"Depression" is just a label put on a cluster of symptoms to make diagnoses consistent across medical providers. It is definitely not a singular condition with one cause and a consistent treatment across patients. It is likely a multitude of conditions which will respond differently to many treatments.
Some people with a depression diagnosis will be very disappointed with ketamine treatment.
Ketamine treatment takes an hour, with virtually no chance of side effects, and you'll know if it works within a few hours. Even if it only works for a tiny percentage of depression sufferers, it should be first line treatment. As it is, it seems to work for a reasonably large percentage of people.
The reality is psychedelics may be the only meaningful medical treatment we actually have for depression.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20080227/antidepres...
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.0040...
a) Other ways of achieving peak experiences and senses of connectedness, wonder and awe, be that mindfulness/meditation, being out in nature, flow states, breathwork etc. which are more often accessible to everyone, for free and without needing to involve big pharma and may have less side effects, supported where necessary with the same complimentary (talking) therapies that run alongside the psychedelics.
b) Challenging some of the potential underlying causes, I'm not suggesting this will apply in all cases, but stress/burn-out, financial pressures, lack of meaning, lack of connectedness, pressure from social media, inequality etc.
Saying someone has "depression" is like saying someone has "a stomach ache". The stomach ache might be Crohn's, an ulcer, food poisoning, or the aftermath of too many hot wings. All would show at least a somewhat similar cluster of symptoms, different based on the person, but all "stomach ache". Imagine the same for depression, but we don't necessarily have the labels or causes pinned down very well.
There probably are many conditions under depression that we'll eventually have good diagnoses for and consistent treatments for, just not yet.
It's not a matter of "everybody is unique" but that the science and testing is quite primitive so far and only some of the distinctions and treatments have been worked out.
This imbalance affects serotonin and norepinephrine release.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8311508/
And this change is mediated by the immune system. Glutamate is now known as an immunomodulator.
I'm doing silly things for silly reasons, and I've never been this happy and at peace. It let me heal from the moral injury of working in big tech for a decade.
"As I reflect on this, I’ve concluded that I exist with the divine purpose of bringing beauty into the world. Beauty and elegance require tremendous suffering because having taste is expensive."
It is kind of typical of the condition.
I know nothing I saw will convince you that the state you are living in is not a balanced state because I have been there as well and no one could tell me otherwise, so I get it.
It can be, but it’s not exclusive to it.
It’s good that you’ve identified cues that helps you check in on your own well-being, and it’s good that you have concern for others and want to help them, but please be mindful not to inadvertently shit on someone else’s sundae in the process.
Seeing your life in spiritual terms and identifying yourself with a purpose is a common and healing experience, especially during transformative points in one’s life — like coming out of a depression, finding love, overcoming adversity, or even reading a book or exploring a new faith that resonates strongly.
For some people, those feelings can get out of control and it’s good for people who face that pattern to be aware of what may be warning signs for them, but the same behavior is often a normal and healthy experience for others. Without other signs of concern, it might be kinder let others be than to suggest they question their own recovery.
With these rushes of neurotransmitters, the receptor density on our neurons changes to adapt to them. This is a truth that we all need to understand. This is how the strong wind ends.
I’m afraid that people will be obsessed with trying to sustain this type of bliss when a more healthy approach would be to look for a neutral state. Absent of the constant highs and lows.
But I’d also mention, as a fellow student of balance, that it can be found amidst great highs and lows and not just in the absence of them. Acrobats exhibit tremendous balance. :)
We can all help prevent suicide. The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States.
I do believe a neutral state is ideal, but that requires highs and lows to define. For a variety of reasons, it's very easy to get stuck in a down position for a variety of reasons.
Congrats ok your success.
I retired from big tech, but it wasn't until ketamine until I could reset to a new baseline and be truly grateful for my present state. Now, I do what I want when I want and the spiritual experience helps me be ok with doing my Thang without too much judgement.
I work on my platform, and I recently started to paint.
It's a hard problem.
However, children are born as life-loving creatures. It seems reasonable that it's easier to keep them that way while teaching them how to function in this world, than to force onto them rigid unnatural habits (for example, many Christians consider sexuality a bad thing, and teach their children to be ashamed of their sexuality, except in this very special case of being married to someone; or they take the "respect your parents" command too seriously, effectively ridding their child of all rights to any kind of personal integrity - "I am your parent, you shall respect me, no matter what I do"), which lead to frustration of the child, which leads to resistance, which leads to frustration of parents, which leads to general unhappiness and mistrust.
