Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!
|
 Uptown4Life
Stranger
Registered: 12/12/11
Posts: 1
Last seen: 1 year, 4 months
|
 Magic mushrooms may be therapeutic   3
#15708744 - 01/23/12 09:59 PM (1 year, 4 months ago) |
|
|
Good evening
I've lurked around this site for some time now, never really participated but here's something worth mentioning. I haven't seen it posted so here it goes:
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/23/magic-mushrooms-may-be-therapeutic/?hpt=he_c1
Comments (195 comments)
Permalink
Magic mushrooms may be therapeutic
Rave-goers and visitors to Amsterdam before December 2008 may be intimately familiar with magic mushrooms, but there's little scientific knowledge on what happens to the brain while tripping.
Now it appears that more research is warranted. A growing number of studies suggested that perhaps the mushrooms' key ingredient could work magic for certain mental disorders.
New research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on why one of the mushrooms' hallucinogenic chemical compounds, psilocybin, may hold promise for the treatment of depression. Scientists explored the effect of psilocybin on the brain, documenting the neural basis behind the altered state of consciousness that people have reported after using magic mushrooms.
"We have found that these drugs turn off the parts of the brain that integrate sensations – seeing, hearing, feeling – with thinking," said David Nutt, co-author of the study and researcher at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom.
Nutt is also Britain's former chief drug adviser, who has published controversial papers about the relative harms of various drugs. He was asked to leave his government position in 2009 because "he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy," according to a letter in the Guardian from a member of the British Parliament.
Psilocybin is illegal in the United States and considered a Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin and LSD. Schedule 1 drugs "have a high potential for abuse and serve no legitimate medical purpose in the United States," according to the Department of Justice.
But in the early stages of research on psilocybin, there's been a bunch of good news for its medicinal potential: psilocybin has shown to be helpful for terminally ill cancer patients dealing with anxiety, and preliminary studies on depression are also promising.
Nutt's study is also preliminary and small, with only 30 participants. His group used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look at how the brain responds to psilocybin, from normal waking consciousness to a psychedelic state.
The study found that the more psilocybin shuts off the brain, the greater the feeling of being in an altered state of consciousness, he said. It's not the same as dreaming, because you're fully conscious and aware, he said.
The medial prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain in the middle, appears to be crucial - it determines how you think, feel and behave. Damage to it produces profound changes in personality, and so if you switch it off, your sense of self becomes fragmented, Nutt said. That's what happens when psilocybin decreases activity in it.
"Some people say they become one with the universe," he said. "It's that sort of transcendental experience."
Another brain region that psilocybin affects is the anterior cingulate cortex, which is over-active in depression, Nutt said. Some patients with severe depression that cannot be treated with pharmaceuticals receive deep brain stimulation, a technique of surgically implanting a device that delivers electrical impulses directed at decreasing activity in that brain region. Psilocybin could be a cheaper option, Nutt said.
It's counterintuitive that a hallucinogenic drug would de-activate rather than stimulate key brain regions, although other studies have shown a mix of results regarding psilocybin turning brain areas on and off, said Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Griffiths was not involved in Nutt's study, but has also researched the effects of psilocybin.
Even if this drug gets approved some day, don't expect to be able to pick up a prescription for psilocybin at your local pharmacy, Griffiths cautioned. There's too much potential for abuse, he said.
Although scientists have found many positive effects of psilocybin in experimental trials, there are of course potential dangers. Some people have frightening experiences while on psilocybin. The fear and anxiety responses of magic mushrooms can be so great that, when taken casually in a non-medical setting, people can cause harm to themselves or others. They may jump out a window or run into traffic because of a panic reaction.
The drug would have to be administered in a controlled setting in a hospital, if found in further research to be an effective and safe therapy for certain mental illnesses, Griffiths said. It would not be appropriate for people who already have psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, since psilocybin can exacerbate those symptoms.
But among healthy volunteers, Griffiths and others have found that people may have long-lasting positive effects from the vivid memories of being on psilocybin (in a controlled, experimental setting). People report mystical experiences of feeling the "interconnectedness of all things," which can be life-changing.
"People claim to have an enhanced sense of self, more emotional balance, they're more compassionate, they're more sensitive to the needs of others," he said. "They have more well-being and less depression, but they're not 'high' in any conventional sense. They feel like their perceptual set has shifted."
The memories of the psilocybin experience, and positive outcomes that users attribute toward them, can last as much as 25 years, research has shown.
