I'm not sure. For example on a few occasions I fell asleep after taking MDMA or LSD(it's rare I know), well when I woke up I didn't feel any better, I just felt tired and dehydrated, whereas 99% of the time I feel AMAZING mentally the day after tripping(and I done lsd about 50 times, mdma about 15-20 times)
On LSD I would often spend hours writing a ton of stuff and have in-depth thoughts about my life and everything that went wrong with it, also I would laugh a ton, and everything was 10x as pleasurable, it's really like a mini nice vacation/spiritual retreat for me, and of course that didn't happen if I slept on it, so basically no benefits if I was not actually tripping and conscious that I was tripping.
I think it's proven empirically.
"In fact, since non-psychedelic medications exist for treating depression,"
Yes except usually antidepressants may only work after at least 4 weeks, and if you stop them you're usually back to depression(if they even work...), and they're also just trying to make serotonin have stabler levels while psychedelics can make you change your whole point of view on life or help fix past trauma.
"don't seem to be as effective for some people." some people? I'd say most people, even after trying multiple antidepressants you're still not that likely to stop being depressed, there is a huge study reproducibility problem, probably caused by the billions of dollars that SSRIs generates.
So really not comparable to drugs that can potentially create paradigm shifts in your brain after one use.
I don't think we'll fix depression with regular drugs.
It'll either be psychedelics assisted psychotherapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation(80% effectiveness in a recent Stanford study), or brain implants.
And especially not with psychedelic analogs, we're just likely to destroy the lives of hundreds of people during clinical trials, messing with psychedelics analogs sounds like a terribly stupid/insane plan.
On LSD I would often spend hours writing a ton of stuff and have in-depth thoughts about my life and everything that went wrong with it, also I would laugh a ton, and everything was 10x as pleasurable, it's really like a mini nice vacation/spiritual retreat for me, and of course that didn't happen if I slept on it, so basically no benefits if I was not actually tripping and conscious that I was tripping.
I think it's proven empirically.
"In fact, since non-psychedelic medications exist for treating depression,"
Yes except usually antidepressants may only work after at least 4 weeks, and if you stop them you're usually back to depression(if they even work...), and they're also just trying to make serotonin have stabler levels while psychedelics can make you change your whole point of view on life or help fix past trauma.
"don't seem to be as effective for some people." some people? I'd say most people, even after trying multiple antidepressants you're still not that likely to stop being depressed, there is a huge study reproducibility problem, probably caused by the billions of dollars that SSRIs generates.
So really not comparable to drugs that can potentially create paradigm shifts in your brain after one use.
I don't think we'll fix depression with regular drugs.
It'll either be psychedelics assisted psychotherapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation(80% effectiveness in a recent Stanford study), or brain implants.
And especially not with psychedelic analogs, we're just likely to destroy the lives of hundreds of people during clinical trials, messing with psychedelics analogs sounds like a terribly stupid/insane plan.