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Swiss LSD study yields incredible results for terminally ill patients
By Victoria Kim
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease published the results of an innovative study measuring LSD's effects on end-of-life anxiety. The study marks the first controlled trial of LSD in over 40 years. It tested the use of LSD as a complement to talk therapy for a group of 12 people "nearing the end of life."
After about two months of weekly therapy, the eight participants who received full doses of LSD improved by about 20% on standard measures of anxiety. The four subjects who took a much weaker dose got worse. Overall, after following up with the group a year after the trial's conclusion, Dr. Peter Gasser, who conducted the therapy, said the patients' "anxiety went down and stayed down."
The drug caused no serious side effects other than temporary and therapeutically valuable times of distress. One of the subjects, a 50-year-old Austrian social worker named Peter, told the New York Times that he was worried about having a bad trip, but ended up having a mystical experience. "I had what you would call a mystical experience, I guess, lasting for some time, and the major part was pure distress at all these memories I had successfully forgotten for decades," he said. "These painful feelings, regrets, this fear of death. I remember feeling very cold for a long time. I was shivering, even though I was sweating. It was a mental coldness, I think, a memory of neglect."
One 67-year-old patient said he met his dead, estranged father "somewhere out in the cosmos," who nodded to him in approval.
Switzerland is known for their progressive, harm reduction approach to drug policy. Their national heroin treatment program, for example, provides drug addicts with free methadone and clean needles. This policy has seen reduced deaths and crime rates, which is a marked turnaround from what was once the site of Zurich's infamous Platzspitz park, dubbed "needle park" in the 1980s.
It's been just over 70 years since Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD's mind-altering qualities when he absorbed some through his fingertips. But research about the drug's therapeutic qualities are just making a resurgence, along with mushrooms and ecstasy. Since the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA) came into effect 44 years ago, these psychedelics were labeled as Schedule I drugs, which are defined as having no medical benefit and a high potential for abuse, making them more difficult to conduct studies with. Marijuana is also considered a Schedule I drug.
Before the CSA, close to 700 studies with psychedelic drugs took place, and the research suggested that psychedelics offered significant benefits in treating alcoholism, easing end-of-life anxiety and treating many complex psychiatric illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The scientific community has researched psychedelics for the treatment of PTSD, alcoholism and drug addictions, and their findings have been promising. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, for example, found that psilocybin, an active component of magic mushrooms that trigger transformative spiritual states, may have lasting medical and spiritual benefits when taken in the right dosage. The study researchers were able to reliably "induce transcendental experiences" in subjects. These experiences offered long-lasting psychological growth and helped people find peace in their lives without negative side effects.
With Switzerland's progressive approach to drug policy, scientists are able to conduct studies with drugs that are still very controversial in the U.S. While countries like Switzerland and Israel are ahead of the game in propelling research of the medical benefits of psychedelics, the U.S. is falling behind by limiting research of these substances.
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Just one dose of psilocybin can ease anxiety
By Alexandra Sifferlin
Cancer is a brutal disease on both the body and mind. Not only do treatments like chemotherapy take a massive toll, but the emotional side effects can be hard to bear. Depression and
anxiety are high among people with cancer, including those in remission. But two new studies offer promising relief through an unlikely source: hallucinogenic drugs.
In two new studies released simultaneously by researchers at New York University and Johns Hopkins, doctors reveal that a single dose of psilocybin can ease anxiety and depression for up to six months. The results have great potential for people dealing with the fear associated with a cancer diagnosis, but also for people with psychiatric disorders that haven't responded to traditional treatments like psychotherapy or antidepressants.
The studies, both published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, are accompanied by 11 editorials of support from leaders in psychiatry, including two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association. “Our results represent the strongest evidence to date of a clinical benefit from psilocybin therapy, with the potential to transform care for patients with cancer-related psychological distress,” says NYU study author Dr. Stephen Ross, director of substance abuse services in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone in a statement.
The NYU Langone Medical Center study involved 29 people who had serious psychological distress, like anxiety or depression, stemming from advanced cancer. Each person received either a capsule of psilocybin or a placebo capsule; in a second session, they were given the pill they hadn't yet taken. The sessions lasted from four to six hours in a room equipped with head phones, a couch and a sleep mask.
People had their own individual experiences with the drug. But the results were remarkable: 60-80% of people in the study reported reductions in their depression and anxiety symptoms that lasted six months after the treatment.
The Johns Hopkins study, which involved 51 adults, had similar results. They each received one large dose of the drug, and six months later, 80% of the people in the trial continued to show decreases in depression and anxiety symptoms. Eighty-three percent of people reported increases in their well-being and life satisfaction, and 67% said the trial was one of the top five most meaningful experiences in their lives.
Several people described experiencing an overwhelming feeling of love while on the drug and felt they had changed immediately. "The feeling of immense love lingered for weeks, and four years later I still feel it at times," says participant Dinah Bazer, who was experiencing severe anxiety about a possible ovarian cancer recurrence. "My fear and anxiety were completely removed, and they haven’t come back."
Lisa Callaghan's late husband, former TV news director Patrick Mettes, was also in the NYU trial. Mettes eventually died from cancer of the bile ducts, but undergoing the trial gave him a sense of peace, says his wife. "In his trip there was an evolution through all of these stages of emotional development," says Callaghan. "He was reborn into this place of personal and universal love. He said he felt it all around him, and he felt a sense of forgiveness too."
