Scientific American Mind: Psychedelic Healing?

That's exactly where many started - LSD in the 1960s for example. But beware - the field is littered with more damaging failures than even anti-arthritic drugs.

The main problem with any of that sort of mind-bending treatment, is until you try it on an individual, you do not know what reaction is going to happen in that person.

After all, at one stage electro-shock therapy was going to treat patients so they would become well, instead leaving patients tortured, maimed, and killed.

Lobotomy procedures in various types: Prefrontal, orbital, ice-pick etc were tried and found to be permanently damaging.

The balance of a person's mind is affected by many things, and nobody can foresee the results of interfering with another.

Once the "New Therapy" is tried, it may be too late ....

"The main problem with any of that sort of mind-bending treatment, is until you try it on an individual, you do not know what reaction is going to happen in that person."

The same can be said of many of today's pharmaceutical treatments for mental illnesses. Having experienced what amounted to a near-fatal reaction to a commonly prescribed SSRI for depression and never having encountered any kind of lasting negative response to more than one hundred experiences with LSD, psilocybin, ketamine and other psychedelics (and having derived multiple positive benefits from them), I think mainstream research into their efficacy for treating mental illness is long overdue. The US population, among others, suffers from a culturally-imposed negative image of psychedelic drugs which is replete with horror stories and sensationalist propaganda which are, largely, simply untrue.

Hello Guest,

"The same can be said of many of today's pharmaceutical treatments for mental illnesses......"

I agree with you exactly, in what you state there.....

The evidence that LSD caused significant undesired and irreversible side effects in a significant proportion of users was pretty overwhelming (this from work in the late 1960s and early 1970s). However, because of there was typically a substantial delay between the end of the 'beneficial' effects and the visible appearance of these side effects, social users frequently claimed a total lack of such side-effects.

Similarly, drugs that are prescribed for 'minor' conditions such as acne can trigger long-lasting depressions, so 'recreational' drugs are by no means alone in this. Conversely, there are some drugs that usually have highly addictive properties when used recreationally but that have unmeasurable side effects if used for pain relief - apparently the pain centres absorb such a high proportion of the product that minimal amounts reach the problem areas.
I believe the there may be equivalent protective effects when using of "wild" (full-spectrum) marijuana in the treatment of MS; the problem is that although the anecdotal evidence here is strongly indicative, as the use continues to be illegal we may simply be missing the data from those with adverse reactions; clearly, a proper study is needed.

Which leads me to a question: did the worst of your depression precede your exposure to these "multiple positive benefit" drugs that have no side effects?

Guest (#1)
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Caveat utor (and don't simply trust the doctors either)

"The evidence that LSD caused significant undesired and irreversible side effects in a significant proportion of users was pretty overwhelming (this from work in the late 1960s and early 1970s)."

References would be appreciated. We have all been exposed to anectdotal reports, but how much peer-reviewed research has actually been performed which supports your assertion?

"However, because of there was typically a substantial delay between the end of the 'beneficial' effects and the visible appearance of these side effects, social users frequently claimed a total lack of such side-effects."

Causality becomes less clear with the passage of time.

While I agree that psychedelics have the potential to unmask mental illness in predisposed individuals, I don't believe this is, by any indicator, a common phenomenon. Besides, the former is precisely the reason carefully controlled research into the mode of action and effects of these compounds is warranted and long overdue.

"Which leads me to a question: did the worst of your depression precede your exposure to these "multiple positive benefit" drugs that have no side effects?"

Yes. I don't believe I would have ever experimented with psychedelics if I had not been dogged by episodes of severe depression starting in childhood and poorly responsive to a variety of "legitimate" drug therapies.

I saw publications from the 60s and early 70s, but unfortunately they are still not freely available on the web - you will need to go to a specialist library to read them. Because of the delays, any such research needs to be statistical. There is a problem here: 1960s-70s researchers observed such a high proportion of "bad trips" among student volunteers that administration to volunteers was stopped on ethical grounds. (I'm not familiar with the US experience, but this was decided independently both in Czechoslaovakia and the UK). The results of this work were not therefore regarded as statistically conclusive, and results from recreational users do not have equivalent control groups (I understand them to be consistent with the limited results of the formal work, however).

