Tag: mental health

CBD Is A ‘Promising Candidate’ For Treating Depression With ‘Few Side Effects,’ New Scientific Review Concludes

A new scientific review says there’s “accumulating” evidence that the marijuana component CBD “has antidepressant properties in humans and animals with few side effects” and may also aid in the reduction of inflammation and formation of new brain cells.

“In summary,” says the manuscript, newly accepted by the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, “there is growing evidence that CBD may be a promising candidate for the treatment of depression.”

The review notes that while the anti-depressant effects of the cannabinoid have been previously reported, the mechanisms of action behind those effects are still poorly understood. “Therefore, this paper reviews the molecular targets, pharmacokinetics, and safety of CBD,” it says.

Authors from the departments of pharmacology at Nantong University, the First People’s Hospital of Yancheng and the Jiangyin Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine—all in Jiangsu, China—looked at recently published papers on experimental and clinical studies around CBD, concluding that effects seem to be linked to the cannabinoid’s role in reducing inflammation and enhancing neurogenesis.

As for the cannabinoids’ targets in the human body, authors wrote that “receptor mechanisms underlying CBD’s effects are very complex and involve in multiple receptors including CB1, CB2, GPR55, 5-HT1A, and PPARγ receptors.”

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First Patient Dosed In Historic Study On Whether LSD Effectively Treats Anxiety

For the first time ever, researchers are administering LSD to patients in a Phase 3 clinical trial. The new study focuses on whether the psychedelic can be used to effectively treat generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

Drugmaker MindMed says that the trial, dubbed Voyage, is eventually expected to enroll about 200 people in the U.S. and will compare the effects of its proprietary LSD product to a placebo. A second Phase 3 trial, called Panorama, will also be conducted in both the U.S. and Europe and is expected to kick off in the first half of next year.

“Today marks a pivotal moment in our journey towards advancing a novel treatment option for the 20 million people in the U.S. living with GAD,” MindMed’s chief medical officer, Daniel R. Karlin, said in a statement released on Monday. “Building on our scientifically rigorous Phase 2b study, which demonstrated efficacy that far exceeds today’s standard of care and a favorable tolerability profile, our Phase 3 studies are designed to adhere to the highest clinical and ethical standards and are in alignment with guidance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

In March of this year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted MindMed’s LSD product “breakthrough therapy” status as a treatment for GAD. That followed a Phase 2 trial showing that a single oral dose of LSD led to “clinically and statistically significant” reductions in anxiety scores 12 weeks after administration, with 65 percent of participants showing a clinical response and 48 percent in clinical remission following the treatment.

Breakthrough drug status is meant to recognize the therapeutic promise of an emerging substance or therapy as well as speed the research and development of treatments that fill an unmet need. MDMA and psilocybin have also previously been awarded the designation.

The new research will use dissolvable oral tablets of the drug, MM120 ODT, or lysergide D-tartrate, which MindMed describes as a “proprietary and pharmaceutically optimized form of LSD.”

The first Phase 3 study, Voyage, will last a year and consist of two parts: a 12-week randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to see how LSD affects anxiety symptoms. That will be followed by a 40-week extension period, during which participants can access open-label treatment with the drug based on the severity of their anxiety symptoms.

LSD has a noticeable subjective effect on sensation and cognition, which means it’s likely participants will know whether they received the psychedelic or a non-psychoactive placebo.

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School-Based Mental Health Diagnosing, A Prescription for Disaster

A Biden-Harris Administration information paper explains that “our country is facing an unprecedented mental health crisis impacting people of all ages.

In 2021, two in five American adults reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression and forty-four percent of high school students reported struggling with persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness.”

Rather than ask why the nation is in the throes of a national mental health crisis, the Biden-Harris Administration, with the help of a useless Congress, decided to throw money at the “mental health crisis.”

That’s right, our exalted leaders haven’t got a clue why Americans are depressed, sad, anxious, and hopeless and, in fact, don’t care to find out. But the President and Congress believe that money will fix the “crisis.”

And just to make the damage as widespread as possible, they’ll enact mandatory programs that target vulnerable, naive school kids.

