Having a guided psychedelic experience may be a powerful treatment for depression, anxiety, and addiction. A new review of clinical trials suggests that psilocybin-assisted therapy has the potential to help alleviate a variety of psychiatric disorders.
Psilocybin is the primary mind-altering substance in psychedelic “magic” mushrooms. The drug can profoundly alter the way a person experiences the world. It produces changes in mood, sensory perception, time perception, and sense of self.
“Psilocybin-assisted therapy has been shown to be safe in several studies across a variety of patient populations,” explained Kelan Thomas of Touro University California, the corresponding author of the review article.
Generally, psilocybin-assisted therapy involves only a few sessions. Patients receive a dose of psilocybin in a controlled setting while professionals are on hand to provide them with psychological support. The patients also receive counseling before and after each session, to help them prepare for and integrate their psychedelic experience.
“This therapy has also demonstrated large effect sizes for improving symptoms on validated psychiatric rating scales, which suggests psilocybin-assisted therapy may be significantly better than the current treatment options only demonstrating small to moderate effect sizes,” Thomas told PsyPost. “The other important distinction is that participants experienced dramatic improvements and higher remission rates after only a few psilocybin-assisted therapy sessions, which also appeared to persist for a much longer duration than current treatment options.”
Thomas and his two colleagues, Benjamin Malcolm and Dan Lastra, came to this conclusion after reviewing seven clinical trials on psilocybin-assisted therapy. These previous studies were published over the past decade and examined cancer-related anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressive disorders, and addiction.
Their review was published online May 8, 2017, in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.
“I’m a psychiatric pharmacist and clinical scientist with an interest in the latest innovative therapies to help provide better treatment options for my clients with psychiatric disorders,” Thomas told PsyPost. “I was reading about the psilocybin-assisted therapy clinical trials in the literature and quickly recognized that the effect sizes demonstrated by this novel therapeutic modality were significantly greater than our current standard of therapy for anxiety, depression and substance use disorders. I wanted to provide a useful summary of these clinical trials for mental health clinicians and characterize the therapeutic potential of this innovative medication-assisted therapy.”
The results of the clinical trials were promising. The review found that the use of psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression currently has the strongest clinical evidence, followed by the use of psilocybin-assisted therapy for anxiety. But it is still too early to draw strong conclusions from the research literature.
“The clinical trials summarized were Phase 2 studies investigating safety and efficacy endpoints, but some of the studies were open-label and lacked statistical analysis,” Thomas explained to PsyPost. “Therefore larger and more robust Phase 3 clinical trials will still be necessary to support an FDA approval and help clinicians better determine the appropriate place in therapy for this novel treatment.”
The review also said that psilocybin-assisted therapy appears to have a favorable safety profile. The main side-effects in the clinical trials were hypertension and anxiety, but these symptoms did not persist beyond the experimental sessions.
“This is a very exciting novel treatment strategy that will require more trained therapists, but I am cautiously optimistic that psilocybin-assisted therapy may become a substantially more effective treatment option for my clients with anxiety, depression and substance use disorders,” Thomas said.
The study was titled: “Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy: A Review of a Novel Treatment for Psychiatric Disorders.“
premedeval on May 14th, 2017 at 06:20 UTC »
I had 2.5g of Golden Teachers exactly one week ago.
I've been on antidepressants for 1 year and 2 months, fairly heavily depressed, and my psychiatrist has identified it from a very young age, perhaps 12-13 that it set in. I'm 21 now.
I'm not the type to say "yea bro do drugs it'll change your life and perspective"
But seriously? I'll tell you what happened. I was doing them with two friends. As they slowly kicked in, I started to feel really good. I was loving laughing. I was really happy I was with my two friends. I somehow noticed the warm breeze on my leg hairs. I somehow made note of the fact that there weren't any clouds in the sky. I felt joy inside, and I even talked to my friends about it. They were asking if I was seeing visuals and stuff and I said nah, but I've got this... feeling of well-being, I feel... alive!
Normally, I'm completely deadened and dull. I'm not the sad depressive type, I'm the complete apathy, no motivation to eat, sleep, talk, type. To give you an idea, I went through an especially bad bender spring semester and went from 155lbs to 116lbs. Straight up stopped eating, didn't feel hunger.
But somehow I felt a sense of vitality and wanting to feel the water (we went to our pool, highly recommend) and talk to my friends etc.
This continues on for a long time. About 3-4 hours in, anxiety set in as I realized I was still tripping and started to freak out that I potentially had destroyed my brain and would now be tripping forever. I became massively self conscious around my friends. I'm a dude and they're both women, so I became hyper alert and freaked out that I was somehow coming on to them. That was the beginning. I spiraled out from there and ended up rapidly thinking about my life as it was. It was a runaway train. I didn't know what I was doing. I hardly maintain a relationship with my parents or sister. I've begun to sit at home. I can't change my habits and keep doing the same thing over and over.
It freaked me out a lot.
In summary: at first I saw the world as it should be and what it could be. And then I was made extremely aware of all of my shortcomings and the situation I was in and it was terrifying. Abject terror and anxiety.
That was 8 days ago. I haven't had a single depressive thought, and I've been on a mood upswing. I know this isn't going to last forever, so I'm making the most of the vision I had and have begun to eat properly again and am talking openly with parents and doing shit.
I'm committed to being alive now. And I'm giving most of that credit to shrooms for showing me how things were and how they could be. They've done their job, now it's my responsibility to myself to take my meds properly, get therapy and change my life.
I'm committed to being alive. Not just alive as in existence, but I mean living (sounds cliche af, I get it, but I'm serious) - it's actually worth it. Perhaps do shrooms and you might
padizzledonk on May 14th, 2017 at 01:30 UTC »
Taking mushrooms really are a 'transcendent' experience, ive done them 4x and I have to say all 4 times were the time of my life.
The best day ive ever had, in my life, hands down no question, was when me and a few friends went to Acadia National Park in Maine for the night sky festival and took mushrooms. We had a dd drive us around all day and night tripping balls, watching the galaxy unfold from the top of the mountain after exploring the natural beauty of that park in full blown fall foliage was just magical on a level Impossible to explain to anyone thats never done mushrooms.
it was transcendent, it was reflective, it was bonding, and it was hilarious to the point that our faces hurt from smiling all day and it felt like we did 10,000 crunches from all the laughing.
best day ever.
I can totally see how someone suffering with depression could be helped with shrooms with a little guidance.
drlumpy on May 14th, 2017 at 00:55 UTC »
I took some truffles last week for the first time. It was my first real psychedelic trip. I've been battling depression for two years now and I can honestly say I haven't had a single depressive thought since I had the truffles. I've even been more outgoing and less introverted. Maybe it's the placebo effect i dunno. But it seems to really work