What people seem to miss is that it’s the psychedelic experience itself that holds the healing potential.

We most likely won’t see a pill derived from mushrooms that cures depression but doesn’t get you high.

The altered state of conciousness is the thing.

Unclear. I have close family that is having marked and unprecedented success in treating serious depression by microdosing psilocybin below the psychedelic threshold. The result is profound, sustained, and after trying a dozen different approved psychiatrist prescribed drugs to find help can not be a placebo effect as surely any of those would have been just as effective.

Out of curiosity, have they tried macro-dosing to be ineffective?

Ie instead of ongoing microdosing, having a 2-3g experience once or twice.

I have very little faith in main stream psychiatric care to provide anything other than blunt palliative options (often with lethal conseuences).

They have not yet, because we haven't found a way to provide a safe environment for this person to be in that can be sustained long enough to cover the entire experience. Providing safety would include alleviating their responsibilities, which includes child care, so that gets pretty complex.

Understood. Wishing you an afternoon and the support needed soon.

Also really glad you have found relief with microdosing!

There isn't a clear threshold in regards to microdosing. You're still getting the psychedelic effect from the psilocybin, just proportionally less.

If your state of consciousness is altered by 2% that's just called a normal day.

There is a very qualitative difference between tripping and not-tripping. (With a blurry line but you can easily stay on one side of a blurry line.)

It's uncertain if microdosing a particular ligand has any scientifically-proven evidence of efficacy without studying it. In many instances, it maybe a shared delusion placebo effect and/or socially-reinforced fad.

I'm not saying you're wrong per se but what evidence do you have that there are no beneficial analogs and triggers for similar biochemical pathways that perhaps are not marked by a substantial or profound classically psychedelic experience?

One bit of evidence is that in the JHU studies, improvement correlated strongly with whether the person had a "mystical-type" experience. When you go through an incredibly cathartic experience of remorse and redemption and come out of it a more loving person, it's a good hypothesis that it was the experience that caused the change.

My understanding is that much of mental illness is caused by unprocessed trauma and the way in which we process trauma is in altered states.

This is why various pathways like ayahuasca, mushrooms, LSD, mdma, Holotropic Breathwork, EDMR etc all work from vary different pathways — they all enduce an altered state, in which the nervous system releases the experience and forms new pathways.

Many of those (specifically ayahuasca, psilocybin, and LSD) all work on very similar pathways and structures. MDMA works on different ones and produces are markedly different experience and isn't usually considered a psychedelic.

And yet, the altered state in a therapeutic setting is the thing that helps.

It's much harder to prove a negative. What evidence do you have that there are? If you consider the way these drugs must be administered to be effective - with a co requisite therapy session - it seems obvious that the conscious effects are the beneficial ones.

There is sufficient evidence for both, and there is probably good reason to split them out (body and mind) and see them as different things that also work combined (body + mind). In this you might compare something like kambo to ayahuasca and ibogaine. They have many similar effects but have different ways of getting there (some more physical some more spiritual ,Kambo is probably not going to help with your childhood abuse, but it may help your high blood pressure, ayahuasca may help you process your childhood abuse and as a result lower your blood pressure.) If you look at something like 2cb vs lsd, lsd is found to be considerably more productive/creative than 2cb at subthreshold doses, but people often experience a much better "therapy trip" on high dose 2cb.

Some great books are:

The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide- James Fadiman

Acid Test - LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal - Tom Shroder

Sacred Knowledge - Psychedelics and Religious Experiences - William Richards

No, that's unknowable conjecture without a safe-as-possible double-blind placebo of the relevant, individual ligands under hospital supervision.

Of course, those studies are certainly underway. And I would bet a non-trivial sum of money that this is the exact result that will be found.

Anyone who has significant experience with healing trauma or mental illness with psychedelics has experienced this phenomenon first hand.