Does this sound like responsible leadership? No. Especially when one considers all the facts. Short of ending all efforts to bring mental health diagnosing and treatment into the public school system, AbleChild predicts that within five years the mental health “crisis” will increase exponentially with devastating effects for decades. Here’s how it works to get mental health patients cradle to grave.

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Psilocybin therapy offers relief from multiple psychiatric symptoms in cancer patients

New research published in Nature Mental Health indicates that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy may offer comprehensive mental health benefits for individuals experiencing cancer-related distress. The study found that this treatment not only reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression but also reduced interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, obsession-compulsion, and somatization. These findings suggest that psilocybin could provide an innovative approach to addressing the profound psychological challenges associated with cancer.

Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy is a relatively new approach that combines the administration of psilocybin, a psychedelic compound derived from certain mushrooms, with guided psychotherapy. Unlike traditional psychiatric medications, which are often taken daily and may take weeks to show effects, research suggests that psilocybin can produce rapid and lasting relief after just one or two carefully supervised sessions.

These sessions typically include preparation with a trained therapist, the psilocybin experience itself in a safe and supportive setting, and follow-up therapy to help process and integrate the experience. This method has shown promise in treating mood and anxiety disorders, particularly for patients facing existential challenges such as life-threatening illnesses.

For cancer patients, the psychological toll can be overwhelming, often manifesting as depression, anxiety, and emotional distress that significantly affect quality of life and clinical outcomes. Standard treatments, including therapy and antidepressant medications, frequently fall short in effectiveness and may be accompanied by delayed onset or undesirable side effects. Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy offers a potential alternative, with rapid and sustained benefits.

While prior research has demonstrated psilocybin’s ability to reduce anxiety and depression in cancer patients, many individuals with cancer experience additional mental health symptoms, such as interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, somatization, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. These symptoms exacerbate the emotional burden of cancer, yet their response to psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy had not been systematically investigated.

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Woke doc refused to publish $10 million trans kids study that showed puberty blockers didn’t help mental health

A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

Critics — including one of Olson-Kennedy’s fellow researchers on the study — said the decision flies in the face of research standards and deprives the public of “really important” science in a field where Americans remain firmly divided.

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Medical Marijuana Improves Chronic Pain And Mental Health Symptoms While Reducing Prescription Drug Use, Study Shows

Results of a new yearlong study of prescribed medical marijuana for patients with chronic pain and mental health issues observed an association between cannabis use and symptom improvement, with most side effects limited to dry mouth and sleepiness. At least some of the benefits appeared to fade as the 12-month study period went on, however.

The report, published in the Journal of Pain and Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, evaluated the effects of medical marijuana on 96 patients over the course of the yearlong observational study, with measurements of pain, depression, anxiety and sleep problems taken at three, six and 12 months.

“We found that the use of medical cannabis was associated with reduced pain during the first 6 months and improved mental well-being over 12 months,” wrote authors, from the University of Melbourne in Australia. “Patients reported not only less pain but also experienced reduced interference from pain in their daily functions. Furthermore, they reported decreased use of pain medications and a large proportion felt that their pain symptoms had significantly improved, as reflected in their reported changes in the severity of pain.”

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Legalizing Marijuana Does Not Jeopardize Mental Health, Studies Show, Contrary To Opponents’ Alarmist Claims 

Opponents of marijuana legalization often allege that jurisdictions that have legalized adult-use marijuana sales experience subsequent rises in incidences of cannabis-induced psychosis and other adverse mental health consequences. But nearly a decade worth of scientific data from Canada and the United States refutes this contention.

For instance, a study published last year in an imprint of the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated the relationship between U.S. legalization laws and psychosis rates in more than 63 million privately insured individuals. Researchers described it as the “largest [study] to quantify the association of medical and recreational cannabis policies with rates of psychosis-related health care claims across US states.”

Investigators concluded: “State medical and recreational cannabis policies were not associated with a statistically significant increase in rates of psychosis-related health outcomes.”

They’re not alone in this determination. A just-published consensus study compiled by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded, “There is insufficient evidence of an association between cannabis policy and changes in mental and behavioral health.”