The potential therapeutic use of psilocybin has been recognized for years, but strict drug laws implemented 45 years ago stalled research. In the 1950s and 1960s, several teams in the United States studied psychedelic compounds for potential mental disorder treatments. But widespread recreational use of the substances became cause for concern and overshadowed the possible therapeutic benefits. In 1971, psilocybin and other psychedelic compounds were classified as schedule 1 drugs, meaning that the government believes they have high potential for abuse. This classification makes it very difficult for research to continue, despite the fact that experts argue adverse side effects from psilocybin (when used responsibly) are rare.
"I tried to understand how something this big had been buried," says Ross. Due to these restrictions, Ross says it took the hospital a couple years to get their study off the ground.
Some of the men and women in the studies did experience side effects, like nausea and headaches, but none were severe. It's unclear precisely how psilocybin works, but the study authors say that the drug may activate parts of the brain that are impacted by serotonin, which can play a role in anxiety, mood and depression.
Significantly more research is needed before psilocybin could be considered as a clinical therapy. The researchers stress that psilocybin in the trials was given in a very controlled environment with multiple investigators present, and that people should not attempt the drug on their own. There's also some concern that pharmaceutical companies may not see financial incentives in single-dose therapies.
Still, many people in the medical community are hopeful. "We're excited about finding a medicine that can be helpful to people suffering from conditions not successfully treated by standard treatment," says Dr. George Greer, medical director of the Heffter Research Institute, which helped fund the studies. "There's a lot of interest."
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My spouse died from a slow and painful cancer. Fortunately we were able to attend a Shaman ceremony in Ecuador and partake of ayahuasca. This was a life changing event and greatly eased the pain.
-Karin
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Psilocybin found to ease end-of-life anxiety
By David Biello
UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob and his colleagues enlisted 12 cancer patients—11 of them women—between June 2004 and May 2008. All suffered from fatal cancers, ranging from
breast cancer to multiple myeloma, as well as "acute stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety disorder due to cancer, or adjustment disorder with anxiety." All agreed to take a "moderate dose" (0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) of psilocybin (and niacin on another occasion) to see if the psychedelic drug might offer some relief from their fear of death and disease.
The unusual decision to have each patient serve as both a subjects and then as a control—rather than having two separate groups, one treated with psilocybin and one with niacin—was taken because the researchers believed "that to be the ethical course to take, given the life circumstances subjects were encountering," (i.e. imminent demise). In other words, Grob and his colleagues felt that all the terminally ill patients should be allowed to experience any potential benefit from the psilocybin treatment. The patients were brought into the hospital, hooked up to a heart monitor and settled in a room "decorated with fabric wall hangings and fresh flowers." Headphones played music of their choice. At 10:00 AM on the day of a treatment, each of the 12 patients in the study individually swallowed the appropriate dosage of psilocybin (or niacin for the control session) as a pill. Researchers then measured various vitals and checked on their status every hour thereafter until the psychedelic experience was over, roughly six hours later.
Eight of the 12 subjects had previous experience with hallucinogens, either in the past year or as far back as 30 years ago. Though heart rate and blood pressure climbed as a result of taking the drug, none reported a "bad trip" and most enjoyed a "significant" reduction in end-of-life anxiety between one and three months after treatment, as measured by various psychiatric questionnaires. Their depression eased as well—a change that was sustained as much as six months later for those who survived that long. Unfortunately, the psilocybin, at this dose anyway, did nothing for physical pain.
The patients generally reported that the medication helped them to examine their lives and determine "how they wished to address their limited life expectancy." Sadly, as of publication of the research, 10 of the 12 subjects have died. But the research suggests that using psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin may help to ease the existential anxiety and despair that modern medicine has largely found no other way to treat.
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How psychedelic drugs help cancer patients face death
By Lauren Slater
Pam Sakuda was 55 when she found out she was dying. Shortly after having a tumor removed from her colon, she heard the doctor’s dreaded words: Stage 4; metastatic. Sakuda was given 6 to 14 months to live. Determined to slow her disease’s insidious course, she ran several miles every day, even during her grueling treatment regimens. By nature upbeat, articulate and dignified, Sakuda — who died in November 2006, outlasting everyone’s expectations by living for four years — was alarmed when anxiety and depression came to claim her after she passed the 14-month mark, her days darkening as she grew closer to her biological demise. Norbert Litzinger, Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still be alive at that time — a concert, dinner with friends; would she still be here for that?” "When" came to claim the couple’s life completely, their anxiety building as they waited for the final day.
As her fears intensified, Sakuda learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.
Sakuda’s terminal diagnosis, combined with her otherwise perfect health, made her an ideal subject for Grob’s study. Beginning in January 2005, Grob and his research team gave Sakuda various psychological tests, including the Beck Depression Inventory and the Stai-Y anxiety scale to establish baseline measures of Sakuda’s psychological state and to rule out any severe psychiatric illness. “We wanted psychologically healthy people,” Grob says, “people whose depressions and anxieties are not the result of mental illness” but rather, he explained, a response to a devastating disease.
