Background: Psilocybin can produce long-term changes in personality, personal values, and behavior. Although psilocybin-assisted therapy (PAT) is being actively studied for various psychiatric conditions, its effects on personal values in patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD) remain unexplored. This study examined the effects of PAT on personal values in patients with AUD and assessed...
Psychotic-like anomalous self-experiences (ASEs) are core and early features of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, which have been recently also postulated to underlie embodiment disturbance in feeding and eating disorders (FEDs). The present study was aimed at investigating the interplay between ASEs and specific psychopathology in FED. Ninety persons with Anorexia Nervosa and 41 with Bulimia...
This research aims to examine the concept of al-Ittihad in the thought of Abu Yazid al-Busthami and its relevance within the tradition of Sufism, particularly in the context of Islamic spirituality. Al-Ittihad refers to the mystical union between human and God, where a Sufi feels a dissolution into the Divine during a profound spiritual experience. This concept is considered one of the central...
BMC PsychiatryOctober 14, 2024Sisi Zheng, Francis Xiatian Zhang, Hubert P H Shum et al.5 citations
Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder (DPD), a prevalent psychiatric disorder, fundamentally disrupts self-consciousness and could significantly impact the quality of life of those affected. While existing research has provided foundational insights for this disorder, the limited exploration of brain dynamics in DPD hinders a deeper understanding of its mechanisms. It restricts the...
How is language related to consciousness? Language functions to categorise perceptual experiences (e.g., labelling interoceptive states as 'happy') and higher-level constructs (e.g., using 'I' to represent the narrative self). Psychedelic use and meditation might be described as altered states that impair or intentionally modify the capacity for linguistic categorisation. For example,...
Background: Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) is permitted in Switzerland under its limited medical use program. Data from patients in this program represent a unique opportunity to analyze the real-world practice of PAT. Aims: This study compared the subjective effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin between patients undergoing PAT and healthy volunteers. For the patients,...
Abstract In Cotard delusion, the subject believes that she has died or no longer exists. One explanation of the delusion proceeds from the fact that depersonalization is often reported as the experience of feeling ‘as if’ the subject no longer exists. In Cotard delusion, this depersonalization experience is coupled with a metacognitive deficit that leads the subject to endorse the experience or...
The MindGym, a novel immersive technology utilizing a reflective chamber environment, was developed to create standardized experiential content, including anxiolytic experiences. This study examined whether therapeutic experiences originally created in the MindGym could maintain their efficacy when delivered via 360-degree recordings through virtual reality (VR) headsets. A randomized...
Abstract The self is an avatar, a virtual entity, constructed by the brain to play the game of life. To control the organism the mind manipulates the avatar through the world. The avatar co-ordinates bodily, perceptual, sensorimotor, cognitive, and metacognitive processes in pursuit of the organism’s goals, the most basic of which is homeostatic maintenance. Other processes are layered over...
Abstract This chapter examines the feeling of ‘losing’ the sense of familiarity with one’s self and body in depersonalization and psychedelic experiences through an ‘active inference’ lens. It is suggested that psychedelic-induced experiences may involve a stance with radically altered prior expectations, providing opportunities for flexibly modulating self- and world models. Specifically,...