And new data from Canada, published this month in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology determined that cannabis-related emergency department visits declined among schizophrenia patients following Canada’s adoption of adult-use marijuana legalization.

“Our findings suggest that regulatory measures accompanying legalization could enhance the quality and safety of cannabis products, potentially leading to fewer adverse health outcomes in vulnerable patient populations,” the study’s authors wrote. “Furthermore, our study indicates that legalization and cannabis regulation, in certain contexts, may help reduce acute care utilization in vulnerable patient groups.”

Their findings are particularly relevant because it is well established that those suffering from schizophrenia, psychosis and similar conditions tend to consume cannabis, tobacco and other controlled substances at rates higher than those in the general population. Data also suggests that, in some cases, cannabis use may exacerbate symptoms of psychosis or even trigger a psychotic episode in those predisposed to it. Therefore, regulatory strategies that better educate, target and protect this vulnerable population is critically important.

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Medical Marijuana Availability Improves Mental Health In Older People, Research Finds

Medical marijuana being legally available “improved self-reported mental health among people aged 65 years and older,” according to a new study.

Among adults overall, “medical cannabis availability was not associated with self-reported poor mental health,” it adds. “Collectively, these results suggest medical cannabis availability has limited mental health effects on the population at large, with considerable mental health benefits for older adults.”

For people 65 and older, authors noted that living within 30 minutes of a dispensary “decreased the probability having a poor mental health day in the past month by about 10 percent,” which they point out was “a 3.5 percentage point decrease from an original probability of roughly 36 percent.”

“What may explain our finding that medical cannabis availability improves the self-reported mental health of people aged 65 and above? Likely pain relief,” the research brief from authors at the libertarian Cato Institute says. “Cannabis is a good treatment for chronic pain caused by nerve disease (neuropathy)—the most common justification for medical cannabis and a common chronic condition among older adults.”

The study used geographic data to” estimate medical cannabis dispensary availability’s effects on self-reported mental health in New York state from 2011 through 2021 using a two-stage difference-in-differences approach to minimize bias introduced from the staggered opening of dispensaries,” the paper says.

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The Silent Pandemic After the Pandemic: The Global Mental Health Crisis

I emerged out of the Covid pandemic lockdown bubble in 2021 but only really started reconnecting with many old friends and acquaintances in 2022. 

Fast forward to 2024, what has struck me are the lasting scars the pandemic and the now widely condemned lockdowns have caused people. I now know countless couples divorced or separated. And many of our kids are irreparably harmed psychologically or developmentally. This is not some random observation but a trend I’ve noticed in a sample set of dozens if not a hundred or so folks in relatively deeper conversations. 

I’ve widely written about how badly the lockdown affected my family for the worst. It caused me massive financial pain and due to my own weakness, led to the unintentional damage for the rest of my family. It also stripped bare any illusions I had regarding my ability to provide, how strong a husband and capable of a dad I was. O for 3 in 2020. Some of these, I’m still working very hard to sort out.

When I feel helplessness or fear, it quickly turns to rage. And in a situation where dojos, parks, gyms and churches were closed, there were literally no outlets for this. 

Multiply this situation to almost every family in the world to different degrees of severity and you see the endemic rash of violence, suicide and loneliness of many young and old people now. The amount of broken families whether here in California, Canada, India, Australia, China or anywhere in the world. I know very few people unaffected. 

The only good thing to come out of all of this is an openness now to therapy and the importance of mental health, things that were taboo to speak about prior in society. 

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iPhone Now Collects Your Mental Health Data

True Story: The Health app built into iPhones is now collecting as much personal information on the mental health of each and every one of us as they can get a hold of.

Yet, a search on Google and Brave yielded no results on the dangers of sharing such information over the phone or the internet. Seriously, no single MSM has done an article on why such data sharing might be a bad idea?

To start, in sharing such data, you aren’t just sharing your information; iPhone knows exactly who your family members are. In many cases, those phones are connected via family plans.

iPhone mental health assessments not only ask questions about your mental health but can also infer the mental health status of family members, as demonstrated by the image publicly shared by phone on the benefits of a phone mental health assessment.

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