[HN Gopher] Psychedelic drugs take on depression
___________________________________________________________________
Psychedelic drugs take on depression
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-08-26 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| kornhole wrote:
| Psychedelics are illegal not because they create hallucinations
| but rather because they help break down the hallucinations we
| have about the world. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man
| is a hallucinating idiot.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| One of my favorite stories about psychedelic experiences is a
| friend's coworker dosing acid one weekend, coming back in on
| Monday, saying "I hate it here" and quitting on the spot. They
| went on to travel and start their own company, and are doing
| great for themselves.
|
| In my experience, psychedelics really help tear down the
| justifications we put up for the BS we tolerate in our daily
| lives and can help you connect with what you really appreciate
| and want in life. Definitely helped me realize the kind of
| person I want to be and appreciate the good things in my life.
| And similarly to the story about the coworker quitting, my
| tolerance for BS is nil, now, too.
| kirse wrote:
| _psychedelics really help tear down the justifications we put
| up for the BS we tolerate in our daily lives_
|
| Thing is you can do that with an extended weekend of
| fasting/meditation and solitude in the woods. Bring a notepad
| and pencil if you really want to lock in the new perspective.
| Bonus is that fasting is also widely known to be healthy.
|
| Plus how do you really know the causative agent of change was
| the drugs, what if there was already the underlying emotional
| desire to do something and having the experience was more
| about creating the justification to act?
|
| Surely one of the insights you had to have realized on drugs
| is how little agency we really have. We easily back-fill
| reasoning and stories to happenings that were bound to happen
| anyway. Our brains always want a story for cause and effect,
| but so much of what happens occurs outside of our control or
| awareness. It's like riding on a rollercoaster and proudly
| claiming "yea I decided to make it do a loop"
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| >what if there was already the underlying emotional desire
| to do something and having the experience was more about
| creating the justification to act?
|
| That's definitely part of it, and I think kind of what OP
| was alluding to in that the experience allows you to
| dissolve many of the cognitive habits you've built up over
| your life, allowing you to experience an extremely honest
| perception of your own mind.
|
| I'm not sure if you've tried it yourself, but I have yet to
| find any other way to achieve that level of clarity. I
| understand in theory that a lot of people find their way
| there by meditation, but I don't have the discipline or
| attention span to get there.
|
| Psychedelics are a way of making that state of being
| accessible to those who may lack the ability or the
| motivation to get there through other means.
|
| I'll also say that of those I know who partake in both,
| psychedelics still offer incredibly powerful and profound
| experiences even to those who practice meditation seriously
| for years or decades.
| Bakary wrote:
| If that were true, we would likely see a greater variety of
| discourse and testimonies from people who use hallucinogens.
|
| On the contrary, they tend to sound surprisingly similar in
| terms of world-view to each other. Once you experience
| hallucinogens yourself, it becomes pretty clear why that might
| be.
|
| The obvious conclusion is, of course, that hallucinogens unlock
| an objective, common reality. That's not what the depth and
| quality of the observations produced suggest, however.
| Natsu wrote:
| I saw Ketamine remove depression immediately after a single
| dose in a loved one. Thought it was magic, because it was, a
| lifetime of depression just evaporated like nothing. But then
| came the psychosis. Nearly got stabbed in my sleep because a
| voice told them to do that.
|
| So... let's just say I think there are other explanations, too.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Ketamine is a magical drug, I've told this story a hundred times
| on HN but it cured my depression overnight.
|
| I was given a large hit of it by a doctor after a horrible
| accident, I went into a K-hole and had a spiritual experience,
| but even more profound was the effect it had for 4 to 6 months
| after.
|
| It was like a veil had been lifted from my mind, the simplest
| pleasures of life made me happy, like smelling fresh coffee or
| feeling the sun on my skin. I had been living in misery for
| decades and suddenly I was awake and lucid and happy.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Oh I've had that experience, and I'm just bipolar.
|
| Ketamine has been known to trigger hypomania and mania in
| patients.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33587793/
|
| 10 mg of Prozac will do the same thing to me, but that's just
| my genetics.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I don't think that was it for me, though I see the parallels.
