alt Hacker NewsWelcome to year 30 of trying to prove psilocybin works for psychiatric illness. And still in the pilot stage.
Even taking the data at face value, the trial cannot disentangle the drug effect from expectancy, psychotherapy, and statistical noise. The enormous effect sizes are almost certainly inflated, multiple-comparison error is uncontrolled, and the participant pool is highly self-selected. Until a preregistered, parallel-group, active-placebo, adequately powered study with blinded independent raters replicates these findings, their practical value for routine cancer care remains minimal.
It’s so interesting to see how strong the drive to prove something works is, overriding everything. As a clinical psychologist, I would welcome this kind of therapy if it worked. But this is just sad. It’s just like listening to people claim that ivermectin can cure everything.
Show me one place where this therapy is conducted by people who haven’t "drunk the Kool-Aid," and I’ll be impressed. It’s so frustrating to work with actual patients and see how much these therapies really don’t work in reality. These kinds of biased studies pop up all the time without actually panning out. I’m starting to think that people promoting therapy, giving false hope, and spending money on research like this should be viewed as corrupt and evil.
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FDA approved in 2018 for (treatment-resistant) depression?
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...
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>Welcome to year 30 of trying to prove psilocybin works for psychiatric illness.
That is true, but it misses some important nuance: the war on drugs has effectively eliminated the ability for legitimate researchers to do significant research on these criminalized drugs.
For example, for me personally, a mild dose of marijuana is as effective as Zolpidem (Ambien) as a sleep aid, but without the lethargy and mental fog the next morning.
To better appreciate his point, read “The Control Group Is Out Of Control”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
Most people involved in it are aware at some level that this is at best suspect and at worst a deception designed to push legalization. Same as the “health benefits of marijuana” crowd who violently deny the risks, addictive nature, potential to induce schizophrenia (temporary or permanent), tendency to make people lazy and obese, etc.
Legalization has never been a question of “is this good for people?”
Thank you for this. I am neither an advocate nor against psychedelic use in therapy but as a person who has consumed these things in the past, my own experiences make me entirely skeptical of people who put on an advocacy hat around any particular chemical. Especially psychedelics like psilocybin which are extremely unpredictable.
When I was a teen a friend gave me an analogy that stuck with me. In much older computers (e.g. C64, Vic-20, etc), they'd behave "interestingly" when you mucked around with the physical circuit board or there was a fault. E.g. if something short circuited because a screw was loose in the board, or a cartridge was halfway in or a chip partially desocketed, etc. Characters would appear in random places, or the machine go through odd loops and so on. And to someone who didn't know how the machine worked, there could be a certain "magic" and a "pattern" to this. But clearly you'd be missing the point if you thought you had "enhanced" the machine this way.
LSD and psilocybin are kind of like that, but for your brain. They short circuit and alter pathways. In ways that can be entertaining but you're entirely missing the point if you try to assign a higher meaning to them.
Our brains are expert pattern-finding machines, and produce causes and reasons even when there are none. For some there may be value in the experience of altering the operation of your brain to get yourself out of a stuck pattern, I guess. But I am not sure the very random stochastic nature of the whole thing is ... medicinal.
I'm not saying you're wrong on the limitations of these studies, but I also don't think it's unreasonable for people to believe in the power of these drugs.
For many people (myself included) taking psychedelics was an immediately life altering experience. I don't need any more scientific validation that psychedelics helped me than I would need to prove that touching a hot stove burned me. It's an immediate and unmistakable effect that is wholly different from any other experience I've had.
Now, proving that these drugs would be beneficial at a population level may be an unanswered scientific question. But, to quote you: "trying to prove psilocybin works for psychiatric illness" - well, that's been done. The people who have been helped have all the proof they need. I think the issues you've raised are more properly targeted at the question "should we recommend psilocybin treatment to depression patients more broadly" which is in fact a much higher bar than "do they work?"