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Psilocybin vs. Antidepressants

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iksaxophone

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Jul 6, 2015
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What are people saying about the advantages and disadvantages of both? I've heard mushrooms and other psychedelics can be used to treat depression, but I'm not sure by what mechanism.
Also, I have no idea how legal antidepressants work, but that's another research project.
 
Psilocybin can help depression not directly but through psilocybin assisted therapy. The psilocybin experience allows the patient to make much greater advances in one therapy session than could normally be made in probably a year of sober therapy. Using them as a self medication for depression could be a risk as without proper guidance a psilocybin trip could certainly worsen a depression too.

There is some emerging evidence also that it reduces activity in the part of the brain responsible for depression, and that it may help brain cell repair and growth, so there may be something more to it than just an adjunct to therapy but it's likely the combination of both that make it so effective. I believe preliminary trials show it clears up symptoms of depression for an average of 3 months, though only very small trials have been done so far.

I think if we can gather more good evidence on them then it's a preferential treatment to SSRIs and similar medications. Exploring your subconscious under the influence of psilocybin and with the assistance of a therapist is actually addressing the root causes of your depression, whereas SSRIs are simply managing symptoms.
 
iksaxophone said:
What are people saying about the advantages and disadvantages of both? I've heard mushrooms and other psychedelics can be used to treat depression, but I'm not sure by what mechanism.
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Classic psychedelics (i.e. serotonin receptor agonists) can be used to treat depression in one of two ways:
a) Psychedelic/Psycholytic therapy: you take it either in the presence of a therapist licensed to work with it (very rare and still largely experimental) or just take it on your own and come to various realizations during the trip that you can discuss with your therapist later.

b) micro-dosing: Very low (i.e. non-psychedelic) doses of LSD, shrooms et. al. produce an antidepressant effect. The problem here is that it can be hard to gauge the exact dose - shrooms, being a natural product, are going to vary in their potency depending on how old they are, how they were dried, species/strain, which part of the fungus you are eating (...) whereas with street LSD tabs are often underdosed and inconsistently laid. I suppose the RC analogs of these drugs (in your body, 4-AcO-DMT converts to Psilocin just like the Psilocybin in shrooms does; 1p-LSD converts to plain old LSD) might be your best bet for that.

We don't really know much about the long-term effects of microdosing, but at hallucinogenic doses I'd say SSRI's are far safer for somebody with mental health issues than psychedelics are (and yes, I've taken both). As powerful as the psychedelic experience can be, it will not necessarily always give you a more positive outlook on life - it can also confront you with a powerful sense of isolation and despair; and if the experience is *too* blissful, it might promote magical (if not outright delusional) thinking.
Also, people aren't trying to pass off dangerous NBOMe's as SSRIs to make a quick buck 8(
 
Hodor, what do you think about the 'no bad trips, just hard trips' theory? I've had a few mushroom experiences and they all have had difficulty but I always came out of it with a better understanding of something. Even though the drug itself didn't necessarily make me feel good.
 
I've had both 'hard' and outright 'bad' trips. Admittedly only one outright bad one though.
 
iksaxophone said:
Hodor, what do you think about the 'no bad trips, just hard trips' theory? I've had a few mushroom experiences and they all have had difficulty but I always came out of it with a better understanding of something. Even though the drug itself didn't necessarily make me feel good.
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Unpleasant experiences can yield some of the most valuable insights, true. However, if a trip is so hard on a person that they become more depressed or paranoid for weeks afterwards then I'd say it was arguably a "bad trip" for that specific person.

Although this may sound cynical, one should keep in mind that a hallucinogen is just a chemical that you jam into a receptor to fuck with the normal flow of your mental processes. It can be a tremendously useful *tool* for self-discovery, but one should not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing it into a "teacher" with a specific lesson you were absolutely supposed to learn, where aborting an exceedingly unpleasant trip essentially equals failing a class and showing ungratefulness to the Jaguar Gods of the DMT Spirit Realm.