Sakuda would take part in two sessions, one with psilocybin, one with niacin, an active placebo that can cause some flushing in the face. The study was double blind, which meant that neither the researchers nor the subjects knew what was in the capsules being administered. On the day of her first session, Sakuda was led into a room that researchers had transformed with flowing fabrics and fresh flowers to help create a soothing environment in an otherwise cold hospital setting. Sakuda swallowed a capsule and lay back on the bed to wait. Grob had invited her — as researchers do with all their subjects — to bring objects from home that had special significance. “These objects often personalize the session room for the volunteer and often prompt the patient to think about loved ones or important life events,” Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins, says.
"The thinking is that with the aid of the psychedelic, you may come to see the object in a different light. It may help bring back memories; it promotes introspection, it can be a touchstone, it can be grounding,” Halpern says.
Sakuda brought a few pictures of loved ones, which, Grob recalled, she clutched in her hands as she lay back on the bed. By her side were Grob and one of his research assistants, both of whom stayed with the subjects for the six-to-seven-hour treatment session. Sakuda knew that there would be time set aside in the days and weeks following when she would meet with Grob and his team to process what would happen in that room. Black eyeshades were draped over Sakuda’s face, encouraging her to look inward. She was given headphones. Music was piped in: the sounds of rivers rushing, sweet staccatos, deep drumming. Each hour, Grob and his staff checked in with Sakuda, as they did with every subject, asking if all was O.K. and taking her blood pressure. At one point, Grob observed that Sakuda, with the eyeshades draped over her face, began to cry. Later on, Sakuda would reveal to Grob that the source of her tears was a keen empathetic understanding of what her spouse, Norbert, would feel when she died.
Norbert Litzinger remembers picking up his wife from the medical center after her first session and seeing that this deeply distressed woman was now “glowing from the inside out.” Before Pam Sakuda died, she described her psilocybin experience on video: “I felt this lump of emotions welling up . . . almost like an entity,” Sakuda said, as she spoke straight into the camera. “I started to cry. . . Everything was concentrated and came welling up and then . . . it started to dissipate, and I started to look at it differently. . . I began to realize that all of this negative fear and guilt was such a hindrance . . . to making the most of and enjoying the healthy time that I’m having.” Sakuda went on to explain that, under the influence of the psilocybin, she came to a very visceral understanding that there was a present, a now, and that it was hers to have.
Two weeks after Sakuda’s psilocybin session, Grob readministered the depression and anxiety assessments. Over all among his subjects, he found that their scores on the anxiety scale at one and three months after treatment “demonstrated a sustained reduction in anxiety,” the researchers wrote in The Archives of General Psychiatry. They also found that their subjects’ scores on the Beck Depression Inventory dropped significantly at the six-month follow-up. “The dose of psilocybin that we gave our subjects was relatively low in comparison to the doses in Stanislav Grof’s studies,” Grob told me. “Nevertheless, and even with this modest dose, it appears the drug can relieve the angst and fear of the dying.”
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The Trip Treatment
By Michael Pollan
In 2010, Patrick Mettes, a 54-year old television news director being treated for a cancer of the bile ducts, read an article on the front page of the Times that would change his death. His diagnosis had come three years earlier, shortly after his wife, Lisa, noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs and he was buckling under the weight of a debilitating chemotherapy regimen and the growing fear that he might not survive. The article, headlined “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning in Again,” mentioned clinical trials at several universities, including N.Y.U., in which psilocybin was being administered to cancer patients in an effort to relieve their anxiety and “existential distress.” One of the researchers was quoted as saying that, under the influence of the hallucinogen, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” Patrick had never taken a psychedelic drug, but he immediately wanted to volunteer. Lisa was against the idea. “I didn’t want there to be an easy way out,” she recently told me. “I wanted him to fight.”
Patrick made the call anyway and, after filling out some forms and answering a long list of questions, was accepted into the trial. Since hallucinogens can sometimes bring to the surface latent psychological problems, researchers try to weed out volunteers at high risk by asking questions about drug use and whether there is a family history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. After the screening, Mettes was assigned to a therapist named Anthony Bossis, a bearded, bearish psychologist in his mid-fifties, with a specialty in palliative care. Bossis is a co-principal investigator for the N.Y.U. trial.
After four meetings with Bossis, Mettes was scheduled for two dosings—one of them an “active” placebo (in this case, a high dose of niacin, which can produce a tingling sensation), and the other a pill containing the psilocybin. Both sessions, Mettes was told, would take place in a room decorated to look more like a living room than like a medical office, with a comfortable couch, landscape paintings on the wall, and, on the shelves, books of art and mythology, along with various aboriginal and spiritual tchotchkes, including a Buddha and a glazed ceramic mushroom. During each session, which would last the better part of a day, Mettes would lie on the couch wearing an eye mask and listening through headphones to a carefully curated playlist. Bossis and a second therapist would be there throughout, saying little but being available to help should he run into any trouble.
I met Bossis last year in the N.Y.U. treatment room, along with his colleague Stephen Ross, an associate professor of psychiatry at N.Y.U.’s medical school, who directs the ongoing psilocybin trials. Ross, who is in his forties, was dressed in a suit and could pass for a banker. He is also the director of the substance-abuse division at Bellevue, and he told me that he had known little about psychedelics—drugs that produce radical changes in consciousness, including hallucinations—until a colleague happened to mention that, in the nineteen-sixties, LSD had been used successfully to treat alcoholics. Ross did some research and was astounded at what he found.