But even if we completely disregard the complexity of raising children - Christianity is, in its essence, a suffering fetish. The symbol of Christianity is a man suffering on a cross. I do not believe that that kind of imagery doesn't have harmful effects on young children.
The TLDR on the Bible is John 3:16-21. You’ve probably heard the first sentence, but I encourage you to read the full paragraph and then compare it with the characterization you shared here.
I've personally witnessed every single thing I've written, so they can't be completely wrong. I was also raised in a Christian family, in a Christian neighborhood, so I'm pretty sure that what I've observed is at the very least plausible.
> The TLDR on the Bible is John 3:16-21.
You should note that Bible is huge, full of contradictions and open to interpretation. You should also note that many Christians have never even read the Bible, and don't follow it to the word, but rather follow the culture of their peers, which is usually focused on observable behaviors (don't eat X, don't work on Y, don't do Z, etc.), rather than deeper, more complex points (love thy neighbor as you love yourself, turn the other cheek, who is without sin - throw the first stone, etc.).
Note that (except for the "suffering fetish" comment) I'm not even trying to tackle the Bible or Christianity as a philosophy here. I'm talking strictly about the sociological aspects of religion.
Life is hard. Individuals consistently fail to act with everyone’s best interests in mind. This is true of all people and all groups of people at all scales.
The offensive thing about Christians is that they’re a people that have acknowledged that they aren’t behaving appropriately in the first place and have come to the conclusion that they want to behave accordingly to the standard set in the Bible. It’s completely understandable that when they don’t live up to that standard that others are put off.
When everyone is out there living their own truth, it can be offensive to learn about a group of people who reject the idea of their own truth and put their trust in the God of the Bible. It’s especially understandable that folks are quick to judge them for their hypocrisy when they fail to live up to that standard.
Yes, but Christianity gives people the excuse not to question their core beliefs - they just confess, repent, blame it all on Satan and carry on with business as usual.
> The offensive thing about Christians is that they’re a people that have acknowledged that they aren’t behaving appropriately in the first place and have come to the conclusion that they want to behave accordingly to the standard set in the Bible
The offensive thing about Christians is that they are constantly trying to impose rules from the Bible upon other people (e.g. abortion laws in southern US).
> When everyone is out there living their own truth, it can be offensive to learn about a group of people who reject the idea of their own truth and put their trust in the God of the Bible.
In other words, Christians consider themselves eternally right, and everyone else eternally wrong, no matter what evidence is provided.
Regarding laws, we live in a representative republic where anyone can vote for any representative to act in their interests. If you would prefer that we remove the rights of Christians to vote because they tend to vote for policies that you don't support, well, that's a very different type of government. Historically, in the US, we have gone to great lengths to give marginalized groups the right to vote.
Finally, a Christian is simply a person who has decided that they will organize their life according to the standard defined in the Bible in preference to other options. Other people make decisions to organize their lives in other ways. It seems like you are willing to tolerate folks in the latter camp, but hold a special animosity towards folks in the former camp. Do we not each have our own autonomy?
That's your interpretation. The behavior I have observed is different.
> Historically, in the US, we have gone to great lengths to give marginalized groups the right to vote
Christians in the US are not marginalized.
> Finally, a Christian is simply a person who has decided that they will organize their life according to the standard defined in the Bible in preference to other options. Other people make decisions to organize their lives in other ways. It seems like you are willing to tolerate folks in the latter camp, but hold a special animosity towards folks in the former camp. Do we not each have our own autonomy?
Read about paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
In order for society to remain tolerant towards everyone, it must not tolerate intolerance. Christianity (as well as many other popular religions) is not tolerant, no matter how much that word appears in its holy books - just look at the history.
If that's all you took away from this conversation, then I agree - it's for the best to end it now. But I'll try to elaborate anyway.
I am not taking the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed, I'm taking the position that nobody, not even Christians, should have the right to impose their own standards upon others, unless they made sense outside of the Christian worldview. Abortion laws only make sense in the Christian worldview (and maybe a few other, equally intolerant, worldviews). The fact that Christians are the majority in the US only makes it de-facto a Christian state, while still pretending to be a secular democracy.
