Psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms) Repair Brain Damage From Extreme Trauma

So, I stumbled upon this today and while this study deals exclusively with PTSD, I wouldn't be surprised if this approach could be applied to tinnitus sufferers given that conditions like PTSD and tinnitus are often linked together. Also remember reading about the effects shrooms had on OCD a few years back, apparently a single dose relieved some users symptoms completely.

https://web.archive.org/web/2013081...8/new-study-magic-mushrooms-repair-brain.html

Anyway:

I think it'd be very interesting to see what effect psilocybin (and other psychedelics/empathogens) could possible have in the role of habituation and inducing brain plasticity with tinnitus sufferers, but I don't know enough about this stuff to really flesh any ideas out. It's a shame stuff like cannabis and mushrooms are shunned because of old propaganda while doctors dish out addicting (and often damaging) pharmaceuticals.

 

Good find!

 

Seen a tv show on that a while back Trials on just that was done many years ago, which was indeed interesting, good to see research still being done on the subject.
Meanwhile mushrooms are shunned, have a drink instead lol

 

I was wondering whether a controlled LSD trip could be of any benefit for tinnitus sufferers.

Yet I'm afraid of an extremely high probability of a bad trip due to a sound in your ear you can't control, God only knows what it can turn into in an altered state of mind, and generally people with tinnitus are more anxious and depressed, which is a clear counterindication to tripping.

Though it's really a shame that substances like LSD and MDMA are criminalised. I really tend to believe in their strong therapeutic potential, if not at reducing the tinnitus itself, but at least in removing fear and anxiety. I wish there was more open research on that topic.

 

Totally agree with you! I've always been a bit scared of LSD though because of the duration of it's effects, deepest I've ever gone is a few mushroom trips which were very pleasant and positive experiences. But I definitely think it has the potential, along with other psychedelics like psilocybin/DMT, to help tinnitus sufferers given the right environment and guidance.

One of the best examples I can think of the use of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting has to be that of Ibogaine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine) and heroin addiction. There are a few documentaries on youtube and VICE did a piece on it on their TV show, but this drug has an absolutely insane success rate when it comes to obliterating sufferers of their crippling addiction to heroin. Heroin addicts go their whole lives addicted to the drug, or end up on something like methadone that is just as crippling the rest of their lives, Ibogaine is able to cure people of their addictions within 2 or 3 days. I find it disgusting that these sort of findings go ignored within mainstream medical communities, while band-aid (and often, just as damaging) solutions in the form of methadone and benzodiazepines are shoved onto helpless addicts.

Hopefully now that more and more people are warming up to the idea of legalizing marijuana and recognizing it's potential health benefits, other psychedelics and empathogens will gain greater acceptance and research.

 

From experience I can tell they don't help to cure the tinnitus. By the time I had tinnitus, I moved on from party setting to shamanistic rituals and setting and use of medicines instead of 'drugs'... none of them helped. Although they do give you a chance of widening your world view and learning you to accept your life the form it is taking. Healing traumas is all about acceptance... so I don't know what these medicines do on neurological level, but I do know they kick your butt if you don't accept

P.S. I hoped Ibogaine would be a miracle cure but it didn't help with erasing tinnitus... I will do another session in the near future and maybe give some feedback if it feels right.

 

Oh wow, you've tried Ibogaine!? What was it like? Out of curiosity, what else have you tried? Don't suppose you've tried Ayahuasca/DMT?

I don't expect to find any sort of miracle cure within psychedelics or emphathogens, but I do believe they could provide an array of benefits to those who are suffering - whether that be aiding in habituation or allowing for acceptance as you mention. It's all very interesting to me!

 

I haven't used psychedelics in quite a while but I could definitely see how they could be beneficial to tinnitus sufferers, especially if you have your anxiety under control. In my experience, I always walked away in an optimistic state of mind after a trip.

 

Yes Ayahuasca is quit familiar terrain. Medicines like Ayahuasca and Ibogaine should be respected and not approached lightly. Although you got to have some form of ease about it all. Seriousness won't get you anywhere, but disrespect will bring you down. But they will show you that anyway, comes with the package

I can't really remember the Ibogaine, it is like everything happened somewhere beyond my consciousness. It teaches you to let go of all your bad habits, physical, psychological and emotional. I felt supported in this for many months after. I used to steal a bit from shops (small stuff, like food which I thought was way overpriced) but I stopped that completely after Ibogaine.

Ayahuasca is of a whole different caliber. She shows you the mysteries of the universe while opening up your Pandora's box while cradling you like a baby while having no respect for any of your cunning emotional tricks. She will shake you up for good. So humbleness is key.

Both of these have to be done in ritual shamanistic setting in a group and with a knowledgeable guide or shaman.