“I felt a little like an archeologist unearthing a completely buried body of knowledge,” he said. Beginning in the 1950s, psychedelics were used to treat a wide variety of conditions, including alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association held meetings centered on LSD. “Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding,” Ross said.
As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.
“I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it,” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”
I was surprised to hear such unguarded enthusiasm from a scientist, and a substance-abuse specialist, about a street drug that, since 1970, has been classified by the government as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. But the support for renewed research on psychedelics is widespread among medical experts. “I’m personally biased in favor of these type of studies,” Thomas R. Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (N.I.M.H.) and a neuroscientist, told me. “If it proves useful to people who are really suffering, we should look at it. Just because it is a psychedelic doesn’t disqualify it in our eyes.” Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (nida), emphasized that “it is important to remind people that experimenting with drugs of abuse outside a research setting can produce serious harms.”
Many researchers I spoke with described their findings with excitement, some using words like “mind-blowing.” Bossis said, “People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to address existential distress. Xanax isn’t the answer. So how can we not explore this, if it can recalibrate how we die?”
In follow-up discussions with Bossis, Patrick Mettes spoke of his body and his cancer as a “type of illusion” and how there might be “something beyond this physical body.” It also became clear that, psychologically, at least, Mettes was doing remarkably well: he was meditating regularly, felt he had become better able to live in the present, and described loving his wife “even more.” In a session in March, two months after his journey, Bossis noted that Mettes “reports feeling the happiest in his life.”
"As a scientific phenomenon, if you can create conditions in which seventy per cent of people will say they have had one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives? To a scientist, that’s just incredible,” said Griffiths.
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Psychedelic mushrooms could cure anxiety for cancer patients
By April Short
When O.M. was 21 he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was a pre-med student at the time. His first reaction was denial, followed by an overwhelming and lasting anxiety, as described in an Atlantic article by Roc Morin. Even after six rounds of chemotherapy helped O.M. kick the cancer, he was plagued with a devastating fear that the disease might return. He checked his lymph nodes so often to see if they’d grown that he developed callouses on his neck.
He experienced this debilitating end-of-life anxiety from the moment he was diagnosed until the day he ingested psilocybin, extracted from hallucinogenic mushrooms, while laying on a psychiatrist’s couch during a New York University study. O.M. is one of 35 study participants, all of whom suffered from severe anxiety due to cancer.
The double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study, which is still ongoing, looks at the potentials for psilocybin to treat anxiety and other psychological distress stemming from advanced cancer. The second half of the study will look at the effect of psilocybin on “pain perception, depression, existential/psychospiritual distress, attitudes toward disease progression, quality of life, and spiritual/mystical states of consciousness.”
O.M. told the Atlantic that when he ate the mushrooms, it was “like a switch went on.”
“I went from being anxious to analyzing my anxiety from the outside,” he said. “I realized that nothing was actually happening to me objectively. It was real because I let it become real. And, right when I had that thought, I saw a cloud of black smoke come out of my body and float away.”
Gabrielle Agin-Liebes, the research manager for the NYU study, told the Atlantic that O.M. had one of the highest possible anxiety ratings possible prior to the study. The day following his treatment, O.M. scored a zero. He had absolutely no anxiety, and stayed that way for seven months following the treatment.
As Morin's Atlantic article notes, psilocybin was used for medicinal purposes for centuries by indigenous peoples before Western Christian globalization stomped out its mainstream usage. In the wake of WWII, hallucinogens-as-medicine made a comeback among psychiatrists. When psychoactive substances gained recreational popularity as street drugs, the Nixon administration waged its war on drugs, passing the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Psilocybin was given restrictive Schedule I classification along with LSD, cannabis and other psychoactive substances. Nixon's war on drugs still rages on today, filling prisons with nonviolent drug offenders and targeting minority populations.
1970s-era policies have also suppressed most research of psychedelics for decades, but thanks to the efforts of determined scientists and research groups like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), government-approved human studies of controlled psychedelic substances are breaking ground again. While the federal government still deems them dangerous and void of medical purpose, research continues to reveal a promising medical potential of most psychoactive Schedule I substances to treat issues ranging from pain and anxiety to addiction and cancer.
A recent FDA-approved study looked at LSD in the treatment of end-of-life anxiety. It was the first controlled study of LSD in humans in 40 years, and the results were overwhelmingly positive, with every patient reporting reduced anxiety and no negative side effects.
The NYU psilocybin study is not the first of its kind. Charles Grob conducted a study with similar outcome measures at Harbor-UCLA. However, the NYU study uses higher doses of psilocybin and examines 32 subjects instead of the 12 Grob examined. The results of the current psilocybin study are still being examined, but principal investigator Stephen Ross told the Atlantic that, “the vast majority of their patients have exhibited an immediate and sustained reduction in anxiety. Consistent with similar studies involving psilocybin, approximately three-fourths of the participants rate their experience with the drug as being one of the top five most significant events of their lives.”
O.M. was among the overwhelming success cases.
“At the hospital they gave me Xanax for anxiety,” he told the Atlantic. “Xanax doesn’t get rid of your anxiety. Xanax tells you not to feel it for a while until it stops working and you take the next pill. The beauty of psilocybin is: it’s not medication. You’re not taking it and it solves your problem. You take it and you solve your problem yourself.”
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Ketamine infusion therapies for end-of-life care
For a terminal illness ketamine may be a great treatment option. Psychedelic drugs and their derivatives, such as ketamine, help patients cope with existential concerns, and can reduce anxiety leading up to death. Ketamine infusion therapies can offer end-of-life patients peace of mind.
