alt Hacker NewsMany people say the first time they use Prozac that it was so helpful they recommended to their friends but then after a while it wore off.
How do you think psychedelics work? They activate the serotonin 2a receptor. It’s nothing but a different drug that effects serotonin. Except it does it more intensely but like all these drugs that act on receptors they wear off because of something what’s called receptor density changes.
For 70 years, we’ve been trying to manipulate receptors into making people feel good. It’s a losing proposition and it’s time to. We changed our thinking. For instance, if these people do have serotonin deficiencies, which is still possibly the case, what is it? That’s causing these deficiencies? Is it low, zinc, low B6, genetics, infection? There’s so many other things that we know that this could be, but we don’t try it.
I think this is naive. A mushroom trip is fully metabolized and cleared in approximately 6-12 hours. Despite the similar levels of reduction in depressive symptoms for the subsequent weeks, the psilocin has been cleared on the day of, unlike prozac, and hasn't been stimulating 5HT2* at all for that afterglow and post-exposure period.
Nobody other than crazy micro-dosers is taking mushrooms often enough to cause a change in receptor density and those people are putting themselves at risk of valvopathy due to 5HT2a restructuring of the heart valves (which, as an aside, is turning out to be a problem for people on prozac and other long-term SSRIs).
A drug that is very occasional, point use, with no ongoing use, which has long term treatment results, is absolutely, utterly unlike prozac.
That aside, let's say for the sake of argument that the mechanism is similar for prozac; I think that's wrong (one additional explanation may actually be: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675... ) but whatever. If so, then psilocin is vastly superior to prozac because you are not required to have continuous exposure for the benefits, as the corresponding cost, withdrawal, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, heart issues, etc. are removed.