Magic mushrooms for anxiety and depression

UK - Magic mushrooms may help with depression, say leading scientists

Guardian

Sarah Boseley, health editor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 January 2012 20.00 GMT

A drug derived from magic mushrooms could help people with depression by enabling them to relive positive and happy moments of their lives, according to scientists including the former government drug adviser, Professor David Nutt.

Two studies, for which scientists struggled to find funding because of public suspicion and political sensitivity around psychedelic drugs, have shed light on how magic mushrooms affect the brain.

Nutt, from Imperial College London, was sacked as a government drug adviser after claiming tobacco and alcohol were more dangerous than cannabis and psychedelic drugs such as ecstasy and LSD.

He believes prejudice and fear have prevented important scientific work on psychedelic drugs. Research began in the 1950s and 60s but was stopped by the criminalisation of drugs and stringent regulations which made the work costly.

"Everybody who has taken psychedelics makes the point that these can produce the most profound changes in the state of awareness and being that any of them have experienced," said Nutt.
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More...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/23/magic-mushrooms-psilocybin-depression-drug
 
Just a possibility...........But

I ate some magic mushroom for the first time way back in June i think it was.

It must have been only 500mg at the most. I dont know why we even took it tbh lol. (i fell asleep after taking it, i always fall asleep at afterparties)


however, id also consumed ketamine. weed and mdma that weekend.
But thats the strongest afterglow ive ever ever ever ever ever had , after being on drugs in a weekend... I even got work that week.

Any chance ???
 
It does help the bipolar depression i get abit that's for sure. It helps more then LSD does but i prefer shrooms anyway. Psilocybin just seems to help me sort out all the shit going around in my head and i tend to feel less depressed after taking them. However i wouldn't give someone a dose of shrooms if they where in a bad mindset because a bad trip can be hellish if the right circumstances are there.
 
^ I have an older friend who believes mushrooms may have brought out his bipolar disorder. He doesn't care to take them because they make him feel pretty bad for days afteward mentally. For some strange reason, however, he's never had a bad LSD trip and continues to take it on rare occasions.
 
I was reading this article, and it said part of the study included:

30 volunteers had psilocybin infused into their blood while they were inside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, which measure changes in brain activity.
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My thought while reading this: It is 2012, and this hadn't been done yet, WTF. The potential of psychedelics is incredibly vast, and because of ignorant laws and cultural conceptions the studies done involving them are so lacking. So backwards we are sometimes..
 
Agreed there should be a lot more research. But brain activity has been measured by PET/SPECT for mescaline 20 years ago and psilocybin a couple of times 13-15 years ago.
 
DailyMail said:
And both Nature and Science, the two most prestigious scientific journals, refused to publish the findings.
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Wonder why? I had a look and there's an article on nature news:

However, Nutt’s findings conflict with those of other studies.

“We have completed a number of similar studies and we always saw an activation of these same areas,” says Franz Vollenweider at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “We gave the drug orally and waited an hour, but they administered it intravenously just before the scans, so one explanation is that the effects were not that strong.”

And according to Keith Laws, a neuropsychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, the results could be explained in another way. “Deactivation of the mPFC and PCC are linked to anxiety and anticipation of pleasant and unpleasant experiences,” he says. “This is a stressful situation, even for experienced drug users, and I suspect that they measured something to do with anxiety.”
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(Actually they administered it IV during the scan)

The discrepancy is mentioned in Nutt's paper:

The effect of psilocybin on resting-state brain activity has been measured before with PET and glucose metabolism (8). This study found a global increase in glucose metabolism after oral psilocybin, which is inconsistent with our fMRI results. One possible explanation for this discrepancy relates to the fact that the radiotracer used to measure glucose metabolism (18F-fluorodeoxyglucose) has a long half-life (110 min). Thus, the effects of psilocybin, as measured by PET, are over much greater timescales than indexed by our fMRI measures. It is therefore possible that phasic or short-term effects of psilocybin show some rebound that is detected by longer-term changes in glucose metabolism. More direct measures of neural activity will help inform this hypothesis, but in support of the inference that psilocybin does decrease neural activity, direct recordings of cortical local field potentials (LFPs) in rats found broadband decreases in resting state LFP power after psilocybin infusion—including γ-power (9)—changes in which are known to correlate with changes in the BOLD signal (10).
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And the other two studies don't help - one with psilocybin and PET, similar to the Vollenweider one, and one with mescaline and SPECT - only show slight increases or decreases in metabolism in particular brain regions between drug and placebo.
 
Critical report from NHS Choices.