Patients who have access to psychedelic medications as part of treatment for their terminal illness have found that they weren’t scared of death anymore. They frequently say that the treatment was one of the most meaningful experiences they’ve had, ever. They talk about gaining a sense of peace with the universe, and having a sense of universal oneness and serenity. Their anxiety typically decreases significantly.
Palliative and hospice care professionals, as well as all of the individuals who care for their loved ones, do an exceptional job caring for those in the various stages of dying. But often the depression, anxiety, and melancholy that come with having a terminal diagnosis go untreated. Ketamine infusions may be one good option for addressing this part of end-of-life care. In most cases, ketamine works instantly and helps to treat those often-overlooked symptoms in a way that few if any treatments beyond psychedelics can.
An appropriate treatment regime may involve a series of outpatient infusion therapies followed by maintenance treatments from time to time as needed by the patient.
The opportunity to provide some relief from depression, anxiety and fear may be a great gift for many facing death. And for those who are particularly struggling it may be especially welcome.
-Dr. Allison Wells
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I suffer from anxiety-based food aversion; my mind convinces my body that it doesn't need food. When at my worst I was consuming less than 500 calories per day. I started microdosing with psilocybin, and pulled a complete 180. After the initial nausea fades, the microdose puts me very much in tune with my body and it's needs. It allows me to easily circumvent whatever "reason" it is on that day that I've used to justify not eating. Basically, it makes my hunger unignorable to the point where I have to do something about it. My appetite is much healthier now thanks to this practice.
-non-zer0
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LSD helped me with debilitating anxiety and also helped me quell and control the subsequent substance use that the anxiety was causing. This is a game changer for me after trying so many harmful drugs from my doctor that never came close to the efficacy of LSD.
-anon
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I would say that psilocybin cured my social anxiety pretty much overnight. I went from not really talking to anyone to becoming friends with pretty much everyone. I learned how to talk to people much better. The mushrooms made me try more at social interactions and to not worry about the consequences so much.
-anon
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4-AcO-DMT worked wonders for my social anxiety. I assumed the opposite would be true, but I was completely worry-free when interacting with strangers in very public places.
-TNS
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I feel qualified to talk about social anxiety and psychedelics, as I've had a lot of experience with both. My recommendation is to take a low-to-moderate dose of a psychedelic in a setting with strangers. If you can't tolerate the idea of tripping around strangers, then trip with a group of friends. It's important to do it in a setting that challenges your anxiety.
The ONLY way to overcome social anxiety is to confront it. Psychedelics can help you do this.
-TheAppleCore
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Clinical trials demonstrate the remarkable benefits of magic mushrooms
In a recent Time Magazine article, Dinah Bazer recounts her personal experience with psilocybin. A cancer survivor struggling with severe anxiety (driven by her fear of a recurrence), Bazer agreed to participate in a magic mushroom trial conducted at the NYU Langone Medical Center.
While fear gripped her when the drug first brought her "tumbling through space," the experience ended up being a profoundly healing one:
"… I started to feel love. I felt like I was being bathed in love and it was overwhelming, amazing, wonderful … The feeling of immense love lingered for weeks, and four years later I still feel it at times. My fear and anxiety were completely removed, and they haven't come back … The experience changed how I wanted to live my life. I used to get up, grab a quick snack and eat it in the car. But I no longer want to be in a hurry. Now I get up an hour early, make a real breakfast and read my paper … I used to imagine what it would be like if the cancer recurred, but I don't think about it the same way anymore. When I don't feel well, and thoughts of a recurrence creep into my mind, I lack fear and simply think, 'Let's just see what happens.'"
According to lead author Dr. Stephen Ross, director of substance abuse services and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone, their investigation revealed that psilocybin “was a rapid, immediately acting anti-anxiety and antidepressant.”
“The high-dose psilocybin resulted in significant decreases in both clinician-rated and self-reported measures of depressed mood and anxiety among the patients. The effects lasted in 78 percent of patients for depression and 83 percent for anxiety in a follow-up assessment six months later."
-Dr. Joseph Mercola
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As someone who has had severe clinical depression off and on for decades and tried psilocybin once (at what I think was a lower dose than they used in the study) I can verify that it works, and works very well. It's positive, it promotes joy and imagination, and I feel much more in touch with my feelings.
I stopped taking my antidepressant that was making me feel even more detached. I felt the medication that I'd been taking was pushing me in the wrong direction. After taking the psilocybin I never took that medication again.
-Ursula
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Psychedelic mushrooms found to relieve anxiety in cancer patients for months at a time
The Johns Hopkins study looked at 51 similar patients who were given a low dose of psilocybin relative to their body weight (3mg), or a high dose (25mg). Five weeks later, patients received the opposite dose. Similarly, researchers found that most patients felt their mental health symptoms had been alleviated 6 months after tripping on the high dose, and 65% reported no longer feeling any depression or anxiety, respectively.
Stephen Ross, a psychiatrist at NYU and lead author of one of the studies, told the Atlantic he was surprised by how well tripping on psilocybin seemed to work for patients. “The moment patients get psilocybin, their distress comes down,” he said. “That’s very new in psychiatry, to have a medication that works immediately and lasts that long.”
