Can Psychedelics Be Good For You?

Psychedelics get a bad rep for being “drugs” that ruin lives and destroy families. But can they be good for some people? can moderate use of psychedelics be beneficial to your health and well-being? today we look at a selection of studies that suggest psychedelics might not be the monsters we think they are.

What are psychedelics?

In plain English, psychedelics are substances that in some way affect your way of perceiving reality. These effects could be auditory, visual, or they might even affect your other senses. There are different kinds of psychedelics for example, empathogenic ones that make you go “Duuuude we’re all totally connected with the universe dude!” (if you’re boring that means it causes a sense of oneness and emotional communion) or oneirogenic substances that according to my “totally credible source” will “have little to no effect on waking consciousness, and will not exhibit their effects until the user falls into a natural sleep state.” There are also hallucinogenic and dissociative psychedelics which are pretty self-explanatory.

How can they be helpful?

Psychedelics are usually used as recreational drugs to “have some fun” however according to some studies some psychedelics might have therapeutic effects if used correctly and with the appropriate dosage. According to this study published in the National Library of Medicine, a meta-analysis of trials done on the effects of psychedelics is shown to be “a potential option for symptomatic treatment during opioid tapering” and is also used to treat “substance addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and major depressive disorder.” This study looked at 105 trials done between 2007 and 2020 with most of the trials being from after 2017.

Another very recent (yesterday as the day of writing this article) paper published in Nature suggests that psychedelics can be used to “reopen the social reward learning critical period” in mice. when you are a baby your brain puts your learning part of the brain on overdrive so that you can learn to not be a clueless baby a little faster (this is why babies can learn to speak so fast for example) this phenomenon is called the critical period in social reward learning. Now this doesn’t mean that using MDMA or LSD makes you super smart so DO NOT DO THAT. Keep in mind that this experiment was done on mice and one cannot assume they are going to have the same effects on humans.

What does all this mean?

The usage of psychedelics in medicine is a relatively new area of science that has only recently gained traction because of new legalization laws. This means that we cannot be conclusively sure about all the downstream effects of using psychedelics in medicine. Sure micro-dosing mushrooms might help with depression but it also might have long-term side effects as well. Are these drugs safe? Are the benefits a good trade-off for the side effects? These are questions that only further research can answer.

Bottom line

Can psychedelics be good for you? Well, it depends. Are you a majorly depressed person or suffering from PTSD and no medication works for you? Then moderate amounts of psychedelics can be a good prescription. (I AM NOT A DOCTOR talk to your doctor before taking any medication.) On the other hand, someone could argue that psychedelics have not been studied thoroughly enough yet. and that is a valid statement as well. we do not know all the risks involved with using these kinds of substances as medication. This is a promising area of research and very smart people are working to answer the questions we have. Hopefully, at some point in the future, we can use psychedelics safely.

P.S: I strongly advise against the recreational use of any psychedelics ESPECIALLY if you were born after the year 2000. Please don’t do drugs. (or do if you want I’m not your dad.)