Monday 16 November 2009

LSD on prescription?

Catching up on the papers today I read an interesting artical on the use of Hallucinogenic drugs in mainstream psychotherapy. It started off mentioning a session in Berlin rumoured to have involved illegal drugs where two of the participants died. There seemed to be two schools of thought, those who say more research is needed as there has been shown to be positive benefits and those who say that the benefits are short-term and the risks too high. The interesting thing is that most of the issues with these drugs is probably as they are illegal drugs. They seem to work on the seretonin system in the brain which is what most prescription anti-depressants do. I suppose a lot of the problem will be that they are out there as illegal drugs, even if they are shown to be helpful their is always the problem on a minority of people self-medicating and in mental health conditions this is unlikely to be helpful.

2 comments:

  1. i think there are a lot of people who already self medicate. like you say there is always a gray between cause and effect of such substances.

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  2. Oh there are definetly a lot of people who self-medicate using alcohol, prescribtion drugs and illegal drugs. But if people read that LSD will help there is likely to be a group who will skip the Doctor part and go straight to the drugs part.

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