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LSD, madness and healing: Mystical experiences as possible link between psychosis model and therapy model
- Isabel Wießner, Marcelo Falchi, Fernanda Palhano-Fontes, Amanda Feilding, Sidarta Ribeiro, Luís Fernando Tófoli
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- Journal:
- Psychological Medicine / Volume 53 / Issue 4 / March 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 July 2021, pp. 1151-1165
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- Article
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Background
For a century, psychedelics have been investigated as models of psychosis for demonstrating phenomenological similarities with psychotic experiences and as therapeutic models for treating depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. This study sought to explore this paradoxical relationship connecting key parameters of the psychotic experience, psychotherapy, and psychedelic experience.
MethodsIn a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover design, 24 healthy volunteers received 50 μg d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or inactive placebo. Psychotic experience was assessed by aberrant salience (Aberrant Salience Inventory, ASI), therapeutic potential by suggestibility (Creative Imagination Scale, CIS) and mindfulness (Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, FFMQ; Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, MAAS; Experiences Questionnaire, EQ), and psychedelic experience by four questionnaires (Altered State of Consciousness Questionnaire, ASC; Mystical Experiences Questionnaire, MEQ; Challenging Experiences Questionnaire, CEQ; Ego-Dissolution Inventory, EDI). Relationships between LSD-induced effects were examined.
ResultsLSD induced psychedelic experiences, including alteration of consciousness, mystical experiences, ego-dissolution, and mildly challenging experiences, increased aberrant salience and suggestibility, but not mindfulness. LSD-induced aberrant salience correlated highly with complex imagery, mystical experiences, and ego-dissolution. LSD-induced suggestibility correlated with no other effects. Individual mindfulness changes correlated with aspects of aberrant salience and psychedelic experience.
ConclusionsThe LSD state resembles a psychotic experience and offers a tool for healing. The link between psychosis model and therapeutic model seems to lie in mystical experiences. The results point to the importance of meaning attribution for the LSD psychosis model and indicate that psychedelic-assisted therapy might benefit from therapeutic suggestions fostering mystical experiences.
4 - Graph Theory Applied to Speech: Insights on Cognitive Deficit Diagnosis and Dream Research
- from Part II - Models of Neural and Cognitive Processing
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- By Natália Bezerra Mota, Brain Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, Mauro Copelli, Physics Department, Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, Sidarta Ribeiro, Brain Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
- Edited by Thierry Poibeau, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, Aline Villavicencio, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
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- Book:
- Language, Cognition, and Computational Models
- Published online:
- 30 November 2017
- Print publication:
- 25 January 2018, pp 81-98
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- Chapter
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Summary
Abstract
In the past ten years, graph theory has been widely employed in the study of natural and technological phenomena. The representation of the relationships among the units of a network allow for a quantitative analysis of its overall structure, beyond what can be understood by considering only a few units. Here we discuss the application of graph theory to psychiatric diagnosis of psychoses and dementias. The aim is to quantify the flow of thoughts of psychiatric patients, as expressed by verbal reports of dream or waking events. This flow of thoughts is hard to measure but is at the roots of psychiatry as well as psychoanalysis. To this end, speech graphs were initially designed with nodes representing lexemes and edges representing the temporal sequence between consecutive words, leading to directed multigraphs. In a subsequent study, individual words were considered as nodes and their temporal sequence as edges; this simplification allowed for the automatization of the process, effected by the free software Speech Graphs. Using this approach, one can calculate local and global attributes that characterize the network structure, such as the total number of nodes and edges, the number of nodes present in the largest connected and the largest strongly connected components, measures of recurrence such as loops of 1, 2, and 3 nodes, parallel and repeated edges, and global measures such as the average degree, density, diameter, average shortest path, and clustering coefficient. Using these network attributes we were able to automatically sort schizophrenia and bipolar patients undergoing psychosis, and also to separate these psychotic patients from subjects without psychosis, with more than 90% sensitivity and specificity. In addition to the use of the method for strictly clinical purposes, we found that differences in the content of the verbal reports correspond to structural differences at the graph level. When reporting a dream, healthy subjects without psychosis and psychotic subjects with bipolar disorder produced more complex graphs than when reporting waking activities of the previous day; this difference was not observed in psychotic subjects with schizophrenia, which produced equally poor reports irrespective of the content. As a consequence, graphs of dream reports were more efficient for the differential diagnosis of psychosis than graphs of daily reports. Based on these results we can conclude that graphs from dream reports are more informative about mental states, echoing the psychoanalytic notion that dreams are a privileged window into thought.