| I just wasn't miserable, the examples I gave were the
| highlights but really the core of it was that life felt
| tolerable. Looking at the hypomania symptoms I didn't exhibit
| any, beside the elevated mood.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Here's a reminder:
|
| "Depression" is just a label put on a cluster of symptoms to
| make diagnoses consistent across medical providers. It is
| definitely not a singular condition with one cause and a
| consistent treatment across patients. It is likely a multitude
| of conditions which will respond differently to many
| treatments.
|
| Some people with a depression diagnosis will be very
| disappointed with ketamine treatment.
| esperent wrote:
| No doubt, but that applies to all depression treatments. Most
| of which have a far higher risk of side effects, and many of
| which take weeks or months to show an effect if they do work.
|
| Ketamine treatment takes an hour, with virtually no chance of
| side effects, and you'll know if it works within a few hours.
| Even if it only works for a tiny percentage of depression
| sufferers, it should be first line treatment. As it is, it
| seems to work for a reasonably large percentage of people.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Yes, your mileage may vary, as they say. Our bodies are all
| unique and so are our responses. It was a miracle for me, it
| might be completely ineffective for someone else.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think it is more, or different than "our bodies are
| unique" and something else entirely.
|
| Saying someone has "depression" is like saying someone has
| "a stomach ache". The stomach ache might be Crohn's, an
| ulcer, food poisoning, or the aftermath of too many hot
| wings. All would show at least a somewhat similar cluster
| of symptoms, different based on the person, but all
| "stomach ache". Imagine the same for depression, but we
| don't necessarily have the labels or causes pinned down
| very well.
|
| There probably _are_ many conditions under depression that
| we 'll eventually have good diagnoses for and consistent
| treatments for, just not yet.
|
| It's not a matter of "everybody is unique" but that the
| science and testing is quite primitive so far and only some
| of the distinctions and treatments have been worked out.
| tsol wrote:
| Depression is a symptom, not exactly an illness. I mean
| we often treat it like one-- and call that Major
| Depressive Disorder-- but I expect in the future we'll be
| able to break it down to 'inflammatory disorder causing
| symptoms of depression', 'trauma disorder leading to
| symptoms of depression', etc
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Yes, this. IMHO, there are two type of depression, both
| immune mediated, and both drive my glutamate/GABA imbalance.
| One is high glutamate the other is high GABA, either
| effecting different region of the brain.
|
| This imbalance affects serotonin and norepinephrine release.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8311508/
|
| And this change is mediated by the immune system. Glutamate
| is now known as an immunomodulator.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997749/
| mathgladiator wrote:
| Been there, and I just did a booster. I'm now very happy as I
| plug along on my project without any negative judgement:
| https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-mo...
|
| I'm doing silly things for silly reasons, and I've never been
| this happy and at peace. It let me heal from the moral injury
| of working in big tech for a decade.
| programmarchy wrote:
| Cool project. You seem like a fun and interesting person. I
| genuinely mean that!
| mathgladiator wrote:
| Thanks!
| birdyrooster wrote:
| What is your moral injury? I admit I have guilt from working
| in big tech too, but how did it affect your mental health?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Very interesting. I've long sought the divine in the machine
| but haven't found a satisfactory avenue to pursue it so I
| went back to Catholicism instead. It provides answers to our
| suffering that hedonism ignores.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| For me, I found the purpose as my role is to solve puzzles.
| Ketamine gave me a sense of spirit that we are all
| connected in this life, and gave me insights that are hard
| to describe. However, I believe there is value in waking up
| and solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles and it
| may not be time to leverage it in the commerce (if at all).
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I am in no way diagnosing, but I have Bipolar Disorder, so
| did my mother and my brother. I say things like this which
| you wrote when I am hypomanic/manic:
|
| "As I reflect on this, I've concluded that I exist with the
| divine purpose of bringing beauty into the world. Beauty and
| elegance require tremendous suffering because having taste is
| expensive."
|
| It is kind of typical of the condition.
|
| I know nothing I saw will convince you that the state you are
| living in is not a balanced state because I have been there
| as well and no one could tell me otherwise, so I get it.
| whiskyagogo wrote:
| It replaced my lifelong fear (terror?) of death with what I can
| honestly say is now curiosity. You can experience only so many
| deaths in your mind before you learn to be comfortable with the
| idea.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| After my spiritual experience 2 years ago, my latent worry /
| conceptual fear of death was also replaced with curiosity.
