Can Psychoactive Psilocybin Cure Social Rejection? No, But it Can Ease Our Minds

This study was conducted on mentally healthy individuals. Will you repeat the process with subjects who suffer from problematic social anxiety? We are using a hallucinogenic compound that's illegal in most of the country so the first stage is usually testing animals. The next stage is testing healthy humans as we've done here. It's easiest to research healthy participants and, with this particular study, we wanted to understand the mechanism of if it works first. If you have no hint of potential effect, you don't want to try it with patients who really need treatment. There's been lots of research about the benefits of hallucinogens in mental health, but this particular study focused on alleviating feelings of rejection. With that in mind, do you see this having specific implications for people with disorders like Borderline Personality, who present with a heightened sensitivity to, or fear of, rejection and abandonment? Absolutely. There's BPD and then the other obvious example is social anxiety disorder. And then there's also depression. If I walk down the street and I see someone I know and he doesn't greet me, I think, 'Well, he probably didn't see me.' But a depressed person gets into this vicious cycle of, 'What did I do wrong? Why doesn't he like me? So these are the three particular disorders where people are showing the most prominent rejection-sensitivity. In the criteria for psychiatric problems, you find social deficits in pretty much all of them. Do you have...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news