Here's a thought experiment:
If Talibans somehow became a majority in the US, would you still consider it "their right" to vote away the democracy and establish Sharia Law?
> If Talibans somehow became a majority in the US, would you still consider it "their right" to vote away the democracy and establish Sharia Law?
Yes. The current form of government in the United States is a representative republic that has a constitution that defines processes for dramatic change including a constitutional convention that allows for open-ended changes to the constitution itself.
I don't have a divine right to the land, water, or air here.
That's were we disagree. I believe there are some human freedoms that nobody has the right to deny. I suppose I'm just an idealist.
> The current form of government in the United States is a representative republic that has a constitution that defines processes for dramatic change including a constitutional convention that allows for open-ended changes to the constitution itself.
I'm sure the goal of such openness of constitution was to protect the liberty of people, not to open doors for authoritarianism.
I have more to write on this, but I was able to grind as I had interesting work. I got bored even as an E8, and I squeezed the last potential out as I mentored and helped others grew.
What do you experience during that time?
I still don’t believe in an afterlife other than in the abstract sense that that the brief existence of me as a point of consciousness was impacted by all that came before it and will have had an impact on all that comes after. I would say more calmness and more acceptance are better descriptions than curiosity.
Like a lot of psychedelic experience, there’s an underlying neurological phenomenon and common subjective experience that gets differently interpreted based on your background beliefs. It’s like the DMT experience of entities is very differently interpreted as inter-dimensional elves by those DMT smokers who have read a lot of Terrance McKenna, as plant spirits by Amazonian ayahuasca drinkers, and as channeled spirits or Christian saints by Daimistas.
Is it possible you're just convinced it feels like death?
So then when I’ve experienced a series of “welp, here we go, I’m on my way to nothingness” and dealt with that terror in those moments, I’ve had the opportunity to accept that fate and even embrace the unknown.
And now that I’m not gripped by existential terror when I think of my own death, I find myself wondering if I’ll be surprised to find something else on the other side of it. And that’s way more fun :)
Ketamine has been known to trigger hypomania and mania in patients.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33587793/
10 mg of Prozac will do the same thing to me, but that’s just my genetics.
It's important to note that this is an atypically long duration. In clinical studies, the duration of effects is more around 1-2 weeks. It's possible that the overall experience (including surviving an accident and getting a "second lease on life") was the trigger for 4-6 months of improvement, not just the medication you were given once.
That's why, in clinical practice, ketamine is more successfully used in conjunction with typical long-term treatments such as SSRIs and therapy. Some studies used a sequence of 6 treatments spread out over months in an attempt to kickstart the recovery, but it's generally not sustainable as a solo therapy.
It could also be the huge dose, the studies I've seen use lighter doses.
I've been meaning to travel sometime to a clinic for the infusion therapy (that comes with some talk therapy) as where I am now its nearly impossible to source clean ketamine reliably.
Pretty mild doses of psilocybin mushrooms tend to have a longer lasting effect (a month or so), and extremely large doses can work for a half a year or so.
"Rodent studies also demonstrate that ketamine rapidly increases BDNF and VEGF release and/or expression in the medial PFC (mPFC) and hippocampus, leading to increase in the number and function of spine synapses in the mPFC and enhancement of hippocampal neurogenesis."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27106168/
"Likewise, repeated ketamine administration increased adult hippocampal neurogenesis"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31310776/
"Our results demonstrate that a single ketamine administration promotes adult neurogenesis in the ventral hippocampus quite selectively" (mice)
And a review about psychedelics in general: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34566723/
"Studies (n = 20) show that a single administration of a psychedelic produces rapid changes in plasticity mechanisms on a molecular, neuronal, synaptic, and dendritic level. The expression of plasticity-related genes and proteins, including Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), is changed after a single administration of psychedelics, resulting in changed neuroplasticity. The latter included more dendritic complexity, which outlasted the acute effects of the psychedelic. Repeated administration of a psychedelic directly stimulated neurogenesis and increased BDNF mRNA levels up to a month after treatment."
I was given a large hit of it by a doctor after a horrible accident, I went into a K-hole and had a spiritual experience, but even more profound was the effect it had for 4 to 6 months after.
It was like a veil had been lifted from my mind, the simplest pleasures of life made me happy, like smelling fresh coffee or feeling the sun on my skin. I had been living in misery for decades and suddenly I was awake and lucid and happy.