| But I was coincidentally faced with death recently and was
| disappointed to see my primal terror is still alive and well.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I am not convinced that a ketamine-induced feeling of death
| is at all relatable to actual death. There is plenty of
| neural activity remaining.
|
| Is it possible you're just convinced it feels like death?
| whiskyagogo wrote:
| The point isn't how similar (or not) the experiences in my
| mind are to actual death, it's that at those times I'm
| convinced I am experiencing not just death, but total
| annihilation of my consciousness which is my personal best
| guess about what happens to us when we die. It's not the
| moments leading up to death I've feared, it's non-being and
| attachment to my own thoughts.
|
| So then when I've experienced a series of "welp, here we
| go, I'm on my way to nothingness" and dealt with that
| terror in those moments, I've had the opportunity to accept
| that fate and even embrace the unknown. Because in a k-hole
| you can be VERY convinced what's happening is real.
|
| And now that I'm not gripped by existential terror when I
| think of my own death, I find myself wondering if I'll be
| surprised to find something else on the other side of it.
| And that's way more fun :)
| staticassertion wrote:
| That sounds frightening. What do yo mean by 'experience only
| so many deaths' ?
| askafriend wrote:
| As they say, "Six million ways to die, choose one"
| whiskyagogo wrote:
| At times I've become convinced that all of experienced
| reality is narrowing to a point and about to wink into
| nothingness, and myself along with it. It's hard to
| explain, but it's very convincing at the time. So as I
| experienced this sort of unraveling of the universe I have
| to confront the idea of my own non-being. Until I come out
| of it and realize it was all in my head :) Even my early,
| terrified experiences felt like therapy, like the pain was
| well spent, so to speak.
|
| It's worth noting, this isn't necessarily representative of
| what most ppl experience per se. These were times where I
| really went "out there" and pushed myself.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| I'm watching the Netflix doc "How to Change Your Mind" about
| this subject. They use similar language: e.g. that psilocybin
| causes terminal cancer patients to view death with
| "curiosity". I find that really interesting, because implicit
| in this "curiosity" must be the idea of consciousness
| existing after death...otherwise what would be curious about
| it? You just die and there's nothing otherwise. So I wonder
| if, e.g. atheists or non-spiritually inclined folks have the
| same experiences in these drugs.
| krrrh wrote:
| I'm basically an atheist and ketamine assisted
| psychotherapy did change my background fear of mortality
| very much in a before and after sort of way. It felt more
| like a different relationship to time and free will. Like a
| realization that the universe existed and unfolded like a
| cellular automata and I was integrated within that. Talking
| to the very experienced therapist afterwards he summed up
| my scattered thoughts as, "you resolved your determinacy."
|
| I still don't believe in an afterlife other than in the
| abstract sense that that the brief existence of me as a
| point of consciousness was impacted by all that came before
| it and will have had an impact on all that comes after. I
| would say more calmness and more acceptance are better
| descriptions than curiosity.
|
| Like a lot of psychedelic experience, there's an underlying
| neurological phenomenon and common subjective experience
| that gets differently interpreted based on your background
| beliefs. It's like the DMT experience of entities is very
| differently interpreted as inter-dimensional elves by those
| DMT smokers who have read a lot of Terrance McKenna, as
| plant spirits by Amazonian ayahuasca drinkers, and as
| channeled spirits or Christian saints by Daimistas.
| sibeliuss wrote:
| It's so wonderful to hear that you were able to overcome
| this.
| dundercoder wrote:
| Seconded. For me however, its a monthly treatment for an hour
| in an office run by an anesthesiologist. The difference is
| night and day compared to any SSRI, SNRI, or TCA I've ever been
| on. Exempting the 3-4 hours post treatment, no ill side effects
| either.
| greymalik wrote:
| > Exempting the 3-4 hours post treatment
|
| What do you experience during that time?
| dundercoder wrote:
| Some visual distortions, difficulty focusing, occasional
| nausea, slow speech, feeling groggy.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > but even more profound was the effect it had for 4 to 6
| months after.
|
| It's important to note that this is an atypically long
| duration. In clinical studies, the duration of effects is more
| around 1-2 weeks. It's possible that the overall experience
| (including surviving an accident and getting a "second lease on
| life") was the trigger for 4-6 months of improvement, not just
| the medication you were given once.
