LSD, “magic” mushrooms and mescaline have been banned in the U.S. and many other countries since the 1970s, but psychedelic medicine is making a comeback as new therapies for depression, nicotine addiction and anxiety. The drugs have another scientific use, too: so-called psychotomimetics, or mimics of psychosis, may be useful tools for studying schizophrenia. By creating a brief bout of psychosis in a healthy brain, as indigenous healers have for millennia, scientists are seeking new ways to study—and perhaps treat—mental illness.
“We think that schizophrenia is a group of psychoses, which may have different causes,” says Franz Vollenweider, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Zurich. “The new approach is to try to understand specific symptoms: hearing voices, cognitive problems, or apathy and social disengagement. If you can identify the neural bases of these, you can tailor the pharmacology.”
Vollenweider and his colleagues have found an existing drug for anxiety that blocks specific effects of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms. When healthy people were given the drug before tripping, they did not report visual hallucinations and other common effects, according to a study published in April 2016 in European Neuropsychopharmacology. The effort is part of a burgeoning movement in pharmacology that seeks to induce psychosis to learn how to treat it.
It makes sense. I often feel that it was my careless use of hallucinogens that caused my illness in the first place. Maybe if they can find a way to undo the damage that’s been done then it might stop the breaks.
I think that more focus is needed on the cognitive aspects of schizophrenia,
this issue prevents a lot of people ( tens of millions worldwide) from functioning.
Are they that desperate?
No real advances with new medications so they resort to God awful mind bending drugs like Mescaline?
Mescaline is to blame for my predicament in the first place.
This is a ■■■■■■■ joke.
They’re not using it to treat schizophrenia. They’re using it on healthy people and then trying drugs like Buspirone to see if it blocks the hallucinations.
Might have implications for treatment much sooner than new meds since this is an already approved drug for anxiety. It’s not going to fix everything but might have potential to help a bit.
I’ve always been interested in taking a hallucinogen to see how it compares to my everyday experiences and hallucinations…I know it’s a huge no-no for psychotic people but I would only do it once. Many reknowned neuroscientists and psychologists have done the same to study hallucinations.
I had my first bout of psychosis at 12 and then went running wild with LSD, mushrooms and Robitussin at 18. I find it hard to believe that these drugs mimic the action of real psychosis well enough to be useful in testing. I’d be very surprised if this ended well.
The only thing about hallucinogens that resemble mental illness to me is when the trip goes bad. A bad trip would be like a field day for psychoanalysis.
I’ve had issues with had trips where I felt like I couldn’t get a certain look off of my face. I’ve had ego death and powerful intrusive psychotic thoughts.
That’s a bad trip for me.
A good trip is an entirely different experience.
Take it from an ex syd head. Acid is better then oral sex BUT it changes ur perception on practically everything. I was a much different person before i experimented. Yea im more loving and open minded to different ideas but u pay a price when u start using it.
I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve done acid and mushrooms, and although I didn’t have a bad time I can compare the two. It is like acute psychosis and it can be heaven or hell which for some is just like sz. If you have sz you honestly don’t need try it. You already have it kind of. It’s just a little more elaborate and pattern forming in its vividness. There is simply no need to try it.
Actually I was thinking more trying LSD. But if it really is like an induced psychotic episode then that would be a terrible idea.
Specifically I want to know if hallucinogen hallucinations are more like psychotic hallucinations, hypnogogic hallucinations (those 2 are different for me) or something entirely different.
Both, hypnogogic but can induce psychosis albeit temporarily for most, but I wouldn’t know if it would effect a sz more in the long term. I wasn’t sz when i had them.
I tried Columbian mushrooms and it was a very intense experience! I literally felt like I saw into a different dimension, it was like self realisation, then moved into a pretty awesome time. But it got scary towards the end. the strange thing is that time moves incredibly slowly because you have 10 thoughts to the 1 that you usually have in the same space of time! All the while incredible patterns were on the walls. And my boyfriends head took on the shape of an alien! I thought I was getting too deep, but then I turned on the lights and came out of it. Intense, weird but cool.
I don’t care anymore