Are there accounts of what it's like to use psilocybin in a clinical setting?
I'm imagining tripping in a therapist's office. Doesn't sound very pleasant.
I'm imagining tripping in a therapist's office. Doesn't sound very pleasant.
I use mushrooms sometimes (rarely, very carefully) while meditating.
They tend to stimulate the area around the vagus nerve - and since meditation is partly frustration, that in turn triggers “uncomfortable” memories.
Also, they seem to smoothen nervous activity? Meditating with closed eyes, often the “black net if colored dots” i see when im sober gets a new more fluid attribute, less choppy.
More often than not, intense crying ensues, and quite a bit of unconscious material surfaces and get confronted.
One drawback to “scoring mushrooms” for emotional healing is quality is inconsistent -
I imagine consistent quality and able hands could greatly help traumatized individuals .. its not a trip in the hedonistic sense, its quite frankly aching to a religious experience
Therapy while "tripping" is very different then the "recreational way". Remember, set and setting are important.
This is just wrong. They use full doses, just not "heroic doses".
https://www.drugscience.org.uk/introducing-the-drug-science-...
I remember hearing a conversation in one episode where microdose research was discussed and David Nutt, the UK's foremost neuropsychopharmacologist, said that studying full doses is more efficient from a process perspective. With such stringent rules around scheduled substances any research means a ton of red tape, keeping people under observation for ages, and so on. It's more effective to study administration of a small number of full doses than run a program to analyse a longer course of microdoses. Of course, you could probably study a one-off microdose but given the subtlety of the effects it's probably hard to distinguish the drug effects from other factors. Given the difficulty of studying this stuff at all and the belief that a full dose is necessary it makes sense to try that ahead of microdose research.
Edit: oh, quote from https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30282-8:
"The extensive use of microdosing psychedelics to putatively improve wellbeing and creativity (Kuypers et al., 2019) raises the question of whether a full psychedelic experience is needed. Microdosing involves taking—usually on a regular basis, e.g., 3 times a week—a low dose of a psychedelic that is devoid of subjective psychoactive effects. As yet there have been no trials of microdosing for any psychiatric disorder, and it seems improbable that a single microdose of psilocybin would have as big an effect in depression as the 25 mg psilocybin “macrodose” usually used. Growing evidence suggests the best outcomes from psilocybin are in patients experiencing the most powerful psychedelic effects, variously called breakthrough, peak, or mystical experiences (Roseman et al., 2018b ). [..]"
Also, Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind" goes into a lot of detail re: the therapeutic process. I'd imagine most clinical processes to be similar to the kind of stuff that happens underground now — full doses, a guide present, care on set/setting etc.
There was some early research which reported success in using LSD and psilocybin to treat schizophrenia in children:
John Hopkins is investigating this. The ethics boards will pretty much require that people be monitored during the intoxication. So yes, probably something along the lines of getting high in a therapist's office.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on his exact points, but the clinical setting was definitely found to have a detrimental effect on the experience.