Psilocybin Mushrooms and depression

Preparation, Preparedness & Prevention Fitness and Nutrition
1

Several studies find they may be helpful with depression and anxiety. Examined in people with cancer, but no reason to assume the effect would be unique to people with cancer. More data is needed, but you can bet pharma is busy looking at Psilocybin analogs for drug development and clinical trials.

A single dose of magic mushrooms can make people with severe anxiety and depression better for months, according to a landmark pair of new studies.

The doom hung like an anvil over her head. In 2012, a few years after Carol Vincent was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, she was waiting to see whether her cancer would progress enough to require chemotherapy or radiation. The disease had already done a number on her, inflating lymph nodes on her chin, collar bones, and groin. She battled her symptoms while running her own marketing business. To top it all off, she was going through menopause.

“Life is just pointless stress, and then you die,” she thought. “All I’m doing is sitting here waiting for all this shit to happen.”

When one day at an intersection she mulled whether it would be so bad to get hit by a car, she realized her mental health was almost as depleted as her physical state.

That’s when her 27-year-old son sent her a link to an invitation from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, seeking cancer patients to sign up to take psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to alleviate their anxiety and depression. “Start thinking about all the existential questions you want to ponder while your window is open to the universe!” her son wrote.

Vincent, who is 5 foot 1 and 61 years old, has never been a big drug user. She doesn’t like taking aspirin, and the one time she used cocaine in her 20s, she fainted. But she’s taken other risks—she was a sky-diver for 10 years—and she figured there was a chance the experience might “reboot” her. She signed up and, after being screened, flew down to Baltimore from her home in British Columbia.

The results of Vincent’s mushroom trip—and those of 79 other study subjects like her—are now being made public, and they’re very encouraging. A pair of randomized, blinded studies published Thursday in The Journal of Psychopharmacology provide the most robust evidence to date that a single dose of psilocybin can provide relief from the anxiety and gloom associated with cancer for at least six months.

Roughly 40 percent of people with cancer suffer from a mood disorder, which increases their risk of suicide and impairs treatment. Evidence they can be helped by antidepressants is weak. “People are facing their own mortality, their own demise,” said Roland Griffiths, a professor at the the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the lead author of one of the studies. “That’s a very special and quite poignant vulnerability that many people have in facing life-threatening illnesses.”

Cont:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/12/the-life-changing-magic-of-mushrooms/509246/

2

Mushroom for depression, X for PTSD, who would have thought psychoactive drugs would be considered treatment for anything?

F.D.A. Agrees to New Trials for Ecstasy as Relief for PTSD Patients

3

I saw the mushroom lady on the news. I thought they meant it would be an ongoing medication and then she said it all happened in the one experience.

I suppose it’s not a lot different than some tribes religious experiences. You know the weekend experience that enlightens your future. She seemed pretty normal to me, not like some nut case. Hard to believe one dose could make that much change for such a long time.

4

And there were studies on using Acid for alcoholism back in the 60’s & 70’s.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-17297714

5

If it weren’t for social stigmas and legal issues we would have learned about these decades ago.

There are researchers chomping at the bit to try and use what are currently schedule 1’s for legitimate uses. However, funding is almost non-existent.

6

It makes perfect sense: X has its origin in treating psychiatric health issues well before it was ever a club/party drug (and some health professionals were very much opposed to its being scheduled as it was) and people have been using Psilocybin for thousands of years.

7

There’s legit medical uses for all manner of scheduled drugs, and are just starting to get some research interest and traction. Hopefully both stigma and scheduling to go the way of the dinosaur

8

Absolutely. But I am not going to hold my breath. We have trouble getting marajuana legal for terminally ill cancer patients.

9

A friend of mine gets cluster headaches, evidently they can help with them too. Or so his research tells him.

10

A good bump for this thread.

Data continues to grow finding compounds in mushrooms appear to have a wide range of potential benefits, from depression to delaying dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“New research suggests that certain edible and medicinal mushrooms contain compounds that may promote nerve growth in the brain and protect against “neurotoxic stimuli such as inflammation” that contribute to neurodegenerative diseases, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.”

The study looked at the “bioactive compounds” in mushrooms and their neuroprotective and cognitive benefits. Researchers reviewed scientific evidence and discovered that “they may fulfil a preventive function against the development of Alzheimer’s disease” and that “mushrooms contain diverse yet exclusive bioactive compounds that are not found in plants.”

