Magic Mushrooms 'Reboot' Brain In Depressed People, Study Suggests (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Magic mushrooms may effectively "reset" the activity of key brain circuits known to play a role in depression, the latest study to highlight the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics suggests. Psychedelics have shown promising results in the treatment of depression and addictions in a number of clinical trials over the last decade. Imperial College London researchers used psilocybin -- the psychoactive compound that occurs naturally in magic mushrooms -- to treat a small number of patients with depression, monitoring their brain function, before and after. Images of patients' brains revealed changes in brain activity that were associated with marked and lasting reductions in depressive symptoms and participants in the trial reported benefits lasting up to five weeks after treatment.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial, who led the study, said: "We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments. Several of our patients described feeling 'reset' after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been 'defragged' like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt 'rebooted.' Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary 'kick start' they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a 'reset' analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy." The study has been published in Scientific Reports.

Comments

Bring it on

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Maybe it could help put the brakes on the recent suicide epidemic.

Re:Bring it on

[PopeRatzo]

Maybe it could help put the brakes on the recent suicide epidemic

I sure hope so. It's a damn shame that research with entheogens was limited (or outright banned) for all these decades. A lot of people might have been helped.

Re:Bring it on

[Anonymous Coward]

On one hand, that's true, lives could have been saved if we weren't insistent on imprisoning people for various substances (with the bonus of less social destruction in heavily targeted minority communities). But on the other hand, think of the financial and political gains made by a small elite handful!

Next you'll be saying that the money spent on the military industrial complex's 'War on Terror' would have been better used developing cures for diseases far more likely to kill you than terrorism or something crazy like that.

Re:Bring it on

[Anonymous Coward]

The more crazy SHIT (FTFY) doctors put in people's brains, (FTFY) the more mass-murders (FTFY) we get.

Okay, now that your grammar issues are no longer a distraction, we can get a good look at the idiocy of your assertion.

What drug were the NAZI's taking? How about during the massacres of Native Americans at the hands of the colonists and later the fledgling US government, the US Army, etc.?

Oh, how about all the various genocides in Europe, Asia, etc.? All drug-related? What drug was that fuckhead in Las Vegas on? The one in that gay nightclub in Florida? What about the dickwads who shot up their school? As far as I know, (and they'd have probably mentioned it on the news,) the dickhead who blew up that Federal Building in Oklahoma was not high on shrooms, and the braying jackass I refuse to name who murdered a bunch of completely innocent people at the AME Church hoping to incite a war between Americans and OTHER Americans wasn't high on anything other than ignorance. (OH! MAYBE WE BAN THAT!)

It's not all drugs, dude.

Also, drugs like these, the active ingredients in peyote, "shrooms," marijuana, etc., have been used by humans and other animals for hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years, generally without people going dangerously insane. Yet people who don't know shit connect them with misbehavior, and other ignorant morons decide we have to "ban" it.

How about you worry about what YOU put in YOUR body, and let me worry about what I put in mine? There's a nice division of authority that goes neatly hand-in-hand with the division of RESPONSIBILITY. (You see, I'm not RESPONSIBLE for your behavior, so I shouldn't really have AUTHORITY over your behavior, except obviously where it has a DEMONSTRABLE, (not assumed,) effect on others, and it goes the other way as well.)

So for example:
Driving a car on public highways and byways while sleepy, distracted, drunk, high, stoned, etc., should be illegal.
GETTING or BEING sleepy, distracted, drunk, high, stoned, etc., should be LEGAL as long as you don't then try to do something that endangers other people's lives.

Simple.

Re:pfft at hippies

[Khyber]

Ah, look at th' wee lad, LSD. How cute. Come get summa dis DMT when you get another 20 years older.

Re:Honest lol

[freeze128]

The first time you use a magic mushroom, it doesn't seem to do much but make you a little bigger. If you take another one after that, then you can shoot fireballs!

Re:Fucking assholes

[Greyfox]

Sure, sure, because Nixon wasn't looking for any excuse he could find to crack down on the blacks and the hippies. And there was no shortage of twatwaffle cronies who were happy to make up whatever bad science the administration wanted to make that happen. And the pharmaceutical companies had absolutely no reason not to do everything in their power to suppress the natural drugs that worked so much better than the shit they were peddling. And not satisfied just to have the USA stick its head up its ass about the subject for the last 50 years, they went out of their way to export their hairbrained policies to the rest of the world. I hope history judges them harshly for the damage they've done, to generations of African Americans and the public well-being as a whole.

And do you know why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it could help put the brakes on the recent suicide epidemic

I sure hope so. It's a damn shame that research with entheogens was limited (or outright banned) for all these decades. A lot of people might have been helped.

Because someone let ASSHOLES be in charge, and to an asshole, anyone seeming to ENJOY anything... must be doing something wrong, and needs to be stopped.

Thank God that things like aspirin and immunizations don't make you make that "I'm coming!" face... or they'd have been banned and stupidly criminalized too.

I'm serious. If taking aspirin had a side-effect of feeling ecstasy, like all is right with the world, like you've just orgasmed, and did nothing else besides what aspirin currently does, it would be illegal to use, or even possess in the United States because we let fucking assholes run things.

Perhaps... we should stop letting fucking assholes run things?