-Katherine Ellen Foley
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Psilocybin for cancer depression
By Ron Cassie
The diagnosis of Clark Martin’s liver cancer came at the same time as the birth of his daughter, with doctors informing the clinical psychologist that he had about a year and a half to live. “It was emotionally very upsetting,” the soft-spoken Martin recalls. “Not because of the dying, but because of my daughter.”
His late-stage cancer, however, proved one of the rare cases that responded to the initial chemotherapy. “I was lucky,” he says. But not out of the woods. During the next two decades, cancer cells would reappear in his lungs, metastasizing into tumors. On each occasion, Martin battled the disease into remission, but the endless regimens and surgeries and ever-looming threat of cancer drove him into bouts of anxiety and depression as he obsessed over his health and micro-managed his treatment plans. “I have a scientific background and became very narrowly focused,” he says. “I felt like I needed to know more than the doctors. I withdrew from life.”
Ultimately, his friends and daughter—entering college by this time—convinced him that he needed to address his mental wellbeing. He tried counseling, but it didn’t improve his outlook. Neither did antidepressants. Partly from desperation to “pop out” of his funk and partly out of professional curiosity, the Vancouver, WA-based Martin flew to Baltimore to participate in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins where he would ingest a powerful dose of psilocybin—the naturally occurring psychoactive ingredient found in “magic” mushrooms.
“All of a sudden, things in the room, things you feel inside, start feeling unfamiliar. Like my brain was going offline,” Martin says. “The experience in my head was just of being in a void,” he continues. “I’m a boater and I’ll use this analogy: Imagine you fall off a sailboat into the open ocean and when you turn around, the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone."
“At one point, I was in a stadium-like building with stained glass—it may have been a giant cathedral. At another point I had the feeling of living on a bubble. I had my space on the bubble and other people had theirs. But mostly there was just an experience of tranquility,” Martin continues. “No people, no architecture, no thoughts, no ideas—nothing. Just calm presence.”
Today, six years later, Martin credits psilocybin—as well as the preparation and guidance that went with it—with parting the fog of his depression. He also credits his psychedelic session with transforming and opening his relationships with his daughter, friends, and even his Alzheimer’s suffering father. “I still think about it every day,” he says, choking up for a moment. “I’m still unpacking and integrating what I learned into my daily life.”
Swiss LSD study yields incredible results for terminally ill patients
By Victoria Kim
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease published the results of an innovative study measuring LSD's effects on end-of-life anxiety. The study marks the first controlled trial of LSD in over 40 years. It tested the use of LSD as a complement to talk therapy for a group of 12 people "nearing the end of life."
After about two months of weekly therapy, the eight participants who received full doses of LSD improved by about 20% on standard measures of anxiety. The four subjects who took a much weaker dose got worse. Overall, after following up with the group a year after the trial's conclusion, Dr. Peter Gasser, who conducted the therapy, said the patients' "anxiety went down and stayed down."
The drug caused no serious side effects other than temporary and therapeutically valuable times of distress. One of the subjects, a 50-year-old Austrian social worker named Peter, told the New York Times that he was worried about having a bad trip, but ended up having a mystical experience. "I had what you would call a mystical experience, I guess, lasting for some time, and the major part was pure distress at all these memories I had successfully forgotten for decades," he said. "These painful feelings, regrets, this fear of death. I remember feeling very cold for a long time. I was shivering, even though I was sweating. It was a mental coldness, I think, a memory of neglect."
One 67-year-old patient said he met his dead, estranged father "somewhere out in the cosmos," who nodded to him in approval.
Switzerland is known for their progressive, harm reduction approach to drug policy. Their national heroin treatment program, for example, provides drug addicts with free methadone and clean needles. This policy has seen reduced deaths and crime rates, which is a marked turnaround from what was once the site of Zurich's infamous Platzspitz park, dubbed "needle park" in the 1980s.
It's been just over 70 years since Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD's mind-altering qualities when he absorbed some through his fingertips. But research about the drug's therapeutic qualities are just making a resurgence, along with mushrooms and ecstasy. Since the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA) came into effect 44 years ago, these psychedelics were labeled as Schedule I drugs, which are defined as having no medical benefit and a high potential for abuse, making them more difficult to conduct studies with. Marijuana is also considered a Schedule I drug.
Before the CSA, close to 700 studies with psychedelic drugs took place, and the research suggested that psychedelics offered significant benefits in treating alcoholism, easing end-of-life anxiety and treating many complex psychiatric illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The scientific community has researched psychedelics for the treatment of PTSD, alcoholism and drug addictions, and their findings have been promising. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, for example, found that psilocybin, an active component of magic mushrooms that trigger transformative spiritual states, may have lasting medical and spiritual benefits when taken in the right dosage. The study researchers were able to reliably "induce transcendental experiences" in subjects. These experiences offered long-lasting psychological growth and helped people find peace in their lives without negative side effects.
With Switzerland's progressive approach to drug policy, scientists are able to conduct studies with drugs that are still very controversial in the U.S. While countries like Switzerland and Israel are ahead of the game in propelling research of the medical benefits of psychedelics, the U.S. is falling behind by limiting research of these substances.
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Just one dose of psilocybin can ease anxiety
By Alexandra Sifferlin
Cancer is a brutal disease on both the body and mind. Not only do treatments like chemotherapy take a massive toll, but the emotional side effects can be hard to bear. Depression and
anxiety are high among people with cancer, including those in remission. But two new studies offer promising relief through an unlikely source: hallucinogenic drugs.
