepherd them back to be close to it. Sometimes, this relocation sticks: the entity sees the light, recognizes it, and continues to pursue it. Sometimes, it doesn't: the entity either wanders around aimlessly with no regard for the direction of the light, or indeed it actively pursues darkness.
At the end of the generation you have a spectrum of entities: those who never left the light, those who strayed occasionally but always took to your shepherding back, ..., all the way to those who actively ran away from the light at every opportunity. So yes, you are the author. You have complete control over how all these entitles move into the next generation, and you can save all of them if you'd like. But why would you?
If the goal is to evolve an entity which can pursue light independently, why compromise this goal by "relocat[ing] an entity that was very far from the light to be much closer to it"?
And if the goal is just to allow as many entities as possible to enjoy the light, why not relocate them all to be close to it? Why not save all of them into the next generation?
You know that small difference in the initial conditions of an entity can play a large role in the path it follows, and you further know that an entity which is spawned into a position where the light is very faint is less likely to be able to pursue it. You sometimes put new creations in which you have much confidence into initial conditions where they are very unlikely to survive, as a means of testing them (perhaps there is another "level" they are taken to to train a new feature once this stage is mastered). If they do not end up being able to pursue the light in those initial conditions, you might indeed let their information perish. But you might instead want to see if they could find the light when moved somewhat closer to it, as a way of checking if their ability is entirely busted or simply not as sensitive as you thought it might be.
> And if the goal is just to allow as many entities as possible to enjoy the light, why not relocate them all to be close to it? Why not save all of them into the next generation?
I'm not sure that is the goal, but regardless your machine only has finite resources, but is changed with presenting an infinite environment. Sacrifices must be made.
You seem to have wandered off the justification of God's behavior as part of a coherent mission, and you are simply describing the characteristics of God which you believe in, but which many people with other beliefs have cogently described as illogical, cruel or anti-humanistic, in sci-fi terms.
The mission remains to develop a cohort of light seeking entities. But this is all a metaphor. I cannot hope to comprehend, much less explain, the intricacies of the situation.
And if you have an argument to make, make it. Don't just say "other people made arguments, and trust me: they were really good".
Which part of the following is not believed by most Christians?
> That God kinda-became human to "sacrifice" himself (with no loss, got up 3 days later to live forever, nothing was sacrificed) in order to forgive the sins of people, but only if they believe it
All of it? Specifically, the 'kind-of' - most Christians beleive Jesus was fully human/mortal. 'with no loss'- most Christians beleive Jesus gave the ultimate sacrifice, not only his mortal life, bit also profound and incomphrensible suffering (don't forget the events in Gethsemane, not just at the hands of the Sanhedrin and the Romans). Also his sacrifice went far beyond forgiving sins of beleivers. It included the promise of eventual resurection for for everyone, not just beleivers. (Details can vary among sects as well as individual persons as to the full impact of Christs sacrifice and resurection on unbeleivers, but the vast majority do beleive that there are effects for everyone, regardless of belief in this life or the next).
Christianity and its doctines are much deeper and richer on these topics than this characature would imply.
I said "kinda" because I didn't want to get into the whole trinity stuff, since it's besides the point to me. But I agree that many Christians, and Muslims, and Jews (and other monotheists) are great people, my last paragraph was a bit harsh. I know many of those people would be happy for everyone to go to heaven, or paradise, or at least find peace in death, whatever it may be, they pray for them, and not just to get brownie points but out of genuine compassion. I know that.
But in my opinion, it's because they're better than the religion. That is their humanity, such humanity is not found in the source materials. I can only speak for myself: in my early 20s, I was confused and deeply in pain about the state of the world, and through a series of coincidences (or signs from God :P) I ended up kinda, vaguely, believing in it. I wanted to believe in it. But I could not get over my empathy for everyone: if everybody isn't saved, nobody is saved. Not to mention that "saving" someone from the wrath you inflict on someone for not believing you saved them is equal parts crazy and abusive. Jesus can mock the wise and laud the wide-eyed children all he wants, but even in the deepest depths of my desperation I could not accept it. I read the stuff, I think about it, and I'm out.
My beef isn't with God, if it exists. But I do have beef with religion, yes. Disappointed with the Bible, I turned to the Quran, found the exact same content with even more bragging. And something about "Jesus can save you (if you let him)" did kinda trigger me, since the Bible says, nobody can come to God lest they get pulled. So don't blame people for not getting pulled, that's victim blaming.
The way you speak of wrath gives me the impression you have only heard of the "eternal conscious torment" interpretation of Hell. You should know that this isn't found in the preachings of Jesus, or the Bible in general. There are several other Biblically-founded interpretations of Hell, including things like "torment in proportion to sins", "torment until repentance", and what might be considered "eternal emptiness", basically the same as what an atheist would say happens on death. I learned this via these lectures: https://www.thenarrowpath.com/topical_lectures.php#Three_Vie..., but you can google "three views of hell" to get a variety of takes on the topic.