A good psychotherapist will often have difficult sessions with patients with traumatic pasts, but they also know not to keep prodding to the point where the patient feels unsafe and mentally violated in their office. With a hallucinogen, *you* (or possibly your tripsitter) have to decide when to cut your losses and drop a benzo. Again, I'm not saying to abort a trip as soon as it starts to become *challenging*, but there is no shame in setting your limits once it becomes clearly overwhelming. Maybe *that* was the lesson you were supposed to learn from that trip (and yeah, I'm aware I just broke the rule about not anthropomorphizing the drug from the paragraph above ;) )
 
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I've microdosed psilocybin on and off for a few months and I can confirm (((IME))) that it does impact depression and anxiety to a noticeable extent. I ate fractions of a gram of shrooms every other day or every few days, and I noticed that my thought pattern was slightly more positive all around. I even felt like my brain was working more efficiently, I used bigger words and was just all around better in any situation requiring interaction or logical thinking. I've heard that psilocybin causes neurogenesis as well.

I don't know the exact method of action or if I was even doing it correctly but I experienced something that was not placebo (when I stopped dosing my problems returned). For reference I have never used traditional SSRIs. I would rather microdose.
 
Microdoses of psychedelics directly activate serotonin receptors, whereas SSRI's increase overall serotonin levels.
Interestingly, the newest generation of antidepressants - Vilazodone (Viibryd) and Vortioxetine (Brintellix) are essentially SSRI's that also function as agonists at specific serotonin receptors (mostly 5HT1A). 5HT1A seems to play a major role in mood regulation, yet activation of 5HT1A alone does not seem to reliably produce an antidepressant effect, as demonstrated by the low efficacy of Flibanserin, the antidepressant that was later repurposed as "female viagra".
Maybe the idea of micro-dosing will spur the development of drugs that also act as weak 5HT2A partial agonists that mimic the effects of micro-dosing without being psychedelic.
 
In the 50s and 60s psychedelics were being studied for mental illness and many involved say they showed great promise and could have revolutionized psychiatry.

This, however, involved tripping with a therapist in a structured manner.

Buying a bag of mushrooms on the street is not the same. They may help with your depression, they may fuck your head up worse.

Not a fan of antidepressants other than wellbutrin. That one gives me a bit of energy and helps my ADD a bit.

Personally I don't like the idea that depression can be treated chemically, I think depression has to do with your thought process being fucked or bad life events getting you down.

The best treatment currently available to unfuck your thought process is cognitive behavioral therapy.
 
Psylocibin works in my opinion re-establishing new neuron chains. It destroy your past neuron chains of negative experience. But what is negative experience? is like fears wich in past helped us to survive in various situation, but it is not always neede to exist for so long period. So depression is negative neuron chain wich exist for too long time wich psylocibin destroy and re-establish as new.
 
(/QUOTE)
Personally I don't like the idea that depression can be treated chemically, I think depression has to do with your thought process being fucked or bad life events getting you down.

The best treatment currently available to unfuck your thought process is cognitive behavioral therapy.[/QUOTE]

What if that individual is very well versed in cognitive behaviour therapy and other forms of self-reflection? I think if both types of chemicals are band aids, at least psychs are more effective because they are able to make self reflective thought processes more effective and long lasting.
 
treezy z said:
In the 50s and 60s psychedelics were being studied for mental illness and many involved say they showed great promise and could have revolutionized psychiatry.

This, however, involved tripping with a therapist in a structured manner.
Click to expand...

This is a good point.
 
DMT suppresses the default mode network which quells things like depression, anxiety and social phobia. It is not strange to think that psilocin can do this as well, although there are some curious differences between psilocin and DMT.

So there is a basis for thinking psilocin can be anti-depressant, however the experience itself can be rather unpredictable and it is hard to say what doses are needed for anti-depressant effect and if this requires doses that also produce a psychedelic trip.

The unpredictable outcome of the trip itself can really obscure and complicate the mental efficacy. Tripping without a guide indeed does increase unpredictability, because there wouldn't be someone to guide you back to the 'main road'. People can get breakthroughs but can also get 'hopelessly' stuck in their issues.

Anti-depressants like SSRI's have rather limited success % when placebo is accounted for and the extent to which you get side effects is unpredictable, also on occasion they can destabilize you during the weeks you are getting used to them - but ultimately the outcomes are not that wildly spreaded.
Psychedelics are much less reliable, but have the advantage of not producing chronic side-effects, although rarely people do get HPPD, PTSD or triggered / exacerbated psychiatric conditions.

