Mental Health

The issue with mental health and medications is that different root causes can create different symptoms in different people, and different medications have different effects in different people. The understanding of what those root causes even are is very limited, let alone trying to figure out what the root causes are in a specific person.

We know that certain medications have certain effects on symptoms, generally speaking, but identifying which one, at which dose, suits that specific person with a collection of reported symptoms that look like depression or anxiety or whatever, often in combination, is trial and error.

Of course, in the US, where healthcare is "fuck you, I got mine," cost does also play a role. Shouldn't, but does. Another thing to take into account is what other medications you're taking, and whether they interact poorly with one another.

Sertraline is the generic for Zoloft, and it's been FDA-approved since 1991. That's a good long time, and if you're going to prescribe an SSRI, it makes sense to give more weight to something that has a long history, for the sake of both effectiveness and side effects.

There's some conventional thinking that it's slightly more "activating" and has fewer side effects than the other cheap SRIs, escitalopram being still under patent.

Research, and more anecdotal than I can count, including a number of my own, shows psilicybin (I use ground magic mushrooms) at slightly-less-than ‘feel high’ doses 4 days a week (aka micro or threshold dose) equals, or surpasses efficacy of any of that list.

No side effects.

Shit works, and you don’t have to “get high” and lose your moral compass, etc.

If you abuse psilicybin, it just stops working. You really can’t get addicted to it at all. Also there is NO ‘lethal dose’. You can’t die from it.

Fuck Rx!