To me, this study has a few "smells" that makes it dubious:<p>> We collected cross-sectional data between November 2019 and July 2020 from
self-selected respondents recruited via media related to psychedelic use such as podcasts and online psychedelic
research conference presentations.<p>This is already a significant bias in participants.<p>> Mental health was assessed with the questions “Do you currently have any psychological, mental health or
addiction concerns?” Participants who endorsed concerns identified specific mental health and substance use
categories from a drop down menu, and were allowed to select more than one category<p>So mental health is not actually accessed medically and simply self-reported.<p>To be clear I lack an informed opinion on microdosing psychedelics, but any study that picks its participant from a community engaging in X to study X but then uses the same community to sample their control group (for lack of a better expression) is questionable.<p>EDIT: Page 6 has a table that compare microdosers/non-microdosers and the latter was actually less likely to self-report *any* mental health or substance use problem by 5%. It's only when using the DASS-21 subscales that they can draw the conclusion that non-microdosers are more anxious, depressed or stressed. Their microdosers/non-microdosers ratio is also almost 1:1.
This study is non-blinded, non-RCT based on individuals who self-selected through social media, self reporting symptoms through an app.<p>While I'm hopeful that psychedelics may prove to be a treatment for some mental health issues, but this study doesn't tell us much.
I replied something similar elsewhere, but I think the real story here is about using tech to administer large scale studies and what that could mean for future research.<p>A lot of people here are discounting the fact that this study would typically be <i>very</i> hard (or impossible) to administer at such a large scale, especially in such a short amount of time.<p>In my mind, the important questions here are:<p>Are the benefits of massive scale studies worth the trade-offs of self-reporting?<p>What can we do to reduce or eliminate those trade-offs?<p>Imagine the scientific value of having easily created, easily administered, <i>massive</i> studies be easily accessible to any research group. If the research data can be made even a little bit more reliable (direct mobile health-kit measurements for example), that's hugely valuable.
More anecdotal than anything else, my fiance suffered from crippling anxiety and moderate depression until mushrooms. Since then, she's come leaps and bounds, and she attributes quite a bit of this to her trip.<p>As for myself, it helped me get over a mountain of grief after a rough childhood. I feel like there's no way I'd be where I am or forgive as much as I have unless I had taken them.<p>No, they're not addictive.
No, you can't take them repeatedly within a short time span.
Yes, they're decriminalized/legalized in <i>many</i> areas.
Several people here in the comments point out the lack of quality of the linked study.<p>I am not a researcher so I wouldn't be able to "see" or figure out these things or know what to look for myself, unfortunately.<p>But this is Nature, a well-respected journal, no?<p>I'm surprised that they're essentially posting clickbait studies...
I'd be careful though. Psychedelic are a powerful eye opener that can and do help with depression, but taking them regularly, even just a microdose can be a very reckless thing. They have the potential to completely drive you insane if you over do it and are best enjoyed with long intervals in between.
More accurately: People who claim to be microdosing also claim to have lower levels of depression and anxiety, compared to people who claim they are not microdosing.<p>None of this tells me whether or not people who have the time and money to microdose are simply in a situation more conducive to mental wellbeing.
Anecdotal, but since I moved to Canada I enjoyed the legality of cannabis (thank you SQDC) and started to dose THC oil before bed and it solved most of my sleep issues (used to have insomnia).<p>Every morning I wake up relaxed, refreshed and it stays the same through the day.<p>Before that I used to do something similar with shrooms but in the morning. Always had that odd feeling I was borderline of starting to trip even with very low micro doses.<p>But my experience in both cases is pretty similar to what people usually say about micro dosing.
Yeah cause your high lol. Psychedelics and other drugs can provide a different perspective of looking at things. For some people this might help them. For a lot of people I still believe that we should be doing studies with meditation and breathing exercises first. As much as I think drugs like marijuana have helped me become very emotionally intelligent, drugs are still dangerous even if they can’t physically hurt you. I think headlines like this which are used only to drive clicks to nature.com are 100 percent inaccurate and misleading. It’s hard to be depressed when your high (yes it’s microcode but ur still high and you know it lol). Doing research on this is fine but for nature.com to take it and write this headline is cancer
Disclosure: Haven't read the paper yet, time constraints...<p>One think pointed out when I stumbled about similar papers before was:<p>The reduction of depression, anxiety, stress from micro-dosing are rediculus small compared to the effects of a more healthy live style and environment. Even just taking a walk in nature for 10min a day often had many times stronger positive effects.
