Mark Groeneveld

The only information they have is the paragraph talking about blinding assessment in the publication.

It's not in the supplemental data and I didn't find any reference on the web to that being a standard questionnaire.

For reference, the Methylone study participants correctly guessed they got methalone (70%) or placebo (53%). That’s much less than MAPP2: MDMA (93%); placebo (75%). But that's not corrected for the differences in measurement.

The “got placebo” bin in the methylone study was also wider than their “got methylone” bin. It seems weird to have a lopsided scale. MAPP2 was symmetric.

I noticed that too and dug in more:

Blinding might not be comparable: the methylone study had a wider middle bin of “unsure” responses than MAPP2. The methylone study also didn’t report the details of the middle bin; responses could have been lopsided.

Measuring therapeutic effect is also tricky because of the “it feels worse before it gets better” destabilization phase in therapy. Destabilization predicts better long-term outcomes (10.1080/10503307.2019.1633484). Participants's stories might shed light on how this influenced the results.

I’d love to know what was happening from the participants’ perspective. I presume they are doing memory reconsolidation since the trial reports persistent improvements. Did they have psychotherapeutic intent? MR not infrequently happens on MDMA when people aren’t using it for escapism.

Interesting: The change in CAPS-5 was similar to the MDMA results from MAPP2 even though the methylone trial didn’t include therapy. SDS improvements favored methylone.

I wasn't sure what you were presenting it as an example of. :P

The depression and anxiety diagnoses falsely communicated to me that my issues didn't have a known etiology and cure.

I also found the diagnoses given to me as an adult (depression and anxiety) unacceptable myths once I realized my symptoms were simply maladaptive implicit memories learned during the period of abuse that I could permanently unlearn with memory reconsolidation.

I think the illness myth given to me was severely harmful and untrue. My parents were emotionally abusing me. A psychiatrist diagnosed me with ADHD, and my family bought into that as a way to avoid the real issue. ADHD was an acceptable myth to them; their abusive behavior was not.

Quite evocative! Do you feel that that metaphor was a helpful or unhelpful myth?

Yea...sigh

This just reminded me to actually read Benish. Ever since I read Luck's description of the illness myth I've been thinking that it might describe a large fraction of current practice and research across the different fields of mental health.

I want PVT to go away so bad. Even the academic literature on tonic immobility, freeze, and fight-or-flight is filled with the nonsense.

This is by far the best explanation of why polyvagal theory is popular that I've come across: alyssaluck.com/polyvagal-th...

It reminds me how when people become practiced enough at meditating, it's easy to notice how perceptions all pop into existence and then disappear at roughly brain wave frequencies.

Is there a recording?

I noticed when they described fear extinction in the paper it seemed like they were actually describing memory reconsolidation since they called it unlearning. I've noticed this pattern in a lot of places; people seem to call both phenomena fear extinction.

The LLM models they looked at are all old crappy ones compared to the current batch. AI moves so fast that by the time a paper is out, the results are out of date.

I agree that pain, or any of the typical qualia reported by humans, is unlikely to be present inside any particular boundary (like a thumb) not associated with human/animal cognition, but some sort of more basic or foreign experience might exist.

I don't think it's a Russellian teapot. A significant portion of the proposed solutions to the Hard Problem posit that everything has/is some form of experience. The assumption that those solutions are unlikely is our culture's semi-arbitrary prior.

I'm confused why it defines consciousness as phenomenal experience, but then effectively treats consciousness as what might be called "reported consciousness," which is different than phenomenal experience. The heart-rate regulator could have a simple phenomenal experience that isn't reportable.

Those issues are just a quirk of the method they use to parse text called tokenization. It's not a fair representative of their capabilities.

My first project will be identifying the causal factors people ascribe to MDMA-therapy-induced, severe destabilization (psychosis, mania, or unworkable panic or dissociation). Identifying these factors will help to better communicate and assess risk factors for people considering MDMA therapy.

I’m putting in a proposal to Reddit for API access so I can download the data. However, they require a university email, and I don’t have one. I was originally intending to share the data with researchers who wanted it, but then I realized I needed a collaborator just to put in the request.

Does anyone want the corpus of posts and comments on reddit.com/r/mdmatherapy for a text analysis project or searchable database of first-hand reports?

The misery and insecure selfishness are basically the same dependent variable. The independent variable is lack of attunement in childhood.

The answers seem to have a large influence on whether a lot of people can casually try MDMA-therapy without major support planning, or try solo MDMA-therapy. It would be great if it was predictable!

I'm curious for people's view on whether 1) complex trauma, including non-secure attachment, explains most of the risk of MDMA-therapy-induced destabilization (assuming the therapist/guide is competent, ethical, and well-matched), and 2) how easy that risk factor is to assess.