Still, there's just not enough known yet about the long-term safety of psilocybin to say whether it could also do damage to the brain, Griffiths said.
"There’d have to be changes in the brain for these long-lasting memories and attributions to occur," Griffiths said. "We don’t know how those changes occur, and why."
____________________________End of Article___________________________
I've read that some of y'all have used shrooms to cure your depression, I used it a few years ago but recently I've entered a difficult period in my life so I've agreed to take zoloft, but contemplating trying this ^^. How would one go about approaching this technique, is it simply just asking the mushroom wtf is this depression about or does it have to do more with just 'feeling' you're way just like the Self-Inquiry method?
Peace
Edited by Uptown4Life (01/23/12 11:16 PM)
|
dwtk
it all rolls into one
Registered: 02/24/07
Posts: 4,481
Loc: Franklin's Tower
Last seen: 3 months, 29 days
|
 Re: Magic mushrooms may be therapeutic [Re: Uptown4Life]
#15708832 - 01/23/12 10:16 PM (1 year, 4 months ago) |
|
|
hey dude, welcome but just a heads up - you should edit your post and quote the entire article before the thread gets locked or a mod has to do it himself.
once again, welcome 
|
eaSe
E@Se
Registered: 12/13/11
Posts: 76
Loc: United States 
Last seen: 1 year, 2 months
|
Re: Magic mushrooms may be therapeutic [Re: Uptown4Life]
#15708866 - 01/23/12 10:25 PM (1 year, 4 months ago) |
|
|
The day after I trip, I feel great and could see how a low daily dose could help with depression.
I dont really know how to go about it, but I think a lot of it could be placebo. I mean if you tell yourself and believe that eating one kiwi everyday will help your depression, it might just work.
--------------------
"Man, you go through life, you try to be nice to people, you struggle to resist the urge to punch 'em in the face, and for what?
For some pimpily little puke! To treat you like dirt! unless youre on a teeeam! Well I'm better than dirt. Well, most kinds of dirt, not that fancy store-bought dirt...That stuffs loaded with nutrients, I can't compete with that stuff."
|
 Led Zeppelin
Tripper
Registered: 05/17/10
Posts: 2,810
Last seen: 3 minutes, 46 seconds
|
Re: Magic mushrooms may be therapeutic [Re: dwtk]
#15708870 - 01/23/12 10:25 PM (1 year, 4 months ago) |
|
|
get off zoloft man that shit will make you emotionless after a while. I havent taken it but every friend I have on SSRIS is just an emotionless zombie
--------------------
  
If acid puts you in the drivers seat, and mushrooms put you in the passenger seat...then DXM puts you in the trunk
|
einseins
Stranger
Registered: 12/20/09
Posts: 10
Loc: Perth, Western Australia
Last seen: 8 days, 18 hours
|
Re: Magic mushrooms may be therapeutic [Re: Led Zeppelin]
#15709071 - 01/23/12 11:13 PM (1 year, 4 months ago) |
|
|
Also, SSRI's such as Zolofoft will greatly, if not completely, diminish the effects of shrooms. You will need to be off Zoloft about a month for a normal dose of shroooms to have their normal effect.
Peace
|
 veggie
Registered: 07/26/04
Posts: 13,985
Loc:
|
Re: Magic mushrooms may be therapeutic [Re: Uptown4Life]
#15709087 - 01/23/12 11:13 PM (1 year, 4 months ago) |
|
|
 This thread has been closed.
Reason:
The story you linked to seems to be pretty much a duplicate of the story posted by Simplepowa here, so I am going to lock this up.
I agree with Led Zeppelin that getting off Zoloft would be wise, but that is not a decision to be taken lightly and should be discussed with your doctor. Plus Zoloft, or any SSRI for that matter, will lessen any experience you have with mushrooms. Many people cannot trip at all while taking antidepressants. If you want to try a totally non drug approach, look into Cognitive Therapy. Most cities will have therapists that specialize in it.
If you are severely depressed you may want to avoid mushrooms entirely. If you do want to experiment with mushrooms to relieve your depression, I would suggest going with very small doses, even .5 grams or less, every couple of days for a while and see if that helps then stop and reevaluate.
We do have forums here that are better for this type of discussion, Physical and Mental Well Being for example, so start there. Good luck!
| |
|
|
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Alan Rockefeller
809 topic views. 0 members, 21 guests and 0 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Toggle Favorite | Print Topic ]
| | |
|
|
|
Images only 
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Edit 
Reply 
