Posted by fachad on November 1, 2002, at 10:40:12
In reply to Re: LSD and brain jolts, posted by Ç(r)ëëþý Tabitha on October 31, 2002, at 22:41:59
>Anytime your brain is jolted, it's changed. For instance, one traumatic event can start PTSD that lingers forever; or a brief ECT jolt can cause huge and long lasting changes.
That ability to cause "huge and lasting changes" was touted as a major benefit by those who endorsed therapeutic use of psychedelics.
Timothy Leary propounded a theory that neurosis and mental suffering were patterns of mental behavior that were fixed early in life thru imprinting. He believed that LSD could be used to re-imprint the mind, with consciously chosen patters. This science, which he called "neurologic" would allow people to design and program their own nervous systems. Take a look at the essay "Seeds of the Sixties" in Leary's book Neuropolitics for his elaboration of this idea.
John Lilly, M.D. did an LSD research study funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published the results in the book "Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer". His thesis was also that LSD was a powerful tool for re-structuring the nervous system thru "metaprogramming", or re-engineering basic functions that were not changeable in ordinary states.
Another researcher, W.V. Caldwell, detailed an entire therapeutic system based on use of psychedelics. It is described in his book LSD Psychotherapy.
I personally think the LSD phenomena is partially responsible for the current paradigm where medication is the preferred method of effecting brain change in patients. Today’s medications are (mostly) devoid of recreational potential, but the basic idea that you can use chemicals to deliberately alter a persons subjective experience in a more positive direction was really brought home to many on an instinctive level by the psychedelic movement.
> If someone started an education campaign to tell school kids that LSD would trigger 20 years of chronic mental illness, I would scoff, but if one person reports that it happened to them personally, I'm inclined to believe they could be correct in attributing their changed brain to the LSD trip.
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> While LSD may not cause immediate organ damage, and I know the fatal overdose amount is like a million doses or something, it still jolts your brain into a heckuva non-normal state. In susceptible individuals it can trigger psychosis (I think this much is accepted medical fact).
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> Here's my not completely scientific opinion... Anytime your brain is jolted, it's changed. For instance, one traumatic event can start PTSD that lingers forever; or a brief ECT jolt can cause huge and long lasting changes. LSD stays in your brain's blood supply only a few minutes, but the trip lasts 8 hours, and nobody really understands how. We just don't understand the brain enough to know the full effects of these extreme chemical changes.
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> Personally I suspect this is how ADs work. They jolt your brain into some chemical change, although more slowly than ECT or acid, and it somehow breaks up the grip of the depression. It almost doesn't matter what kind of jolt. I read that serotonin reuptake *enhancers* have also been shown to have antidepressant effect, though serotonin reuptake inhibitors are the preferred treatment these days.
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> So as much as I might enjoy the effect a hallucinogen has on my brain, I know that as a mood-disordered pill-popping person, it's not wise to jolt my brain into any wacky serotonin state, especially when I've reached some stability. If anything, I'd want to jolt my brain when I was horribly depressed, and there's nowhere to go but up.
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poster:fachad
thread:125886
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021101/msgs/126073.html