Anecdotal evidence about neurofeedback, especially TAGSync, always made me curious but this stuff seems to expensice to try. I am glad we are progressing at methods and evidence, maybe one day more people will be able to try it.
Triggering psychosis != causing longterm mental illness. I think parties on both sides of the debate over the safety of psychedelics would agree that they can and often do trigger psychosis. And both parties probably agree, at this point, that they do not cause mental illness.
One episode of psychosis is not a life long psychotic illness.
When people say "psychedelics cause mental illness" that could mean:
* Someone with no underlying mental illness takes a few doses of LSD and is left with a life long psychotic illness
* Someone with no underlying mental illness regularly takes huge doses of LSD, and ends up with a life long psychotic illness
* Someone with underlying mental illness has that illness surfaced by LSD use, when it would have gone un-known if they hadn't taken psychedelics
* Someone with underlying mental illness has that illness surfaced by LSD. But it probably would have happened anyway.
* Someone with mental illness has that illness temporarily triggered by LSD.
Because LSD is illegal and it's very hard to research we don't know much about the interactions of LSD and mental illness.
While I'm strongly pro-legalisation I do find it problematic when people dismiss any possible harms of drug use, when it's fine to say we don't know, but should legalise anyway.
What if doctors could prescribe drugs for recreational reasons? Then you are getting them from a setting where can be informed about the dangers, and a professional can tell you if you have personal risk factors (for example, I have a friend with a heart condition who is at very high risk of heart attack under the influence of cocaine).
And then the professionals can help measure dependency and long term effects, and people can participate in studies and contribute to the science of recreational drug use. Drugs are always medical grade, never laced with other substances, and doctors can recommend safe alternatives to the dangerous recreational drugs.
Power dynamics between a doctor and an addict may pose ethical problems, but if the doctor has the proper oversight these problems can be mitigated.
No, doctors should have less power. It's absolutely embarrassing and disgusting that individuals must seek approval of another person just to get permission to buy certain medicines. Outside of things that require coordination (like antibiotics), there should be no prescription requirements. (There may need to be waivers and a statement of understanding before purchasing things, sure.)
Doctors already regulate recreational and personal-enhancement via their strangehold on opiates and stimulants. We don't need to further this system.
Yes, but the dividing criteria is completely arbitrary. The medical term would be chronic. To me psychosis means a form of mental illness, so it looks like the GP doesn't have a clue.
Thats like saying heart palpitations is an illness and therefore when someone takes a large dose of cocaine and gets an irregular heartbeat, they have a heart problem.
Any definition you're thinking of that places any psychotic episode as a definite indicator of mental illness is completely irrelevant as soon as the subject is under the influence of a mind-altering drug.
Definitely a fantastic read. Terrifying, but incredibly interesting. The author seems like an otherwise fairly well-adjusted person now - but it must be incredibly weird to look back at memories from when you were that completely out-to-lunch.
How do they work, and how reliable? Seems like a pretty difficult thing to determine which healthy people are predisposed to mental ilness and which aren't.
You have to be skeptical of psychological screening after Lisa Nowak passed some of the most stringent screening out there and still did her diaper drive:
Since we don't have reliable screening for basic mental illnesses, I find it implausible that we have "reliable" screening for these kinds of vulnerabilities. I must be missing something; any thoughts?
Since the beginning of the era of modern psychedelic research, no one has developed any serious longterm mental illness as the result of taking psychedelics in a research setting. And this is out of thousands of people.
I think part of the reason is that it's actually a lot easier to determine if someone is predisposed to mental illness than it actually is to determine if the person sitting in front of you has a mental illness. E.g. if one of your parents was bipolar or you had a relative who committed suicide then you'd be immediately excluded from any trial. And because they are only doing this research on adults, this means that participants would have all had 20+ years to figure out if their parents have signs of mental illness or whatever.
Look in the references:
"Four additional studies found post-LSD psychotics with prior psychosis but also patients in whom the drug precipitated psychosis without a prodrome ... One group reported cases of psychosis following a single dose, suggesting a peculiar vulnerability to the drug in certain individuals. A review of this problem concluded that prior illness was evident in many, but not all, psychoses following LSD "
Your general gist seems to be correct (that it's a rather low risk for people without history), but "no one" seems to be incorrect. Which makes sense - LSD's a powerful medication. And for comparison, this happens with stuff they give to kids, like Ritalin and speed.
When I said since the beginning of modern psychedelic research, I meant since Rick Strassman began studying DMT in 1991. In the 50s and 60s there were lots of cases like this, but that's not really analogous to modern research. (In many cases back then they were actually purposely trying to cause mental illness.)
That article's only reference is a study I linked to earlier, which concluded, "We did not find use of psychedelics to be an independent risk factor for mental health problems."
From the end of that article: "While the experiment is quoted as evidence of LSD's toxicity, it seems most likely that the Thorazine or the combination of drugs killed Tusko, not the acid. Lending credence to this, in 1984 psychologist Ronald K Siegel repeated the experiment with two elephants, using LSD only. Both survived."
It's not my specialty, I was just pointing out something mentioned in the article, by a researcher in the area. If you have references that contradict his claim, I'd be interested in seeing them.
No, that's not what the article says. It says they can carefully screen for "people with active psychotic disorders or a strong predisposition for such disorders should not receive these treatments".
Take note of active and strong predisposition. They're saying if someone is obviously having problems, or seems like they might (e.g. many family members have had issues), they can find those folks out.
It is not in any way suggesting they can detect psychotic dispositions in general.
> I think 'software is eating the world' moment comes to play
this moment made me think that strict software/hardware division is getting pretty obsolete
While it's dated (e.g. just prior to what people are saying are the heydays of CMOS, which matches my vague memory), I found this 1981 book invaluable back when I read it in the early '80s: http://www.amazon.com/Microelectronics-Revolution-Tom-Forest...
It covers in at least a little detail all the generations of semiconductors, e.g. there was a great table showing which companies were big in each. As I recall, back then TI was the only survivor, and, surprise, TI is still pretty strong as I understand it. It's discussions and illustraions of yield, what akiselev discusses here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10286735 were particularly useful.
I wouldn't recommend it today (and probably didn't return to it after the '80s) except that's it pretty cheap used and will cover lots of stuff that's not so generally well known now.
Your data points may differ, but eBay makes profits of 1B on mainly a Java platform. Other large companies use Ruby, PHP, Python and Java which all are based on OOP.
