The psychedelic drug psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, is as good at reducing symptoms of depression as conventional treatment, a small, early-stage trial has suggested.
The study, run by Imperial College London's Centre for Psychedelic Research, is among the first to test psilocybin against the usual drug treatment, an SSRI, in this case Escitalopram.
Prof David Nutt is the deputy head of the centre, and co-author of the study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.
Psilocybin Photo: supplied / Imperial College London / Thomas Angus
He is the Edmond J. Safra professor of neuropsychopharmacology and director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College London.
It was a double blind randomised trial, he told Kim Hill and the results indicate that that psychedelics re-wire part of the brain.
“I think the psychedelic experience is important not because in itself it is therapeutic, seeing coloured lights and feeling that your body is morphing into the universe, I don’t think they are central to the therapeutic effect
“But they are an indication of the fact that psilocybin is changing the way your brain works.”
People with depression get locked into an inward, ruminative way of thinking from which they can’t break free, he says, and psilocybin breaks down the brain patterns that lock you into such thinking.
“This is what our imaging study we think will show, that in depression parts of people’s brain gets locked into a way of thinking which is inwardly centred, it’s ruminative and they cannot break out of it which is why they get locked into depression
Anti-depressants work differently, he says.
“Anti-depressants work on a different part of the brain, the limbic system, the emotional brain. Psilocybin works in the high-level cortical brain.”
Anti-depressants protect the brain against stress and allow the brain to heal, he says which is why they take 6 weeks to work.
“Psychedelics disrupt depressive thinking therefore you can come out of the depressive episode almost immediately.”
In a previous study, he says, a single dose of psilocybin induced a complete recovery in 20 percent of people.
Prof David Nutt Photo: supplied / Imperial College London /Thomas Angus
The average length of improvement for people treated with a psychedelic was six months, Professor Nutt says.
“Psilocybin produces an almost instant recalibration of your depressive thinking through disrupting thought processes where as the SSRIs dampen down the stress response, which is leading to depression and therefore allows the brain to heal from depression over a period of a few weeks.”
He believes psychedelics are opening up a “whole new era of psychiatry” but the stigma attached to them must be broken down.
He says their prohibition has not resulted in reduced recreational use but has meant research into their therapeutic value has been set back.
“We were there in the 1950s and ‘60s they were being used innovatively in those days.”