|
| That's why, in clinical practice, ketamine is more successfully
| used in conjunction with typical long-term treatments such as
| SSRIs and therapy. Some studies used a sequence of 6 treatments
| spread out over months in an attempt to kickstart the recovery,
| but it's generally not sustainable as a solo therapy.
| fragmede wrote:
| Therapy is really key to sustainable improvement from
| ketamine, and I worry that it's just being given to patients
| without the therapy aspects, and what are they doing to do
| when it stops working for them?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It definitely wasn't because of the accident, my life is
| ruined lol and at the time I was in horrific pain. But I can
| accept the timeline could be non-typical.
|
| It could also be the huge dose, the studies I've seen use
| lighter doses.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Smaller doses of ketamine (recreational doses) taken via
| nose tend to alleviate depression and anxiety for me for
| 1-2 weeks, depending on how much of it I do.
|
| I've been meaning to travel sometime to a clinic for the
| infusion therapy (that comes with some talk therapy) as
| where I am now its nearly impossible to source clean
| ketamine reliably.
|
| Pretty mild doses of psilocybin mushrooms tend to have a
| longer lasting effect (a month or so), and extremely large
| doses can work for a half a year or so.
| krrrh wrote:
| The shorter duration is also more common with lower dose IV
| infusions. There is evidence that higher concentrations
| (usually delivered infra-muscularly or sublingually), and the
| k-hole experience OP describes delivers more long lasting
| results. In the Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy space, there
| is a lot of criticism of the infusion model of a nurse
| managing simultaneous infusions on several patients at sub-
| psychedelic doses as a cash treadmill, as opposed to a deeper
| psychedelic experience which can be more costly to deliver
| because ideally it demands pre and post integration plus
| administering to a group can be problematic if someone
| experiences a "bad trip". With some preparation and screening
| a lot of the doses in a series can be managed at home though.
| fassssst wrote:
| Regular SSRI had the same effect for me.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Ketamine also has the effect of creating neuroplasticity in the
| 24 hours or so following administration. Even the nasal spray.
| responsible wrote:
| [deleted]
| loceng wrote:
| I've wondered: what are the chances that big pharma will attempt
| to suppress these medicines that compete with their patentable
| products, like seems to be the case with the majority of drugs
| caught up in "the war on drugs"?
| jahnu wrote:
| The frequency of these kind of posts followed by anecdotes about
| how it worked for the commenter (who I believe btw) makes me a
| little uneasy. Somewhere buried in the discussion eventually is a
| comment from a relevant professional urging caution in
| interpreting and reacting to these news reports and anecdotes.
| Now with something as serious as this I would not at all object
| to such cautions being placed a bit more prominently. This isn't
| reckless use of goto being discussed but something much more
| serious. Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. Perhaps
| it's just me, don't take it as a holier than thou attitude.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Your skepticism is warranted. Psychedelics are a hot topic and
| journalists have been promoting a lot of one-sided articles
| that make them sound like miracle cures. In clinical practice,
| ketamine can be useful as part of a recovery and treatment
| strategy, but it's not really an effective long-term treatment
| due to the short duration of effects (1-2 weeks post dosing)
| and the unsustainable nature of the drug (tolerance builds to
| the anti-depressant effect with repeated dosing).
|
| Some ketamine treatment providers are running very professional
| and well-staffed businesses (source: had to do a lot of due
| diligence on the industry for a potential investment) but some
| of the others are shockingly under-qualified to be
| administering high doses of ketamine to patients with little
| evaluation. The regulatory bodies are slowly catching up to
| some of these providers and instituting stricter regulations.
| While there is some therapeutic potential, it needs to be
| delivered in the context of a long-term treatment strategy
| rather than just giving someone ketamine over and over again
| (as some unscrupulous providers will gladly do as long as the
| patient is willing to pay).
| renewiltord wrote:
| Honestly, I find HN's obsession with "professionals" annoying.
| For long-tail conditions, the professionals are frequently far
| less informed than fellow sufferers.
|
| During the beginning of the pandemic, people on HN were telling
| us that N95 masks do nothing without official fit training.