In two new studies released simultaneously by researchers at New York University and Johns Hopkins, doctors reveal that a single dose of psilocybin can ease anxiety and depression for up to six months. The results have great potential for people dealing with the fear associated with a cancer diagnosis, but also for people with psychiatric disorders that haven't responded to traditional treatments like psychotherapy or antidepressants.
The studies, both published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, are accompanied by 11 editorials of support from leaders in psychiatry, including two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association. “Our results represent the strongest evidence to date of a clinical benefit from psilocybin therapy, with the potential to transform care for patients with cancer-related psychological distress,” says NYU study author Dr. Stephen Ross, director of substance abuse services in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone in a statement.
The NYU Langone Medical Center study involved 29 people who had serious psychological distress, like anxiety or depression, stemming from advanced cancer. Each person received either a capsule of psilocybin or a placebo capsule; in a second session, they were given the pill they hadn't yet taken. The sessions lasted from four to six hours in a room equipped with head phones, a couch and a sleep mask.
People had their own individual experiences with the drug. But the results were remarkable: 60-80% of people in the study reported reductions in their depression and anxiety symptoms that lasted six months after the treatment.
The Johns Hopkins study, which involved 51 adults, had similar results. They each received one large dose of the drug, and six months later, 80% of the people in the trial continued to show decreases in depression and anxiety symptoms. Eighty-three percent of people reported increases in their well-being and life satisfaction, and 67% said the trial was one of the top five most meaningful experiences in their lives.
Several people described experiencing an overwhelming feeling of love while on the drug and felt they had changed immediately. "The feeling of immense love lingered for weeks, and four years later I still feel it at times," says participant Dinah Bazer, who was experiencing severe anxiety about a possible ovarian cancer recurrence. "My fear and anxiety were completely removed, and they haven’t come back."
Lisa Callaghan's late husband, former TV news director Patrick Mettes, was also in the NYU trial. Mettes eventually died from cancer of the bile ducts, but undergoing the trial gave him a sense of peace, says his wife. "In his trip there was an evolution through all of these stages of emotional development," says Callaghan. "He was reborn into this place of personal and universal love. He said he felt it all around him, and he felt a sense of forgiveness too."
The potential therapeutic use of psilocybin has been recognized for years, but strict drug laws implemented 45 years ago stalled research. In the 1950s and 1960s, several teams in the United States studied psychedelic compounds for potential mental disorder treatments. But widespread recreational use of the substances became cause for concern and overshadowed the possible therapeutic benefits. In 1971, psilocybin and other psychedelic compounds were classified as schedule 1 drugs, meaning that the government believes they have high potential for abuse. This classification makes it very difficult for research to continue, despite the fact that experts argue adverse side effects from psilocybin (when used responsibly) are rare.
"I tried to understand how something this big had been buried," says Ross. Due to these restrictions, Ross says it took the hospital a couple years to get their study off the ground.
Some of the men and women in the studies did experience side effects, like nausea and headaches, but none were severe. It's unclear precisely how psilocybin works, but the study authors say that the drug may activate parts of the brain that are impacted by serotonin, which can play a role in anxiety, mood and depression.
Significantly more research is needed before psilocybin could be considered as a clinical therapy. The researchers stress that psilocybin in the trials was given in a very controlled environment with multiple investigators present, and that people should not attempt the drug on their own. There's also some concern that pharmaceutical companies may not see financial incentives in single-dose therapies.
Still, many people in the medical community are hopeful. "We're excited about finding a medicine that can be helpful to people suffering from conditions not successfully treated by standard treatment," says Dr. George Greer, medical director of the Heffter Research Institute, which helped fund the studies. "There's a lot of interest."
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My spouse died from a slow and painful cancer. Fortunately we were able to attend a Shaman ceremony in Ecuador and partake of ayahuasca. This was a life changing event and greatly eased the pain.
-Karin
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Psilocybin found to ease end-of-life anxiety
By David Biello
UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob and his colleagues enlisted 12 cancer patients—11 of them women—between June 2004 and May 2008. All suffered from fatal cancers, ranging from
breast cancer to multiple myeloma, as well as "acute stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety disorder due to cancer, or adjustment disorder with anxiety." All agreed to take a "moderate dose" (0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) of psilocybin (and niacin on another occasion) to see if the psychedelic drug might offer some relief from their fear of death and disease.
The unusual decision to have each patient serve as both a subjects and then as a control—rather than having two separate groups, one treated with psilocybin and one with niacin—was taken because the researchers believed "that to be the ethical course to take, given the life circumstances subjects were encountering," (i.e. imminent demise). In other words, Grob and his colleagues felt that all the terminally ill patients should be allowed to experience any potential benefit from the psilocybin treatment. The patients were brought into the hospital, hooked up to a heart monitor and settled in a room "decorated with fabric wall hangings and fresh flowers." Headphones played music of their choice. At 10:00 AM on the day of a treatment, each of the 12 patients in the study individually swallowed the appropriate dosage of psilocybin (or niacin for the control session) as a pill. Researchers then measured various vitals and checked on their status every hour thereafter until the psychedelic experience was over, roughly six hours later.