 

I smoked marijuana for the first time post-tinnitus some weeks ago. I did not enjoy it. I got to high and got stuck inside my head together with my loving tinnitus. I had to lay down in my bed to not freak out. Sad, but true. I really enjoyed to smoke marijuana once in a while pre-tinnitus.

I have never tried psychedelics. Maybe I should give it a shot. It's not like it's hard to get them.

 

A small dose, say 5-6 typical UK magic mushrooms, will have no real noticeable effect when taken at all, so anyone wanting to experiment with repeated low dose use could do that without fearing a psychedelic trip. From memory you'd be looking at maybe 20 magic mushrooms before any kind of trip and most regular users would be taking 100 plus in a mushroom tea - that would get pretty crazy though!

Over here they grow September - October time but you can dry them and store them - I think they may have been criminalised in the last 10 years or so though. I've no desire to get into recreational use but a small amount daily might be worth a go.

 

Very interesting article. Magic mushrooms may be a very safe and effective antidepressant. Who'd have thought it?

It could help tinnitus sufferers in those first horrible months after onset.

'Two similar randomized controlled trials in late-stage cancer patients suggest that a single, high dose of the psychedelic drug psilocybin has rapid, clinically significant and lasting effects on mood and anxiety. The findings may be a therapeutic game changer for psychiatry.'

Psilocybin May Be a Psychiatry Game Changer​

 

I know this old but here goes:

My last trip on mushrooms was a dose of 20 small blue-meanies (Australian slang for Panaeolus Cyanescens).

During the "excursion", I had a passage during which, eyes shut, I imagined leaving my body and travelling out towards some kind of "event horizon", a bubble which enveloped the house I was staying in with my girlfriend and two other friends, at a vast height above the house.

As I approached this invisible envelope, I sensed that what had appeared as stars on my approach, turned out to be port-holes through which I could move, if I wished, with a simple act of the will.
But I held back, fearing that, should I push out and beyond, I might be unable to find my way back "home", much like a diver under an ice flow might not find the hole in the ice when he wanted to resurface into the light of day above.

It really would be too bad if, once started on such a journey, one were to become fixated on the noises inside one's skull, would it not?

I was about 17 at the time of the trip, so, about 5 years after the original injury to my ear-drum (an exploded bit of "ordanance" on Cracker night (Australian version of Guy Fawkes Night), right near the left ear-hole) so, at the time, tinnitus was not such an issue.

Right now, with tinnitus spiking like a son of a bitch, I dunno, I just don't know... tempting, I gotta say... but?

 

Interesting thread...

I've recently started micro-dosing Psilocybin to help with my depression after a number of casual uses and a few years of reading studies about using it for therapy, ranging from depression and addiction (quitting smoking) to accepting mortality when one has a terminal illness. I haven't really experienced my tinnitus diminishing with them but there have been other benefits and now reading about how it repairs the brain (I've been recently interested in Lion's Mane mushrooms, thanks to a video by Paul Stamets, which also repair the brain) and am looking forward to any other benefits from them.

I very much agree with @nills about respecting medicines as I have done an Ayahuasca ceremony and it's exactly how he mentions it, unfortunately it didn't help with my tinnitus.

I also agree with @Amaturekapfar about how weed suppresses REM sleep and how maybe a year of proper REM sleep (I like to think of a few months hibernation maybe) would really help with the tinnitus. I'm a daily cannabis smoker and it does make my tinnitus louder but then it returns to "normal" after as @Sen mentioned.

I've tried a number of the treatments mentioned in this thread (Ayahuasca, Cannabis, LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin) and the only one that actually made my tinnitus go away for any length of time was MDMA. Mostly the first time. It was amazing and gave me enough hope that we can find a cure or at least relief.

The best advice is be careful and respect any substance that you choose to use and sometimes less is more.

 

I tried this a little while ago, at 0.25g and 0.5g of what I assume are reasonably potent cambodian 'cubes in tea.

At 0.25g, almost nothing noted; very mild enhancement of visual data, no changes to tinnitus. Mild mood lift present ~2 hours ex post facto, with effects lasting only 20-30 minutes.

At 0.5g, significant open eye distortions, and when sitting in silent meditation, there was a clear (and artificial) quieting of the mind around the tinnitus, but no changes noticed in the tinnitus signal at all. Closed eye space friendly and geometric; described state to a friend, "I've got my tinnitus, but god is wrapping me in a blanket now".

Effects dissipated rapidly, ~40-60 minutes. More significant mood lift ~2 hours ex post facto, total duration of significant effects maybe closer to 2 hours at this dose.

