Magic Mushrooms & Depression: Similar Successful Treatments

magic psilocybin mushrooms depression woman holding sparklers at night

Photo: Ethan Hoover

Psilocybin’s Effect On Depression. Mushrooms Join Album Of Greatest Hits:

So the world loves vitamins and supplements.

Why? Because we believe that they are more “natural” than pharmaceuticals.

We come from the Earth, and so do the vitamins & supplements ultimately.

They also seem to carry fewer serious side-effects when used in moderation.

-Which is the ideal drug. All good direct-effects. None on the side. None bad.

Among the scenarios providers and patients alike are looking for an ideal “drug” to address? -Depression.

Well, Yale’s team just found a very big piece of that puzzle…

The Short Answer:

People love vitamins & natural supplements.
This is because they are seen as medication without side-effects.
Yale researchers may have found the mechanism for a new one that seems to help depression.
Most anxiety & depression meds have side-effects like emotional-blunting, temporary dissociation, and GI-issues.
Treatment-resistant depression has encouraged experimentation.
Until recently, Science did not know exactly how anti-depressants worked.
The effects seem similar to cardiovascular exercises like running.
Psychedelics seem to do a very similar thing.
Specifically when it comes to increased connections.
Test-animals dosed with psilocybin “magic” mushrooms formed 10% more brain-cell connections in the first 24 hours.
These connections were also 10% stronger than normal ones.
Even more than 30 days later, 1/3 of these connections were still present.
These benefits occurred with only one dose.
The animals also handled stress better and had increased brain-activity.
These results are similar to experiments on humans.
They experienced both reduced emotional-blunting and a clearing-out of traumatic feelings.
Hopefully regulators and producers will make safe forms of psilocybin available to the general public soon.

Read on to find out the details…

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Can’t We Just Get One Medication With No Side-Effects?:

So anyone who’s been on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication can tell you that sometimes there are side-effects.

GI-tract issues, emotional-blunting, the dissociation phase, brain-zaps, anhedonia, etc.

Not nearly as comical as Ambien patients sleep-eating half a wheel of brie at 2AM with no recollection,

Or Viagra users dealing with 4-hour erections, I’ll give you that.

But still, side-effects nonetheless.

And then there’s the other problem: Treatment-Resistant Depression.

Treatment-Resistant Depression Inspires Inventive Treatments:

Where the microsphere of the associated problems, like inflammation, can make even regular meds at high-doses startlingly less-effective than designed.

In-fact in recent times, novel approaches are getting so inventive even horse-tranquilizers and laughing-gas are being tested,

With some pretty promising results, actually.

And the funny thing about treatment-resistant-depression is that until very recently,

Science really didn’t know exactly how anti-depressants worked.

Especially when Prozac came out. They only knew -that- it worked, not exactly How.

It’s Just A Chemistry Problem, Right?:

Of course the hypothesis was that there was an imbalance of brain-chemistry for some reason,

And that if you found a way to rebalance it, then it was fixed.

But we recently got a big hint to how anti-depressants were working when scientists studied Exercise.

Because not only did they find out it helps clean out your brain,

It does two more extremely-interesting and beneficial things.

Learning From The Magic Of Running & Exercise:

Not only does it release a growth-hormone that makes you freakin’ grow new brain cells right there while you’re running, jumping, climbing trees,

But it ALSO sets up a special chemical environment in your brain that defends against the natural “Excess pruning routine” it normally goes through,

So you actually grow, but also -keep- those new brain cells, too!

So yes, not only was Science WRONG when it said you couldn’t grow new brain cells.

You absolutely do already on a daily basis, and running grows them 10x faster than your normal rate.

Science Decodes Prozac… Finally.:

Well, guess what science only recently found out about anti-depressants?

They do nearly the same Got-Dang thing as exercise in that department.

They make you grow new brain-cells and set up the chemical environment so they survive!

And… Coincidentally enough! That’s where the new study picks up.

Because just like anti-depressants, the whole ecosystem of shamanistic benefits of hallucinogenic substances has shown some pretty postivie effects on psychology.

Psychedelics Are Neurochemical “Exercise” In A Bottle:

From LSD’s inversion of the brain’s Default Network,

That lends huge creedence to Maestro George Clinton’s maxim of “Free Your Mind And Your A** Will Follow!”.

All the way to the recent near-miraculous results of giving the right sized dose of psilocybin “Magic” mushrooms to depression-sufferers.

And with those positive benefits of mushrooms on depression, wouldn’t you guess what the current research team found?

On a set of lab mice that were dosed with psilocybin mushrooms, researchers found the growth of brand-new brain-cell-connections!

All The Greatest Patterns Repeat. -Or At-Least Rhyme:

These were observed in as little as 24 hours!

And they continued to keep growing for the next few days.

But wait, it gets even better!

In numbers, the mice grew about 10% new brain-cell connections.

And those new connections were 10% larger than normal ones, so they were at-least that much stronger, too!

Still better than that: As we hinted before, the brain’s natural pruning-routine, stress, and depression will tend to reduce connections in the cells of the brain.

And Those New Connections Stuck-Around Long-Term, Too!:

But at-least 50% of the connections formed by the magic mushrooms were still there by day 7.

And 1/3 were still present even more than 1 month later.

Still another great part of this research is that much of the growth in brain-cells was found right at the ends of them,

Where they make the most amount of connections to the rest of the brain.

So there is a good chance that this treatment may be helping to repair connection-damage caused by stress and other depressive conditions.

Psilocybin Mushrooms. Fixing Stress & Depression Damage At Light-Speed:

Oh yeah, wait. There was one more thing.

All of these amazing benefits happened WITH -ONE- DOSE.

And wait, because their brains weren’t just fixed, they were Better!

Further tests on the medicated mice also found that they were better able to handle stress.

They showed higher levels of activity in coping with it when it came to drive and ability to escape the situation,

And their brain-activity was also elevated vs. the control mice for the same situation, so their little noggins were working more & better, too!

Not Just A Repaired Brain, But A Better One, Too:

This jibes perfectly with previous experiments on humans with magic mushrooms.

Because not only did those subjects regain their previous emotional range,

But they were also much better able to handle stress, and most reported the sensation of having made peace with previous negative memories to the point of feeling like they had been emotionally cleansed of prior trauma.

And while the future is uncertain, it is certainly a very encouraging set of results that follows a similar theme set by other practices that help a depressed brain improve.

The amazing 42x speed & effectiveness of the beneficial dose alone should be motivation enough for both regulators and the right manufacturers to get this fix out to the public.

So here’s to hoping that some day psilocybin “magic” mushrooms will be portioned & packaged in a way that’s accessible to everyone who would like to both feel and become better.