I believe in emotion. Nothing is meaningful without emotion, feeling, or intuition; not our reason, not our beliefs, not anything. And I've never seen my depression as a "disease", it's a symptom, and I'm very glad to suffer depression for a bit of noble pessimism, and because it "motivated" me to leave the rat race, despite the painful cost of my cherished social status and material success. It led me to enlightenment and insight, because I ended up spending a lot of time with myself ascetically, and nothing to push or pull me. Ultimately it led me to Aryanism.
Antidepressants: I've been prescribed pretty much everything, and honestly? I think hard drugs are safer and more effective than antidepressants, in a sense (not that 'psychedelics' are hard drugs btw; they're absolutely not). Explanation: You can safely take a moderately strong opioid infrequently, whereas for antidepressants to have any effect you're
forced into chronic use, which necessarily causes physical addiction. And antidepressants aren't "inspirational", they're not "happy pills", they don't offer joy or wellbeing, they just take the edge off things, in hopes to function as a long-term recovery aid (whether they even do this is dubious). You might as well just meditate for 15 mins a day.
I'm really glad to see some psilocybin-sympathy, it's really impressive what those little mushrooms can do
and how safe they are.
From my understanding, psilocybin increases global brain connectivity (yet reduces its total
activity, paradoxically), granting us a more "whole" perspective, while simultaneously relaxing certain connections (particularly in areas responsible for ego, planning, decision-making), and strengthening or creating others (like creating cross-talk between sensory regions, and increasing activity in areas associated with emotion and memory), resulting in a very dream-like pattern of activity. It has great power to break one out of old and unsatisfactory thinking patterns, and bring buried issues to the surface which can now be dealt with in a novel way. Very very therapeutic, I suspect (and in my personal experience) even for physical conditions where there's miscommunication between the brain and body.
Edit: I just learned that psilocybin
specifically reduces activity in the
Default Mode Network, which is the network adults default to any time they're not engaged in external activities. It's the ruminating, self-absorbed, non-present, easily-bored mind. The DMN is even more overbearing in people with depression or ADHD. When the DMN is down, the brain reverts to its long-forgotten, childlike pattern of brain activity - which is also seen in meditation and dreaming. As children, neuronal connections are based on proximity rather than, as adults, functionality; which sounds more efficient and probably explains why on psilocybin, global brain connectivity increases despite a reduction in total brain activity/blood flow.