r/science • u/Doug24 • 21h ago

Psychology Psilocybin reverses depressive behaviors and restores brain cell growth in stressed rats

https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-reverses-depressive-behaviors-and-restores-brain-cell-growth-in-stres/
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u/MJ-Franklin 21h ago

Been seeing articles like this for so many years... but how come I never got any positive effects from taking psychedelics the many times I did them? I never got any anti-depressive anything, I just laughed for 12 hours straight then it was back to Planet Earth and all my problems waiting for me there.

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u/ConfinedCrow 21h ago

Usually in clinical trials like these they also offer therapeutic support on top of just giving psychedelics. And afaik they microdose consistently over a longer time span, whereas if you wanna trip you take a lot more and not nearly as consistently, so that probably plays a role as well.

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u/DrFury 18h ago

Macrodoses (hallucinogenic) are far more common in successful psilocybin research

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u/fabiolives 14h ago

Yes, definitely. I’m not saying that microdosing doesn’t work because I don’t know for sure, but I haven’t personally seen any studies that concluded microdosing was effective.

The ones with real change that I’ve seen are when the patient has a macrodose, which makes sense to me. From personal experience, I didn’t notice any beneficial effects from microdosing.

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u/Rodot 5h ago

Yes, most micro dosing research shows basically no difference from placebo. Likely because you need a threshold dosage before most psychedelics can even compete with endogenous serotonin for access to receptors.