| Bro, official fit training is something you can easily sub with
| a free video from 3M's website. It's this hopeless obsession
| with "official" and "professional" and shit like that when any
| reasonably intelligent individual can work through stuff
| themselves.
| willhinsa wrote:
| Something much more serious for many people is the specter of
| suicide looming over them.
|
| Caution is useful, but it's not always an unalloyed good.
|
| Chemotherapy isn't healthy or safe, but the thing it's used to
| stop is even worse.
| akuro wrote:
| As someone who has taken extremely heavy doses of some very,
| very potent psychedelics (LSD, DMT, ketamine, mescaline and
| psilocybin), I am inclined to agree with you. I acknowledge
| that some people experience great benefits from psychedelics,
| but the current push to label psychedelics as mental health
| miracle solution doesn't sit right with me.
|
| Make no mistake: these chemicals are not to be trifled with.
| People with underlying mental health issues - the poeple who
| would be most interested in using psychedelics - are at heavy
| risk of exacerbating their illnesses. Even outside of those
| special cases, I've seen normal people become heavily affected
| by bad trips. I simply don't think that there is enough
| scientific literature on the adverse effects of psychedelics. I
| also do not like the heavy focus on the "spiritual" aspects
| that these drugs are believed to confer: are you really
| transcending, or are you just so heavily intoxicated that you
| believe you are and no longer have the rational capabilities to
| convince yourself otherwise?
|
| If I can end on just a little anecdote myself, I personally
| believe that heavy psychedelic use is especially
| counterproductive to technical/knowledge-based work. I did
| barely any work during the year that I was experimenting with
| these drugs. I was so content with my life as it was that I
| simply didn't feel the urge to exert myself. I was becoming
| soft, more predisposed to magical thinking. I believed that
| psychedelics had revealed unto me truths about how society
| should be run, how life should be and the true nature of
| mathematics. But I didn't know a damn thing! I just lost the
| inclination to actually analyse my ideas (or notions, because
| they barely qualified as ideas), instead being content to just
| accept them as they were. After a long stretch of abstinence
| from these drugs, I realised how worthless most of these
| notions actually were. I also deeply regretted the amount of
| time I spent taking these notions seriously, as well as the
| amount of time I had wasted in thinking that I had actually
| been experiencing any spiritual truths.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > I was becoming soft, more predisposed to magical thinking.
|
| My experience is only with microdosing LSD and psilocybine
| mushrooms, however this 'softness' does ring true to me.
|
| The good part with microdosing though is that it doesn't last
| anywhere near a year, while the positive effects I've felt
| and the deep conclusions I reached about myself and life in
| general I think will last a lifetime.
|
| LSD has especially helped me get pretty much completely rid
| of anxiety in a particularly tense moment of my life. It has
| also 'thawed' some more ingrained thought patterns and ideas
| I had about things.
| ekzy wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience. Most stories I read
| online about psychedelics are overwhelmingly positive, so
| much that it feels like you'd be missing out on life if you
| didn't try it. It's good to read your kind of stories too.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| There are many personal anecdotes about how one treatment was a
| game changer. I don't doubt them, but as the article says, it
| doesn't work for everyone. I am posting this as a counterweight
| to all the glowing reports.
|
| My wife has some chronic health conditions (EDS and ME/CFS and
| depression); I'm sure they are at least partially related. While
| ramping off of one antidepressant in anticipation of trying
| something different, her depression came roaring back, so the
| doctor prescribed ketamine infusions. It didn't help at all.
|
| Part of the problem was the clinic. One of the (correct) refrains
| about psychedelics is the importance of "set and setting". To the
| employees, this was just one of eight infusions they were going
| to do that day and it was all very routine, but for someone who
| has never experienced psychedelics, an attentive, caring, gentle
| environment would have helped a lot. Being a woman, it was
| tremendously anxious for her to go into a closed room with a male
| nurse she had never met before and give up consciousness and
| control for half an hour. Having a different nurse every time
| wasn't great for building trust. There were some other things
| too, but ultimately the main thing was she experienced no
| benefit.
| jokoon wrote:
| if it's so dependent on the environment, then the drug just
| doesn't work in general, meaning it's not viable.
|
| if doctors are unable to find ways to make a drug work and
| predict it, then it's pointless.
|
| A 4 days vacation every month will have better results, and
| it's something most therapists and psychiatrist also say, that
| lifestyle matters.