Cont:

http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/healthy-living/news/a27568/mushrooms-could-prevent-dementia-and-alzheimers-disease-suggests-study/

Source study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/28098514/

11

Another study of interest:

Eating magic mushrooms can treat depression, study finds

The drug ‘resets’ the brain circuits to immediately improve moods

Eating magic mushrooms can help treat depression.

That’s according to a new study that found that the drug psilocybin, found in mushrooms, can “reset” the brain’s circuits and help ease symptoms.

Scientists got special permission to give the mushrooms to 19 people who had not been helped by traditional treatments. They said their mood was lifted immediately, and that in some cases the effect would last as long as five weeks.

Brain scans showed that the neural circuits in the brain had been reset, pushing them out of their depressive states, the scientists found.

Cont:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/magic-mushrooms-depression-study-psilocybin-brain-neural-circuits-symptoms-a7998166.html

12

Tad OT, but still though this the best place for it. Gets the award for the coolest hypothesis of how we split off from our cousins to develop the big brains:

"Imagine Homo erectus, a now-extinct species of hominids that stood upright and became the first of our ancestors to move beyond a single continent. Around two million years ago, these hominids, some of whom eventually evolved into Homo sapiens, began to expand their range beyond Africa, moving into Asia and Europe. Along the way, they tracked animals, encountered dung, and discovered new plants.

But that’s just the version of our origin story that happens to be widely accepted by scientists.

A more radical interpretation of these events involves the same animals, dung, and plants but also includes psychedelic drugs. In 1992, ethnobotanist and psychedelics advocate Terence McKenna argued in the book Food of the Gods that what enabled Homo erectus to evolve into Homo sapiens was its encounter with magic mushrooms and psilocybin, the psychedelic compound within them, on that evolutionary journey. He called this the Stoned Ape Hypothesis.

McKenna posited that psilocybin caused the primitive brain’s information-processing capabilities to rapidly reorganize, which in turn kick-started the rapid evolution of cognition that led to the early art, language, and technology written in Homo sapiens’ archeological record. As early humans, he said we “ate our way to higher consciousness” by consuming these mushrooms"

Cont:

https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis

13

Cool hypothesis indeed. However, both Terence and Dennis McKenna are loony toons IMO. Despite my opinions of the two, I still think Psilocybin has great potential in many areas - neurogenesis and psychiatry being all but two of them.

There is a recent “interview” between Joe Rogan and Paul Stamets, a world renowned mycologist, that you will likely find interesting. They even mention the McKennas.

https://youtu.be/mPqWstVnRjQ

Official Kremlin Transmission

14

The same is being said about LSD. As with all studies I question who paid for the study? The SSRIs seem not to be as good as the people that push them say they are.

15

One can be a loon, but still brilliant loon with plenty to contribute. I can’t say if that’s the case for those gents as the topic is out of my lane to say one way or another, but being a loon does not defacto negate the intel per se. Known some real interesting loons in my day :wink:

16

All I know is the 10 or so times I’ve done mushrooms in my early and mid twenty’s I had tons of fun :slight_smile:

17

Study on mushrooms and depression with measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression: fMRI-measured brain mechanisms

Scientific Reports volume 7, Article number: 13187 (2017)

Psilocybin with psychological support is showing promise as a treatment model in psychiatry but its therapeutic mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, cerebral blood flow (CBF) and blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after treatment with psilocybin (serotonin agonist) for treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

Quality pre and post treatment fMRI data were collected from 16 of 19 patients. Decreased depressive symptoms were observed in all 19 patients at 1-week post-treatment and 47% met criteria for response at 5 weeks. Whole-brain analyses revealed post-treatment decreases in CBF in the temporal cortex, including the amygdala. Decreased amygdala CBF correlated with reduced depressive symptoms. Focusing on a priori selected circuitry for RSFC analyses, increased RSFC was observed within the default-mode network (DMN) post-treatment. Increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex-bilateral inferior lateral parietal cortex RSFC was predictive of treatment response at 5-weeks, as was decreased parahippocampal-prefrontal cortex RSFC.

These data fill an important knowledge gap regarding the post-treatment brain effects of psilocybin, and are the first in depressed patients. The post-treatment brain changes are different to previously observed acute effects of psilocybin and other ‘psychedelics’ yet were related to clinical outcomes. A ‘reset’ therapeutic mechanism is proposed.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13282-7

18

You can go to YouTube and listen to Dorian Yates experience with psychoactive drugs treating his depression.
Interesting interview and a very interesting guy.

19

I have known Dorian for a long time and discussed that one.

20

I only recently found those videos.
Very impressive information about a very impressive guy.
It would appear he set a goal, educated himself and then became the best in the world in a very competitive sport.
Pretty Amazing.