I think responding to this requires giving a summary of the effects of different drugs, to build a simple mental model of how they could cause addiction.
Group A: Drugs like benzos, alcohol, and opioids provide pleasant sensations upfront, killing your pains and anxieties, but those problems return in even worse form when the drug wears off. It’s as though your brain’s baseline for what counts as suffering had been lowered by the experience of being coddled. It’s very clear how this leads to compulsive redosing and addiction.
Group B: Psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and LSD induce unpleasant feelings as they take effect, followed by a more positive (perhaps euphoric) experience once the brain adjusts to the presence of the drug, and then less potent pleasant after-effects when the drug wears off. It seems like the brain has raised the bar for suffering - suddenly the fact that you can see things in the correct color, gravity is pointing in the right direction, and you have clarity of thought makes life feel easy. You might redose to extend the peak effects, but you aren’t going to take any more for a while once it wears off. It would be tough to get addicted to these. However, a depressed person might have trouble with the come-up, and could experience a panic attack. You’d want a very skilled therapist if you’re trying to treat depression this way.
IMO ketamine kind of straddles the line here. The onset of the dissociation can be stressful, but it’s not that hard. You don’t forget your problems, but they feel like the problems of somebody that you know closely and care a lot about, so you can try to solve them from a different perspective. You can feel that you are doing something great, which can lead to compulsive redosing, but you keep the lessons you learn when it wears off. It’s not as though your problems come back in even worse form like you get with group A. Although if you really blast yourself, the dissociation can get so strong that you don’t care about your problems at all, which gives you more of a group A experience while you are peaking. I’m not a scientist and I may be wrong about this, but I think the antidepressant effects are not caused directly by the drug or metabolites that one could become tolerant of. I think that they are a result of the brain’s recent experience of looking at life from a non-depressed perspective.
Group A: Drugs like benzos, alcohol, and opioids provide pleasant sensations upfront, killing your pains and anxieties, but those problems return in even worse form when the drug wears off. It’s as though your brain’s baseline for what counts as suffering had been lowered by the experience of being coddled. It’s very clear how this leads to compulsive redosing and addiction.
Group B: Psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and LSD induce unpleasant feelings as they take effect, followed by a more positive (perhaps euphoric) experience once the brain adjusts to the presence of the drug, and then less potent pleasant after-effects when the drug wears off. It seems like the brain has raised the bar for suffering - suddenly the fact that you can see things in the correct color, gravity is pointing in the right direction, and you have clarity of thought makes life feel easy. You might redose to extend the peak effects, but you aren’t going to take any more for a while once it wears off. It would be tough to get addicted to these. However, a depressed person might have trouble with the come-up, and could experience a panic attack. You’d want a very skilled therapist if you’re trying to treat depression this way.
IMO ketamine kind of straddles the line here. The onset of the dissociation can be stressful, but it’s not that hard. You don’t forget your problems, but they feel like the problems of somebody that you know closely and care a lot about, so you can try to solve them from a different perspective. You can feel that you are doing something great, which can lead to compulsive redosing, but you keep the lessons you learn when it wears off. It’s not as though your problems come back in even worse form like you get with group A. Although if you really blast yourself, the dissociation can get so strong that you don’t care about your problems at all, which gives you more of a group A experience while you are peaking. I’m not a scientist and I may be wrong about this, but I think the antidepressant effects are not caused directly by the drug or metabolites that one could become tolerant of. I think that they are a result of the brain’s recent experience of looking at life from a non-depressed perspective.