Tag Archives: Psychiatry

Does Microdosing Improve your Mood and Performance? Here’s what the Research Says

Posted on by under Psychology, Science, Shared
File 20190206 86233 7rvfkk.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
Microdosers take such small quantities of psychedelic substances that there are no noticeable effects.
By AppleZoomZoom

Vince Polito, Macquarie University

Microdosing means regularly taking very small doses of psychedelic substances such as LSD or psilocybin (magic mushrooms) over a period of weeks or months. The practice has made countless headlines over the past couple of years, with claims it can improve health, strengthen relationships, and increase productivity.

These claims are surprising because microdosers take doses so small there are no noticeable effects. These can be just 1/20th of a typical recreational dose, often every three or four days. With such small amounts, microdosers go about their daily business, including going to work, without experiencing any typical drug effects.

Previous research suggests microdosing may lead to better mood and energy levels, improved creativity, increased wisdom, and changes to how we perceive time.

Read more:
LSD ‘microdosing’ is trending in Silicon Valley – but can it actually make you more creative?

But these previous studies have mainly involved asking people to complete ratings or behavioural tasks as one-off measures.

Our study, published today in PLOS One, tracked the experience of 98 users over a longer period – six weeks – to systematically measure any psychological changes.

Overall, the participants reported both positive and negative effects from microdosing, including improved attention and mental health; but also more neuroticism.

What we did

As you would expect, there are many legal and bureaucratic barriers to psychedelic research. It wasn’t possible for us to run a study where we actually provided participants with psychedelic substances. Instead, we tried to come up with the most rigorous design possible in the current restrictive legal climate.

Our solution was to recruit people who were already experimenting with microdosing and to track their experiences carefully over time, using well validated and reliable psychometric measures.

Microdosers go about their lives without any typical drug effects.
Parker Byrd

Each day we asked participants to complete some brief ratings, telling us whether they had microdosed that day and describing their overall experience. This let us track the immediate effects of microdosing.

At the beginning and end of the study participants completed a detailed battery of psychological measures. This let us track the longer-term effects of microdosing.

In a separate sample, we explored the beliefs and expectations of people who are interested in microdosing. This let us track whether any changes in our main sample were aligned with what people generally predict will happen when microdosing.

What we found

There are five key findings from our study.

1. A general positive boost on microdosing days, but limited residual effects of each dose.

Many online accounts of microdosing suggest people microdose every three or four days. The thinking is that each microdose supposedly has a residual effect that lasts for a few days.

The daily ratings from participants in our study do not support this idea. Participants reported an immediate boost in all measures (connectedness, contemplation, creativity, focus, happiness, productiveness and wellness) on dosing days. But this was mostly not maintained on the following days.

However, there was some indication of a slight rebound in feelings of focus and productivity two days after dosing.

Microdosers experienced increased focus.
Rawpixel

2. Some indications of improvements in mental health

We also looked at cumulative effects of longer term microdosing. We found that after six weeks, participants reported lower levels of depression and stress.

We recruited people who were not experiencing any kind of mental illness for the study, so levels of depression and stress were relatively low to begin with. Nevertheless, ratings on these measures did drop.

This is an intriguing finding but it’s not clear from this result whether microdosing would have any effect on more significant levels of mood disturbance.

3. Shifts in attention

The microdosers in our study reported reduced mind wandering, meaning they were less likely to be distracted by unwanted thoughts.

They also reported an increase in absorption, meaning they were more likely to experience intense focused attention on imaginative experiences. Absorption has been linked to strong engagement with art and nature.

4. Increases in neuroticism and some challenging experiences

Not everyone had a good time microdosing. Some participants reported unpleasant and difficult experiences. In some cases, participants tried microdosing just once or twice, then didn’t want to continue.

Overall, participants reported a small increase in neuroticism after six weeks of microdosing, indicating an increase in the frequency of unpleasant emotions.

5. Changes do not entirely match people’s expectations

People have strong expectations about the effects of microdosing. But when we looked at the specific variables participants most expected would change, these didn’t match up with the changes actually reported by our microdosers.