So... mushrooms do what they've always done, but, for me, that doesn't affect the ringing very much. I have the sense that if I took about six grams, my ego would completely fall apart around the tinnitus, and all that would be left of me would be a pillar of cacophonous noise oscillating up and down my spine through my chakra centers. I am not sure if I find that idea more fascinating or terrifying, but I do know that it's going to be a long time before my busy life affords me the chance to be that incapacitated for a whole day.

Anyway, I hadn't peeked down any of these corridors in a number of years, so even if there was no astonishing effect on my tinnitus, it was vaguely reassuring to find out that mushroom space is the same as it was the last time I left it, and that the unfathomably mysterious fractal heart of the universe beats on, forever, filling and permeating this space we call "here" with light and love... or some such hippy bullshit. Drugs are bad, mmmkay?

 

Psilocybin Therapy Appears To Be At Least As Effective As A Leading Conventional Antidepressant

I thought this would be interesting for many of you since ADs are a hallmark treatment for the tinnitus community at large. It would seem that psychedelics could be a treatment for this condition sooner than later.

 

People are doing self experimentation and results are all over the map.

I've never found Psilocybin to have a long term effect on the nature or volume of my tinnitus but it's certainly provided a different perspective on it...

 

Have you tried heroic doses of 5 g+?

 

Not since having significant tinnitus, no. I think the most I ever took in youth was ~8 g, which was quite a night but not anything I am in a hurry to revisit. That would have been in 2003 or so. I haven't taken more than a gram and a half in about a decade and a half.

 

Is microdosing effective enough, or perhaps even as effective as a full dose? I don’t want to trip on this thing.

 

If you listen to Dirk De Ridder's recent episode on the Tinnitus Talk Podcast, he talks about how psychedelics may work to cure tinnitus. His theory suggests that you need a dose strong enough to dissolve the self. Perhaps that could be accomplished with microdosing if coupled with meditation or something else also working to quiet down the default mode network, but likely not with microdosing alone.

Here's the link to Dirk's interview. Transcript available. I included an excerpt germane to this discussion below.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/podcast/episode/tinnitus-ingrained-in-the-brain-dirk-de-ridder/

Dirk: Now if this is correct, then what it means is that you first have to detach those connections again. You have to break the sound generated by the memory by hippocampus auditory cortex PCC with whatever way you can, so we’re currently doing studies now in New Zealand to see if we can break these connections with specific stimulation designs and medication. So, for example, we know that certain psychedelics, whether it’s hallucinogens, like ketamine and MDMA, can break those connections specifically within the default mode network within our self-representation. That's also, of course, why if you have a psychedelic experience, you have the feeling that you're not in your body anymore, that everything is changing— that's because you have no reference.

49:25 How to break tinnitus connections
Hazel: Yeah, you can even lose your sense of self entirely in such an experience, which I think is fascinating.
Dirk: So what we’re currently trying is—first of all to dissolve the self by psychedelics and then try to rebuild it without those abnormal connections, so that being said, what it means is that the model, the theoretical model, again creates the theory, the theoretical therapies. The therapies link to the theory, so from a practical point of view, if this model is correct—that the sound becomes part of who you are, we have to dissolve who you are. You can do that with psychedelics, then you have to detach the sound network, meaning the auditory cortex, the parahippocampus from the self, which you can do by creating a noisy stimulation design so that it can’t synchronize. If that works, then that should be beneficial, but then you should still try to prevent this from reoccurring because if you have hearing loss, your brain might again try and do that, and that's why then, for example, you might need hearing aids, not to treat the tinnitus, but to prevent it from reoccurring or you might do mindfulness or whatever therapy that teaches your brain to basically say look, the lack of auditory input is not important because then you should not develop the tinnitus again. So, what it means is that if the tinnitus becomes part of who you are, you have to just take another treatment approach. But it's doable, it's just creates a little—it makes it just a little more complex and it also means that you might have to work in different phases rather than what we do now. Now we still think well, we have to treat it all at once. In the future probably that won't happen. In the future we will think, okay, well, if this is correct, then we have to first detach the sound from the self, then we have to detach the sound from the suffering, which is still another network, and then we have to ultimately prevent it from recurring, and that being said, that will be two or three different sequential treatments rather than the one magic pill or the one approach that treats everything. It does take a different approach, but it's all doable because we better understand those networks and those connections, and we know which medications can work on which of these components.

 

You would think that if this actually worked we would have a lot of anecdotes on Tinnitus Talk of long term tinnitus (post acoustic trauma period) people playing with psychedelics and being cured. That doesn't seem to be the case.

 

Agreed. Even De Ridder says that psychoactives are not solution alone, that there's a whole sequence of things that need to happen in addition to using psychedelics.

Also, there are anecdotes here where it has worsened people's tinnitus.

Would be great if folks like De Ridder could do more studies on psychedelics like they're doing now with depression, PTSD, etc.