Psychiatry as its practiced has no idea as to what depression even is under the hood. The entire science is based on the patients self reported feelings or the psychatrists feeling of how someone else is feeling.
What you're saying is something else, that drugs can produce long term harm despite short term improvements
This study is showing that THC, CBD, blends, or cannabis do not improve self-reported feelings over the long term.
You can use pedantry and wordplay all you want, but no matter how we look at this study it does not show positive effects.
> What you're saying is something else, that drugs can produce long term harm despite short term improvements
Recreational drugs make you feel good temporarily. That's literally why people do them.
They also cause harm when abused.
These are all obvious and well known facts.
Just to clarify, the study is not saying that.
The study is saying "there isn't conclusive evidence at this point, but it leans more toward helping than hurting on many categories". Please read the paper if in doubt.
I did. I don’t know if you did, though, because the categories that they said there might be some signal were secondary topics like insomnia, not depression PTSD and anxiety.
I mean, it’s literally in the title. It’s covered again in the abstract.
>Recreational drugs make you feel good temporarily. That's literally why people do them.
The point Im making is this is true for a ton of psychiatric or even non psychatric treatments. And to be perfectly clear Im not saying you should be treating your anxiety with weed, even if it does help you
That point wasn't intended to be taken in isolation.
I was making statements about how long-term treatment of an underlying condition is not the same as taking a drug which temporarily masks a problem or induces altered mood states.
The fact that a drug has acute effects, good or bad, is separate from any conversation about chronic effects.
For depression, anxiety, and other conditions it's the chronic effects that matter. The acute effects almost become side effects at that point. For some drugs, getting to long-term treatment involves tolerating the acute effects while your body adapts
Same with amphetamines for ADHD. And yes, if you take much more, you will experience side-effects ("cause harm when abused"). Opioids are not an outlier at all.
> Recreational drugs make you feel good temporarily
Drugs are only recreational if you take them recreationally, there is nothing that makes them inherently recreational.
And we have not discussed MDMA, which is considered a hard "recreational" drug, yet there are lots of benefits for treatment of PTSD, for one, similarly to psychedelics.
... or ketamine for depression, which is now approved by the FDA, even.
By giving a patient the ability & skills to establish a less dopamine-seeking lifestyle while temporarily relieving them of the deficit.
Its use is supposed to be coupled with therapy and/or coaching (e.g. https://www.thriveemerge.com) to ensure that the patient isn't just using it as a lifelong crutch.
That's how it's supposed to be done. This approach is more effective in children for obvious reasons. Persons diagnosed later in life are therefore more likely to require it permanently.
That's a question for a specialist and/or a medical researcher in the field. It's well above our "pay grade" here.
Anecdotally, I have tried the majority of legal stimulants at therapeutic doses. Nothing works quite like Amphetamines do for me.
> Why not a legal stimulant?
My prescription for it IS legal.
There's also atomoxetine, but it's not very effective.
> Why not a legal stimulant?
Which ones? People absolutely do self-medicate with coffee, ephedrine, or even cocaine where it's available (coca tea). And these stimulants do work, but they have _more_ side effects than amphetamines when used in theurapeutic doses.
One place I'm aware of that works from imaging as well is Amen Clinics in the US.
Neuroscience seems to be coming through with more and more understanding using technologies like fMRI and others the past 5-10 years. There is definitely some understanding there.
The short version, as I understand is, is that brain scans show differences at the population level but not on the individual level. Amen claim to both diagnose ADHD through brain scans (which is already impossible) and also diagnose various "subtypes" of ADHD like "Limbic ADD" which have no scientific backing for their existence.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/spect-scans-at-the-amen-cli...
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dr-amens-love-affair-with-s...
Both https://sciencebasedmedicine.org and https://theness.com/neurologicablog/ are good resources for detailed research into science and medicine. With Neurologica having some good deep dives into Neuroscience topics https://theness.com/neurologicablog/category/neuroscience/ as the author is a recently retired academic clinical neurologist
By increasing the baseline dopamine? I think the biological mechanisms for the ADHD treatment are more-or-less clear at this point.
Not so much with depression, though.
