Study: Magic mushrooms reduce anxiety and depression in terminal patients after a single dose

From CNN: “By 6½ months, after all patients had received psilocybin, about 60% to 80% showed clinically significant reductions in depression, anxiety and existential distress and and improved attitudes toward death.

Fifteen of the original participants were then followed up 3.2 and 4.5 years later and showed sustained long-term improvements, with more than 70% of them further attributing “positive life change’s to the therapy experience, rating it among ‘the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives,” according to the study published Tuesday in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.”

Elizabeth Warren wants to go full totalitarian on social media giants in the name of “free speech”

Presidential candidate Warren has made it clear that she will impose burdensome and restrictive regulation on social media, which includes designating them “platform utilities”, aggressively eliminating “disinformation” to protect “free speech”, as well as fulfilling the incoherent populist rallying cry of “breaking up” the biggest of the corporations. It would be a massive, authoritarian intervention into a very free and open market for networking, finding and sharing news,

But “disinformation” is in the eye of the beholder. How long would it take before legitimate criticism of various powerful officials, agencies, or industries would be deemed disinfo? Free speech enjoys far greater protection on the internet right now, in the absence of any government regulation. Warren’s hyperbolic proposal would siphon all the energy of the free, unhampered interaction occurring every second on social media, leaving a digital product that no one would want to use.  And what of other, smaller social media firms? At what point would they receive the same bureaucratic treatment?

Warren’s plan would kill social media, and in the process severely damage freedom of expression on the web.

 

An epidemic of antipsychotic/antidepressant prescriptions for children under 2

Ghoulish revelations in this New York Times article: Still in a crib, yet being given antipsychotics:

“Most experts suspected that the trend of medicating younger and younger children for suspected psychiatric disorders was trickling down to very young children. Last year, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that health care providers had given a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to at least 10,000 children age 2 or 3 and then prescribed medications such as Adderall outside American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines.

“I think you simply cannot make anything close to a diagnosis of these types of disorders in children of that age,” said Dr. Ed Tronick, a professor of developmental and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “There’s this very narrow range of what people think the prototype child should look like. Deviations from that lead them to seek out interventions like these. I think it’s just nuts.””