Under these interpretations, there is no "wrath" inflicted upon the lost, they simply do not gain the reward of having faith and instead enter into the "default" death state.
> "Jesus can save you (if you let him)" did kinda trigger me, since the Bible says, nobody can come to God lest they get pulled. So don't blame people for not getting pulled, that's victim blaming.
Your view is sounds consistent with a lack of belief in Free Will, is that what you believe? The Calvinist branch of Christianity supports this view, but it is not the only interpretation. If you don't believe in Free Will might as well just stop reading here because nothing is in your control anyways :)
If on the other hand you do believe in Free Will, it must be the case that you have a choice in coming to Christ. It is true that nobody can come unless they are pulled, but they can also resist that pull. The Bible speaks many times of God saying mortals resisted His call. Most famously perhaps Sodom and Gamora.
And the pull can come in many forms, most commonly in being preached the Gospel. It is very hard at this point to exist in the world without someone at some point having attempted to preach the Gospel to you, and the Bible makes it clear that Jesus Christ gave up his life so that all may be saved. Indeed, the most famous sentence in perhaps all of time supports this: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (emphasis mine).
So under a non-Calvinist interpretation everybody has the opportunity to come to salvation, assuming they have heard of Christ (the pull), and it is up to them to choose to do so, by choosing to believe in Him.
1. ok, so the word 'kinda' is not an essential part of the doctrine, got it.
2. 'profound and incomprehensible suffering' - what is Jesus supposed to have suffered which is different from many other humans who have been betrayed, tortured and killed? Whatever you think it is, it appears to be extra-biblical. The Gethsemane quote is just "my soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death". Allowing for loss in translation this is an expression of suffering well within human experience.
3. 'the vast majority do beleive that there are effects for everyone, regardless of belief in this life or the next' Sorry, no. The vast majority of modern Christians belong to churches for which 'sola fide' is not just an essential part of their theology, but the foundation of their existence.
Actually, it's super controversial, even among Christians. If it is documented through the Bible, that's not evinced by your link (to a conservative Evangelical website), which only cites Acts and John, two very closely related parts of the Bible. And neither of those says anything about the resurrection of those who are not saved happening because of Jesus's sacrifice.
I wouldn't try to define a "true" Christian. But not any of the many Christian I have ever spoken to about their beliefs, nor any of the many Christian denominations I am familiar with.
I'm a flesh automaton created to house a polymer that is capable of propagating itself through time. For what end? Maybe it's emergent behavior from a structured universe, maybe life is meant to converge towards some higher end. Who knows.
Ridiculing is one thing. Waging holy war, murdering, burning and dehumanizing is unfortunately a common reaction to differing viewpoints among religious folk.
And I would add, the world is more peaceful and loving and moral under Christian morals (the morals we all currently share) than under the ethics of the Roman Empire. Christians ended the slave trade for specifically, uniquely Christian reasons. It was a religious issue. Modern progressives grew out of the Protestant culture of puritan founders. It’s why we embraced immigration.
It’s one thing to be ignorant of the creator (and deny creations miraculous nature), but to be ignorant of world history; please read about Rome.
Yeah, I'm 100% atheist, but often feel horrified by the shallow understanding of religion and theology that many other atheists exhibit. I want shake them and say "do you really think you're smarter than Thomas Aquinas?"
Sure, he was wrong... but not worthy of ridicule. It's just so easy and satisfying to assume that disagreement indicates stupidity.
I think they're saying, somewhat facetiously, that they don't see dead people because they're aphantastic.
Phenomenologically, I'm not sure people typically "see" Jesus (Holy Spirit, et al) as much as perceive their presence or influence.
(I'd say the seeing dead people thing was a simple, bad-faith comment, but I believe it was Thomas Aquinas who made the "if you can't see it, it's because God didn't want you to see it" class of arguments regarding insensible phenomenon, so maybe it's actually a profound theological treatise they're working up.)
> I think they're saying, somewhat facetiously, that they don't see dead people because they're aphantastic.
Yes.
> Phenomenologically, I'm not sure people typically "see" Jesus (Holy Spirit, et al) as much as perceive their presence or influence.
Not quite. Jesus is unique in the Trinity as being the fleshly form of God that can indeed be associated with a clear image, that people (at least at some point in history) were expected to see and hear. Accordingly, I have heard some (but certainly not all) Christians speak of "seeing" Jesus in a phantastic sense (sometimes quite regularly - even constantly), and conversing with Him at length in this same sense. That is beyond my ability to reason about, so I do not.
> if you can't see it, it's because God didn't want you to see it
Indeed. Learning of my own aphantasia left me feeling profoundly broken, and it was in a sense the subject of that original "bad trip". It was unsettling to learn that "everyone else" has some seemingly magical power that I do not, and I had developed a fascination with finding a way to "fix myself".
I've since come to consider my nature to be God's intentional creation, so if there is some way I am different from others there is certainly a good reason for it – even though I might not know what that reason is.
