Several measures have been designed to assess subjective experiences induced by psychedelic substances and other mind-altering drugs or non-pharmacological methods. Recently, two self-report questionnaires have been introduced to measure acute adverse effects following psilocybin ingestion and the phenomenon of ego-dissolution associated with psychedelic use...
Several measures have been designed to assess subjective experiences induced by psychedelic substances and other mind-altering drugs or non-pharmacological methods. Recently, two self-report questionnaires have been introduced to measure acute adverse effects following psilocybin ingestion and the phenomenon of ego-dissolution associated with psychedelic use...
BackgroundSeveral measures have been developed to examine acute psychedelic effects (e.g. mystical-type and challenging experiences), but no measure assesses acute psychologically insightful experiences that may occur during psychedelic experiences.AimThe purpose of this study was to develop and examine the psychometric properties of the Psychological Insigh...
We study the significance of stories about bad trips among users of psychedelics. Drawing on narrative theory, we describe the characteristics of such stories and explore the work they do. In-depth qualitative interviews with 50 Norwegian users of psychedelics. Almost all participants had frightening experiences when using psychedelics and many described the...
Serotonergic hallucinogens such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) induce head twitches in rodents via 5-HT receptor activation. The goal of the present investigation was to determine whether a correlation exists between the potency of hallucinogens in the mouse head-twitch response (HTR) paradigm and their reported potencies in other species, specifically ...
Introduction Psilocybin (PSI) has persistent antidepressant efficacy in human trials. We have shown one dose of PSI to significantly decrease depressive-like behavior in male Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats for at least five weeks without losing efficacy. However, the outcome assay we used to evaluate depressive-like behavior, the forced swim test (FST), has been cr...
Despite their acutely inebriating and sometimes unpleasant effects, some people report positive changes in life satisfaction, well-being, or mental health after taking psychedelic drugs. One explanation may be the ability of psychedelics to trigger mystical-type experiences. We examined the validity, reliability, and factor structure of a novel Finnish trans...
This article provides an ethical analysis of psychedelic research involving disorders of consciousness patients. We apply two internationally accepted approaches for analyzing the ethics of human research, the Value-Validity Framework and Component Analysis, to a research program recently proposed by Scott and Carhart-Harris. We focus on Scott and Carhart-Ha...
The 30-item revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30) was previously developed within an online survey of mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin-containing mushrooms. The rated experiences occurred on average eight years before completion of the questionnaire. The current paper validates the MEQ30 using data from experimental studies with...
The involvement of the serotonin system in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia has been elucidated by experiments with hallucinogens. Application of a hallucinogen to humans leads to changes in perception, cognition, emotions, and induction of psychotic-like symptoms that resemble symptoms of schizophrenia. In rodent studies, their acute administration affe...
A large body of historical evidence describes the use of hallucinogenic compounds, such as psilocybin mushrooms, for religious purposes. But few scientific studies have attempted to measure or characterize hallucinogen-occasioned spiritual experiences. The present study examined the factor structure of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), a self-repo...
The serotonin 5-HT(2A) receptor is the major target of psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline, and psilocybin. Serotonergic psychedelics induce profound effects on cognition, emotion, and sensory processing that often seem uniquely human. This raises questions about the validity of animal models of psychedelic drug action. None...
As part of a larger survey of health-related behaviours, 2239 15-16-year-olds in Wales provided information on their use of eight different types of drugs. Key findings indicate that just over a fifth of this age group report to having tried drugs at some time, while a tenth say they have done so within the past month. The most frequently reported substances...
In the course of examining the complete dose-response relationship for the behavioral effects of LSD in the cat, we discovered that, in addition to large increases in investigatory and hallucinatory-like responses, two behaviors, not previously reported, are emitted with a high probability under LSD. Beginning from a baseline of essentially zero in saline-tr...