Scans reveal brain effects of magic mushrooms

Tuesday January 24 2012


“Magic mushrooms could one day be prescribed for depression,” The Independent has today reported.
The newspaper said the approach is based on potentially using its chemical properties to trigger positive memories during psychotherapy.

A number of newspapers have reported similar news, which is based on research led by the former government drugs adviser Professor David Nutt. For example, the Daily Mirror reported that the use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is being considered as part of therapy for depression.
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Crucially, this exploratory study was not a clinical trial or an examination the effect psilocybin has on people with depression. Therefore, it is not possible to say from this research whether psilocybin could have benefits for people with depression. Also, importantly, the possible harms of using this drug, either in the short- or long-term have not been studied here.
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The volunteers in this study had experienced hallucinogens before and did not have depression. Therefore, it is not possible to say whether these people would have exactly the same experience as people who had current or past depression, or people who had never experienced the sensation of hallucinating. This was not a clinical trial and did not look at the effects of the drug on depression.
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More...
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/01January/Pages/psilocybin-mushroom-brain-scans.aspx
 
Study: Magic mushrooms may help treat depression

Psychedelic mushrooms may point to new ways to treat depression, suggest two small brain imaging studies that seem to show how psilocybin -- the active ingredient in such mushrooms -- affects the brain.
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One study included 30 healthy people who had psilocybin inserted into their blood while magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners measured changes in their brain activity. The scans revealed that psilocybin caused decreased activity in what the researchers described as the brain's "hub" regions -- areas especially well-connected with other areas.

That study was published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The second study included 10 healthy volunteers and found that psilocybin boosted their recall of personal memories and their emotional well-being for up to two weeks. The researchers said this suggests that psilocybin might prove useful as an adjunct to psychotherapy. That study will be published online Thursday in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
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Nutt and his colleagues also found that psilocybin reduced blood flow in the hypothalamus, where blood flow increases in people with cluster headaches. Some headache sufferers have reported that psilocybin improved their symptoms.
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full article
 
^ I appreciate the mixture of psilocybin and psilocin, and the different proportions of each in, say, cubensis vs. cyanescens (and the different effects based on those proportions).

As for mushrooms helping depression, it makes a lot of sense to me, personally.
They are one of the most amazing drugs I have ever experienced.
If you told me that they cured cancer and AIDS I would not even be too surprised.
 
LSDiesel said:
I always wanted to get pure psilocybin like in tablet form
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Yes that would be nice. Mushrooms are also very nice too though.

I know many people who have had issues with depression and even OCD, and they said how taking mushrooms did help them at least temporarily.
 
Unbreakable said:
Psilocybin is 4-po-dmt.....

Psilocin is 4-ho-dmt, and 4-aco-dmt is most likely hydrolyzed into psilocin in the liver anyway.....So pretty much they are the same exact compound in mushies.
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Thanks for explaining this. :) I was looking at psilocin/4-ho-dmt trip reports on erowid the other day and they also included 4-aco-dmt reports and I didn't know why those were also included.
 
No problem I once was looking for shrooms in a pill for the fact i hate the taste.... I would assume the world is full of other people who enjoy the experience but hate the ingesting process, so pill form is a god send imho :)
 
Magic mushroom depression trial hits stumbling block

David Nutt, president of the British Neuroscience Association and professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, said he had been granted an ethical green light and funding for the trial, but regulations were blocking it.

"We live in a world of insanity in terms of regulating drugs," he told a neuroscience conference in London on Sunday.

He has previously conducted small experiments on healthy volunteers and found that psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, has the potential to alleviate severe forms of depression in people who don't respond to other treatments.

Following these promising early results he was awarded a grant worth 550 000 pounds from the UK's Medical Research Council to conduct a full clinical trial in patients.

But psilocybin is illegal in Britain, and under the United Nations 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances it is classified as a Schedule 1 drug—one that has a high potential for abuse and no recognised medical use.

This, Nutt explained, means scientists need a special licence to use magic mushrooms for trials in Britain, and the manufacture of a synthetic form of psilocybin for use in patients is tightly controlled by European Union regulations.

Regulatory hoops

Together, this has meant he has so far been unable to find a company able to make and supply the drug for his trial, he said.

"Finding companies who could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the licence, which can take up to a year and triple the price, is proving very difficult," he said.

Nutt said regulatory authorities have a "primitive, old-fashioned attitude that Schedule 1 drugs could never have therapeutic potential", despite the fact that his research and the work done by other teams suggests such drugs may help treat some patients with psychiatric disorders.

cont at
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-04-07-magic-mushroom-depression-trial-hits-stumbling-block
 
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