Two of the biggest changes microdosers expected were increases in creativity and life satisfaction, but we found no evidence of shifts in these areas. This suggests the changes we found were not simply due to people’s expectations.

What does it all mean?

This complex set of findings is not what’s typically reported in media stories and online discussions of microdosing. There are promising indications of possible benefits of microdosing here, but also indications of some potential negative impacts, which should be taken seriously.

Read more:
Opening up the future of psychedelic science

It’s important to remember this was an observational study that relied heavily on the accuracy and honesty of participants in their reports. As such, these results need to be treated cautiously.

It’s early days for microdosing research and this work shows that we need to look more carefully at the effects of low dose psychedelics on mental health, attention, and neuroticism.The Conversation

Vince Polito, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cognitive Science, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Psychiatry as Pseudoscience

Posted on by under Psychology, Science

Not only psychiatry itself but also the values reflected in its statistical definition of “normalcy” serve to condition men to habitual, unthinking, conformist behavior.

– Benjamin R. Barber

psychiatryprotest

 

Moral Bias and Politics in Psychiatry

 

Unrecognized Facts About Modern Psychiatric Practice (PDF)

  • There are no known biological causes for any of the psychiatric disorders apart from dementia and some rare chromosomal disorders. Consequently, there are no biological tests such as blood tests or brain scans that can be used to provide independent objective data in support of any psychiatric diagnosis.
  • Psychiatric drugs have often been prescribed to patients on the basis that they cure a ‘chemical imbalance’. However, no chemical imbalances have been proven to exist in relation to any mental health disorder. There is also no method available to test for the presence or absence of these chemical imbalances.
  • Psychiatric diagnostic manuals such as the DSM and ICD (chapter 5) are not works of objective science, but rather works of culture since they have largely been developed through clinical consensus and voting. Their validity and clinical utility is therefore highly questionable, yet their influence has contributed to an expansive medicalisation of human experience.
  • Just like other substances that affect brain chemistry (such as illicit drugs), psychiatric drugs produce altered mental states. They do not ‘cure‘ diseases, and in many cases their mechanism of action is not properly understood.
  • Studies have found that antidepressants have no clinically significant benefit over placebo pills (inert pills) in the treatment of mild to moderate depression, while they provide some benefit for severe depression, at least in the short term. Recent research also suggests that antidepressants may be associated with a risk of increased mortality, at least among the elderly.
  • There has been little research on the long-term outcomes of people taking psychiatric drugs. The available studies suggest that all the major classes of psychiatric drugs add little additional long-term benefit, and for some patients they may lead to significantly worse long-term outcomes.
  • Psychiatric drugs can have long-lasting effects on the brain and central nervous system, particularly when taken long term, which can lead to physical, emotional and cognitive difficulties.
  • Psychiatric drugs can have effects that include mental disturbance, suicide, violence, and withdrawal syndromes. These can be misdiagnosed as new psychiatric presentations, for which additional drugs may be prescribed, sometimes leading to long-term use of multiple different psychiatric drugs in the same person
  • Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs can be disabling and can cause a range of severe physical and psychological effects which often last for months and sometimes years; in some cases, withdrawal charities report, it may lead to suicide.
  • Use of psychiatric drugs in children and adolescents has been rapidly expanding across the developed world. The potential long-term damage these drugs can have on developing brains has not been properly assessed. Furthermore, there is now evidence that increased use of medication within this age group may lead to worse long-term outcomes.
  • The UK regulator of psychiatric drugs (the MHRA) is entirely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and employs ex-industry professionals in key leadership positions. Such conflicts of interest could lead to lenient regulation that places commercial interests above patient protection.
  • Ties between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry are particularly widespread in psychiatry. In the UK psychiatrists do not have to report to any agency or authority how much industry income they receive each year.
  • The majority of psychiatric drug trials are conducted and commissioned by the pharmaceutical industry or those who have extensive ties with them. This industry has a long history burying negative results, and of manipulating research to highlight positive outcomes.

myth of mental illness

The Myth of Mental Illness

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor?

Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest.

Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart?

Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.

– William Shakespeare