Hi everyone, I'm a co-author on this paper and also the co-founder of Quantified Citizen (we built the mobile research platform used in this study). What a nice experience to see this on the front page this morning.<p>I'll address a few of the comments made here so far below, but feel free to reply with more questions (or reach out directly, email in bio) and I'll try to get back to them throughout the day.<p>There are a lot of comments re-iterating concerns already covered in the limitations section of the paper. It's clear that an observational approach like this cannot establish causality and that self-selected recruitment can introduce bias, and the paper acknowledges this. RCTs will happen on this subject, but there aren't many significant ones published yet, and other types of evidence also provide value.<p>The subject of microdosing is one where the community practice and experimentation is far ahead of where the science is, which is different from research into regulated medicines where drugs are either not on the market or prescribed by doctors. There are a lot of health-related topics like this that are understudied where practice within a community that is not served by mainstream medicine moves forward slowly through anecdotes and informal discovery processes. Think not just about stigmatized subjects like psychedelics, but also about chronic disease communities, biohackers, athletes, etc. Sometimes alternative therapies and bottom-up health practices like these end up being validated by the scientific community, and other times the relative lack of rigor leads to years of people taking harmful or fruitless approaches. Bringing a more scientific lens to what people are already doing and speeding up the feedback loop with the research community is a big part of what we're doing with our company.<p>For microdosing specifically, there is a lot to discover by gathering evidence on motivations, demographics, and methods of real-world usage. The paper linked to above brings new insights into these topics, and is the first published research looking at the practice of stacking. One advantage of a large (n=8703) observational approach like this is that it helps pull signals from the noise to help inform further study.<p>The patient-reported data on depression and anxiety comes form the standardized DASS-21 scale which is a widely used self-report tool in psychological research. In addition to this data, we also included various quantitative cognitive tasks in the app (data will be analyzed in upcoming papers, stay tuned). While this data isn't collected in a controlled environment our approach collects data from so many participants that we have power across various demographics and methods of use. We also encouraged non-microdosers to participate, and the relatively low burden of participating meant that many submitted data throughout the study period.
Surely this analysis is completely flawed unless they were able to introduce placebos unwittingly to the participants who thought they were microdosing?<p>Otherwise you've got a bunch of people who are the sorts of people who are going to try microdosing. Of course they're going to answer questionnaires in a way that scores them as less depressed. Firstly because they're less depressed people (can be bothered to work out how the hell to get hold of the stuff) and secondly because they're not stupid and know what sorts of answers will influence the score in what direction).<p>Totally did not read the paper. Someone tell me I'm wrong please!
Tread carefully when altering the processes that constitute your ability to reason. I know somebody who nearly broke their mind by dosing with this and that chemical to self heal their issues.
Very skeptical. How can one possibly trust self reported "microdosing" for something like LSD where a normal dose is on the order of tens of micrograms? Not to mention that self reported users can't be relied upon to reliably determine the provenance or quality of what they're ingesting. There are similar issues involved with something like mushrooms where freshness, natural concentration, and mode of preparation are all major factors on the drug's effects.
I would be more interested to hear the thoughts of the children of adults who microdose psychedelics.<p>I imagine they would be the best guage of the total net effect.
Outcomes of the study aside, it is great that despite the legality of these substances, we are seeing research beginning to bubble up into popular culture. I believe they can help a lot of people, and are so under researched!
There was a really good Reply All about this. Not gonna spoil it:<p><a href="https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/2oh933" rel="nofollow">https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/2oh933</a>
Would love to participate in a study just because I can't get regular access to mushrooms/cacti without growing it myself, and LSD is much harder to come across these days in my area.
Is it possible that traditional diets were exposing us to small quantities of nootropics and we’ve just lost them through commodification?<p>I wonder if this is a new phenomenon or just an undiagnosed one.
Serious question. If you live in a state where mushrooms aren't legal yet, can you declare yourself a researcher and register your kitchen as a lab?
Will they do a next study lasting 10 years on addictive effects of microdosing and putting you on a path of wanting highly potent stuff gradually?? No they will not, smells like a study funded by someone to prove a point on their sales pitch...No doubt the researchers could have been under a NDA for limited disclosure of observations / the funding provider reviewing information first before anything is published. Just like antibiotic resistance develops, addiction too follows the same path...