Why Are Natural Allies Emerging as We Suffer from Mental Health Crises?
As mental health and substance abuse crises have festered, western medicine is finally allowing researchers to study long-stigmatized natural substances.
The amount of research that has been done already on natural substances like cannabis and psilocybin is actually pretty extensive, but yes there is much more emerging research as well. To put it into perspective, humanity has a much longer history of working with natural substances — what I call natural allies or medicines — than with pharmaceuticals such as SSRIs.
SSRIs may be helpful, but there are no studies on them for long-term use. Conversely, there *have* been numerous case studies and news stories about how many people who take SSRIs and SNRIs find that they cannot stop taking them and suffer from more damage as a result of these medications interfering with our brain chemistry. See for instance this article in The New York Times (from 2018).