|
| If a drug cannot do better than lifestyle change, then the drug
| doesn't work.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| A word of caution: Ketamine treatment is far from standardized.
| Most of the clinical studies I've read aren't using doses that
| produce profound psychedelic trips. The more professional clinics
| seem to have settled on dosing regimens that produce mild
| impairment, but not the full-blown dissociative trips described
| in many of these articles.
|
| Meanwhile, there are a lot of questionable ketamine clinic
| providers popping up all over the country that give much higher
| doses. Some of them promote the psychedelic angle heavily in
| their marketing materials, as it has become a major revenue
| generator from patients who read articles like this one. While a
| single medium to high dose of ketamine may not produce marked
| negative effects, some of the high-dose, repeat-dosing regimens
| used by alternative therapy providers are in the range where I'd
| begin to be very concerned about lasting damage.
|
| I would strongly caution anyone curious about ketamine treatment
| to stick to the lower-dose clinics and providers. Avoid anyone
| trying to sell you on "psychedelic therapy" or who has a
| reputation on the internet of providing excessively large doses.
| Also keep in mind that the antidepressant effects are short-
| lived, so plan to engage with traditional long-term treatment
| (therapy and/or antidepressants) to create a lasting strategy for
| yourself when the short-term effects of the ketamine wear off.
| nwienert wrote:
| This would be far more helpful if you included the dose ranges
| you allude to, how many you think are required to cause damage,
| and threw in a few citations.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Does anyone know what the therapeutic ranges are at different
| clinics? I'm currently in IV infusion clinic where they start
| at 0.5 mg/kg, and increase by 0.1 per session. They are trying
| to target having a light psychedelic experience during the
| infusion, as they've found that gives the desired
| antidepressant effects later on, but not so much so as to be
| really far out, or to be frightening, totally out of body, or
| loss of consciousness at all.
|
| I'm told the max therapeutic dose they administer is somewhere
| between 1-2mg/kg, and I believe anesthetic effects come on
| somewhere in between 2-4mg/kg? Anesthesia doses are
| administered much faster, so I'm sure that it's not a direct
| comparison.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| They should not be lumping ketamine in with all the other
| psychedelics which act on the serotonin 2A receptor. I'm hesitant
| to say ketamine is a psychedelic at all.
|
| Regardless, I find .25 mg of Klonopin can get rid of my
| depression as well, they've known for a long time that depression
| has a strong linked glutamate excitation in certain parts of the
| brain.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| > say ketamine is a psychedelic at all.
|
| For me, whatever I experienced was definitely something.
| https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-mo...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Chronic benzo administration can cause depression, so that
| might not work for everyone.
|
| I'd argue that the term "psychedelic dissociative" accurately
| captures what ketamine can be.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I do not take it chronically and no one should. I take it
| once, as needed. Works for a few days.
|
| And chronic ketamine use can cause depression as well:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5035802/
|
| All these drugs are not the answer. It is much more likely
| there is a fundamental immune dysfunction causing the
| depression. IMHO, all mood disorder patents should be seen by
| rheumatologists, not psychiatrists.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
| NMDA_receptor_encephaliti...
|
| FYI: I have Sjogren's Syndrome and Discoid Lupus
| krrrh wrote:
| Amongst psychedelic therapists it's pretty normal to include
| Ketamine under the rubric of psychedelics these days, even
| though receptor purists might still object. Same is true of
| MDMA. From a subjective experience there's no doubt that it's
| different, but at psychedelic dose ranges most psychonauts will
| characterize it is a psychedelic experience, and ketamine can
| produce experiences every bit as weird and life altering as the
| tryptamines.
|
| One interesting line of research on thinking about new ways to
| characterize this that they all can be characterized as re-
| opening critical periods of development. Gul Dolen at Johns
| Hopkins is spearheading this, and this interview with her is
| worth a listen.
|
| https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-psychoactive-84544756/ep...
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Higher (recreational) doses of ketamine can induce extremely
| interesting states that I would definitely classify as
| "psychedelic" in effect.
|
| It is an interesting drug.
|
| There are also subjectively different effects between racemic
| ketamine and pure S-ketamine. I have never been able to try
| pure R-ketamine, it just doesn't seem to be available.
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