So, yes, you are right that the negative results are not totally conclusive (also, adolescent brains may be more susceptible to negative effects than the general populace). But I would have grave reservations on the ethics of further tests - unless and until the US DOD work from the same period is followed up, analysed, and found to indicate that the side effects indicated elsewhere were not fully replicated - or someone finds indications of benefits (form this previous use) that justify the risks in particular cases.

"But I would have grave reservations on the ethics of further tests - unless and until the US DOD work from the same period is followed up, analysed, and found to indicate that the side effects indicated elsewhere were not fully replicated - or someone finds indications of benefits (form this previous use) that justify the risks in particular cases."

I would share your concerns if I believed that research into the possible use of these drugs as weapons of war and tools for mind control were the only legitimate basis for deciding whether to undertake current research into their medicinal and spiritually enhancing properties. I am familiar with those old experiments and the callous disregard for the set and setting required to avoid adverse reactions in a clinical setting. Those studies are so flawed in their lack of attention to the capabilities of these drugs that any positive benefits derived by subjects were likely entirely disregarded, especially in light of the objectives of the research. That the experiments were widely considered failures only reflects a failure on the part of researchers to conclude that the utility that they desired to discover in psychedelics is contrary to the very nature of the psychedelic experience.

You can easily find, freely available on the Web, inumerable reports of the positive benefits people in all walks of life all around the world have derived from the psychedelic experience. You can also find reports of the occasional casualty. But I would challenge you to even begin to compare the damage done to individuals and society at large by psychedelics to that caused by adverse reactions to modern, licit antidepressants, much less societally sanctioned drugs of abuse such as alcohol and addictive opioids (the abuse of which can be therapeutically approached with much greater success with LSD, ketamine or ibogaine than any other current mode of therapy).

http://www.eleusis.us/resource-center/references/kpt10yrs.php

http://www.ibogaine-research.org/Ibogaine-Research-Project/IbogaineNetscape.htm

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/uoa-ltf100606.php

I wouldn't expect the DOD results to show benefits - only to support or counter the results on medium/long-term negative effects from the UK and Czechoslovakia. And in this respect, I would only accept negative effects that were also observed in those other more sensitive trials. My reasoning is that this is the only reasonably large-scale experiment available where the sample-set was not self-selecting, and therefore the only available back-up source for data on levels of long-term harm.

The problem with the freely-available reports is that the samples are excessively self-selecting. People suffering some of the sorts of harm that were observed are often not in a condition to report on it; in addition, a substantial proportion of schizophrenics are 'in denial' regarding their condition - and this seems to be even more prevalent amongst those who either exacerbated or brought on the condition through misuse of dugs (this comment is based solely on reports on treatment of skunk-induced problems). Then there's the issue of admitting such a cause when seeking treatment (particularly if medical insurance is involved).

Given the apparent risks, if there were to be trials they should be confined to people where benefit is anticipated; they should also start extremely small-scale. I'd also like to see as much supposedly "irrelevant" information retained and analysed as possible - because I have a strong suspicion that there will be correlations between the side-effects and individuals' genetic make-up and/or physical condition, and it should be possible for these to be taken into account when determining treatments

Yes, I agree with you about the failings* of 'licit' pharmaceuticals and in particular antidepressants. I'm afraid that I've been forced to the view that the final ('large-scale') tests on medicaments should be carried out by independent enterprises; the pharmaceutical companies should be given no choice as to which tester is chosen, and all results on accepted medicaments should be published. N.B. that this is against my general philosophy on commercial freedom, but given the histories of buried problems I can see no reasonable alternative.

*Licit recreational drugs (alcohol, caffein, etc.) are a different matter. If they weren't already well-established, I imagine they would be listed as 'controlled substances'. However, we need to bear in mind the unintentional consequences of trying to change this situation in the 1920s.