So it's a matter of a crapshoot vs. a limited but more reliable effect. Psychiatric supervision usually means you have less of a gamble, although depending on where you live a psychiatrist can also follow your condition when you self-experiment or self-medicate although they don't assume responsibility and it is usually quite a different situation... if you have not tried anything for your depression it might be wise to see if some atypical medications help (mirtazapine made me feel a bit better - I am opposed to SSRI's), psychedelics are probably better reserved for treatment-resistant depression (although it is not responsible to trip if you are actually suicidal or feel hopeless).

How about low dose ketamine in hospital setting ;D Can help as a nice reset for your spiralling thoughts and feelings and what remains may be less treatment-resistant.
 
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I think that whether microdosing works or not just really depends on the person/situation. Ive tried it for anxiety and depression and I found that it had no effect at all. I even tried doubling the dose. That's not to say that it doesn't work, or won't for you. Many people have had results, so it's worth a shot.

I actually found that the best way to almost completely eliminate crippling anxiety was aniracetam, and the best aid in knocking depression down a notch or two was Ashwaghanda.

Of course, you've got to be prepared to make some serious life changes regarding your circumstances/health/mind state, otherwise it's coming back/staying.

I'd imagine it's partly a natural human response to forcing us to change our circumstances for the better of our health. Easier said than done of course, but a lot easier when you're not so deep in the pits of depressive hell.
 
I looked up aniracetam and ashwaghanda. Aniracetam seemed particularly interesting. Can you point me to some good resources on it?
 
If you Google them you'll read much the same I did. Check:https://examine.com

And for my thoughts check the nootropics thread on here, and feel free to ask me any questions.

That said, I've pretty much summed up my experience in here. I was suffering crippling anxiety and depression on a daily basis, having never done so before.

Aniracetam pretty much eliminated my anxiety entirely, and ashwaghanda reduced my depression noticeably. The effects of the Ashwaghanda were short term, whereas I only suffer from mild anxiety right now.
 
Tranced said:
If you Google them you'll read much the same I did. Check:https://examine.com

And for my thoughts check the nootropics thread on here, and feel free to ask me any questions.

That said, I've pretty much summed up my experience in here. I was suffering crippling anxiety and depression on a daily basis, having never done so before.

Aniracetam pretty much eliminated my anxiety entirely, and ashwaghanda reduced my depression noticeably. The effects of the Ashwaghanda were short term, whereas I only suffer from mild anxiety right now.
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Do you know if ashwaganda and/or aniracetam can be safely combined with SSRIs like Lexapro and Klonopin?

And please no preaching from anyone about SSRIs not working.

I've gotten SOME pretty significant help from it, but it's not always enough.

What I'm really upset about is the kratom ban because it helped me better with my depression AND anxiety better than anything else I've ever tried other than MAYBE Shrooms but even though I DO very much want to grow them myself my life circumstances at the moment won't permit that without wanting to go into greater detail (and I also SUCK with anything to do with science so I'd probably fail a lot before i got it right).

It really is true for me that most of my shroom trips have made me feel even more anxiety and depression free than Kratom or anything else I've ever used but the problem is that any release I got ended when the trip was over and I never made lasting changes.

I also disagree with posters who think that chemical depression and chemical anxiety don't exist.

I don't want or care to get into a debate about it cause we won't change eachother's minds, but I think it's been pretty close to proven that certain people's brains are lacking in serotonin, dopamine and other chemicals that regulate emotion and that faulty brain processing (whatever you attribute to this) can produce this as well.

As someone with anxiety and depression myself i can't believe it has 100% to do with life circumstances.

Sure, they play a MAJOR part, but there's a chemical component as well IMO.

So with Kratom now becoming illegal I am looking for more drugs and plants which might be able to help me with my own depression and anxiety when the Klonopin and Lexapro aren't always able to fully do the job.

I think psychedelics in general are amazing tools for this kind of thing, but I'm still wary of ordering RCs, or else 4-Aco-DMT would probably be the first one I would/will try.

If anyone has any more suggestions for any sorts of drugs, be they psychedelics, opioids, stimulants, dissociatives, benzos, or others which DON'T negatively interact with Lexapro or Klonopin (although I CAN skip my Klonopin for a day or two but SOME would be left in my system) I am very interested in hearing about them.

Even legal or over the counter supplements are fine to suggest IF you think they TRULY work.
 
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