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A recent survey found more than half of Canadians believe depression and anxiety have become “epidemic.” Yet antidepressants dispensed in this country by the millions offer little over placebo for mild depression, studies show. Prozac-like pills known as SSRI’s in particular just aren’t cutting it, says Petranker, a clinical psychology PhD student at York University. “People are saying, at a grassroots level, what else can we possibly do?”

According to Fadiman, a psychedelic researcher and psychologist, what microdosing can do is muffle the negative feelings, without muffling everything else. With traditional antidepressants, people often feel numb to themselves. Their sexual capacity is diminished. “What we found with microdosing is that people’s negative feelings again were less. But they also had more positive feelings, which has never appeared on anti-depressant studies,” Fadiman says. “People felt less bad, and more good.”

In their own paper published last month in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, Fadiman, of the University of Sofia, Palo Alto, and Toronto clinical psychologist Sophia Korb report that people who followed a microdosing protocol — dose on day 1, no dose days 2 and 3, repeat cycle for a month — reported less depression, better mood, less procrastination, more energy and more patience with people whom they find otherwise frustrating, including people they sleep with. “People indicate they have incredibly improved focus and attention,” Fadiman says. “I remember one young man who said, ‘I only use it when I have a coding problem.’”