The Efficacy of a Hit of LSD in Combating Various Mental Conditions

Before you know it psychologists and psychiatrists will start to recommend taking a hit, a hit of LSD that it is, to combat an array of mental disorders. In terms of neuropharmacology, LSD is classified as a hallucinogen that elevates serotonergic activity in the visual cortex; likewise, hallucinogens alter sensory perceptions in a dramatic way. A recent study, through brain scans, has found that the brains of subjects who toke a “hit” of LSD mimicked the brain functionality of infants. In what way can mimicking the brain of an infant actually be beneficial? Certainly not in intelligence or survival instinct, but rather in the intrinsic way infants are able to look and experience the world.

The study in this article had subjects, who had been intensively screened for any personal or family history of any psychotic disorder by a psychiatrist, were given the standard recreational amount of LSD and were then assessed. There wasn’t much discussion on the actual results, rather there was a discussion on how the brain scans of subjects who used LSD revealed that they were more emotionally sensitive and hyper-imaginative which mimics the way many infants go about their young, emotional lives. Possibly one of the most important outcome of this study concerns using LSD to treat mental disorders such as depression and addiction. LSD would be introduced to allow malleability of the specific brain configurations that had been reinforced through mental disorders. This becomes particularly interesting when looking at the history of antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs as traditional antipsychotics were initially developed as antihistamines, showing the advancements and ever-changing nature of neuroscience.

In terms of criticism for this study, there is a particular concern with the exact definition of an infant brain used to compare the brains of subjects using LSD to those of infants. Much of the article was spent illustrating the infant brain as one of wonder and and untapped mystical experience; however, the problem is those are not measureable quantities that can be used to assess similarities and differences. It would be safe to that assume the primary literature quantitatively defined the measures to which the brains of the subjects were measured. In this study, the amount of LSD given to a subject was equivalent to what might consider a “hit” when used recreationally, so another problem that warrants further investigation is the dosage of LSD given to subjects and the minimum amount of LSD needed to be beneficial. It would also have interesting to know whether this was a blind experiment with a placebo to see how those who took LSD differed from those who took a placebo and if any “placebo effect” was evident.

In summary, LSD use has provided evidence that it may be useful in psychopathologies and for a better understanding of the brain on drugs. While this does not provide evidence that LSD and other recreational drugs are 100% useful, it does warrant further investigation of the uses and effects of LSD and other recreational drugs on the brain and in treating mental disorders. It would be interesting to see how the regulation of this drug may potentially lessen with increased studies and how LSD could be used to help with PTSD, memory loss, multiple sclerosis, and other neurodegenerative disorders. Rather than focusing on the negative aspects of LSD it is interesting to see the pathway neuropharmacology is paving for future studies of drugs and brain functionality.