Terminally ill patients may experience existential distress, depression, or anxiety, limiting quality of life in the final stage. Existing psychotherapeutic or pharmacological interventions have (time) limited efficacy. Psychedelic treatment may be a safe and effective alternative treatment option. Systematically review studies on psychedelic treatment with and without psychotherapy for...
The 21st century has seen a dramatic flow and ebb in the fortunes of clinical psychopharmacology particularly with regard to antidepressants. For about 20 years, perhaps from about 1985 onwards, the tide flowed in with many ‘new’ drugs being made available to clinicians. In mood and psychotic disorders, these were essentially incremental advances from old drugs such as amitriptyline and...
The recreational use of new psychoactive substances (NPS) is increasing worldwide. Among them, the arylcyclohexylamine family including phencyclidine (PCP) and ketamine derivatives is increasing. We report a non-fatal intoxication mainly due to arylcyclohexylamine compounds illustrated by molecular networking (MN). A 37-year-old man with a history of drug abuse was discovered with several bags...
Arylcyclohexylamines are a category of substances to which the anesthetic ketamine belongs. The arylcyclohexylamines have been reported to act as antagonists of the N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor. An analog of ketamine, 2-(ethylamino)-2-(3-methoxyphenyl)-cyclohexanone (methoxetamine; MXE), has been controlled as a narcotic in Japan and overdoses of MXE have been reported to cause health...
Substance-induced consciousness alterations (CA) have mainly been studied among users of psychedelics but not among people using street drugs. Explore occurrences of three different types of substance-induced CA [ego dissolution (ED), visual pseudo-hallucinations (VPH), anxiety/paranoia (A/P)] and their perceived influences on life, together with their associations with substance use and...
Despite major advances in the treatment of mood disorders, major depression, a common mental disorder, remains a serious public health problem. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) regardless of the anesthetic agent used, is the most effective form of treatment in major depression and the gold standard therapy in treatment resistant depression. Ketamine is one of the anesthetic drugs approved by the...
Despite the vast number of people who use technology as a part of their spiritual practice, there is little research on the subject in studies of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Although HCI takes the idea of user experience very seriously, the field gives almost no consideration to experiences with technology that might be described as spiritual or transcendent. This paper reviews the work...
Major depressive disorder is a leading cause of disability worldwide. Because conventional therapies are ineffective in many patients, novel strategies are needed to overcome treatment‐resistant depression (TRD). Limiting factors of successful drug development in the last decades were the lack of (1) knowledge of pathophysiology, (2) translational animal models and (3) objective diagnostic...
Any macrosystem consists of many microparticles. According to statistical physics, the macroproperties of a system are realized as the statistical average of the corresponding microproperties. In our study, a model based on ensemble theory from statistical physics is proposed. Specifically, the functional connectivity (FC) patterns confirmed by Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis (LEiDA) are...
Therapeutic deficiencies with monoaminergic antidepressants invites the need to identify and develop novel rapid-acting antidepressants. Hitherto, ketamine and esketamine are identified as safe, well-tolerated rapid-acting antidepressants in adults with treatment-resistant depression, and also mitigate measures of suicidality. Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychoactive alkaloid and...