Eight of the 12 subjects had previous experience with hallucinogens, either in the past year or as far back as 30 years ago. Though heart rate and blood pressure climbed as a result of taking the drug, none reported a "bad trip" and most enjoyed a "significant" reduction in end-of-life anxiety between one and three months after treatment, as measured by various psychiatric questionnaires. Their depression eased as well—a change that was sustained as much as six months later for those who survived that long. Unfortunately, the psilocybin, at this dose anyway, did nothing for physical pain.
The patients generally reported that the medication helped them to examine their lives and determine "how they wished to address their limited life expectancy." Sadly, as of publication of the research, 10 of the 12 subjects have died. But the research suggests that using psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin may help to ease the existential anxiety and despair that modern medicine has largely found no other way to treat.
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How psychedelic drugs help cancer patients face death
By Lauren Slater
Pam Sakuda was 55 when she found out she was dying. Shortly after having a tumor removed from her colon, she heard the doctor’s dreaded words: Stage 4; metastatic. Sakuda was given 6 to 14 months to live. Determined to slow her disease’s insidious course, she ran several miles every day, even during her grueling treatment regimens. By nature upbeat, articulate and dignified, Sakuda — who died in November 2006, outlasting everyone’s expectations by living for four years — was alarmed when anxiety and depression came to claim her after she passed the 14-month mark, her days darkening as she grew closer to her biological demise. Norbert Litzinger, Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still be alive at that time — a concert, dinner with friends; would she still be here for that?” "When" came to claim the couple’s life completely, their anxiety building as they waited for the final day.
As her fears intensified, Sakuda learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.
Sakuda’s terminal diagnosis, combined with her otherwise perfect health, made her an ideal subject for Grob’s study. Beginning in January 2005, Grob and his research team gave Sakuda various psychological tests, including the Beck Depression Inventory and the Stai-Y anxiety scale to establish baseline measures of Sakuda’s psychological state and to rule out any severe psychiatric illness. “We wanted psychologically healthy people,” Grob says, “people whose depressions and anxieties are not the result of mental illness” but rather, he explained, a response to a devastating disease.
Sakuda would take part in two sessions, one with psilocybin, one with niacin, an active placebo that can cause some flushing in the face. The study was double blind, which meant that neither the researchers nor the subjects knew what was in the capsules being administered. On the day of her first session, Sakuda was led into a room that researchers had transformed with flowing fabrics and fresh flowers to help create a soothing environment in an otherwise cold hospital setting. Sakuda swallowed a capsule and lay back on the bed to wait. Grob had invited her — as researchers do with all their subjects — to bring objects from home that had special significance. “These objects often personalize the session room for the volunteer and often prompt the patient to think about loved ones or important life events,” Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins, says.
"The thinking is that with the aid of the psychedelic, you may come to see the object in a different light. It may help bring back memories; it promotes introspection, it can be a touchstone, it can be grounding,” Halpern says.
Sakuda brought a few pictures of loved ones, which, Grob recalled, she clutched in her hands as she lay back on the bed. By her side were Grob and one of his research assistants, both of whom stayed with the subjects for the six-to-seven-hour treatment session. Sakuda knew that there would be time set aside in the days and weeks following when she would meet with Grob and his team to process what would happen in that room. Black eyeshades were draped over Sakuda’s face, encouraging her to look inward. She was given headphones. Music was piped in: the sounds of rivers rushing, sweet staccatos, deep drumming. Each hour, Grob and his staff checked in with Sakuda, as they did with every subject, asking if all was O.K. and taking her blood pressure. At one point, Grob observed that Sakuda, with the eyeshades draped over her face, began to cry. Later on, Sakuda would reveal to Grob that the source of her tears was a keen empathetic understanding of what her spouse, Norbert, would feel when she died.
Norbert Litzinger remembers picking up his wife from the medical center after her first session and seeing that this deeply distressed woman was now “glowing from the inside out.” Before Pam Sakuda died, she described her psilocybin experience on video: “I felt this lump of emotions welling up . . . almost like an entity,” Sakuda said, as she spoke straight into the camera. “I started to cry. . . Everything was concentrated and came welling up and then . . . it started to dissipate, and I started to look at it differently. . . I began to realize that all of this negative fear and guilt was such a hindrance . . . to making the most of and enjoying the healthy time that I’m having.” Sakuda went on to explain that, under the influence of the psilocybin, she came to a very visceral understanding that there was a present, a now, and that it was hers to have.
Two weeks after Sakuda’s psilocybin session, Grob readministered the depression and anxiety assessments. Over all among his subjects, he found that their scores on the anxiety scale at one and three months after treatment “demonstrated a sustained reduction in anxiety,” the researchers wrote in The Archives of General Psychiatry. They also found that their subjects’ scores on the Beck Depression Inventory dropped significantly at the six-month follow-up. “The dose of psilocybin that we gave our subjects was relatively low in comparison to the doses in Stanislav Grof’s studies,” Grob told me. “Nevertheless, and even with this modest dose, it appears the drug can relieve the angst and fear of the dying.”
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The Trip Treatment
By Michael Pollan
In 2010, Patrick Mettes, a 54-year old television news director being treated for a cancer of the bile ducts, read an article on the front page of the Times that would change his death. His diagnosis had come three years earlier, shortly after his wife, Lisa, noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs and he was buckling under the weight of a debilitating chemotherapy regimen and the growing fear that he might not survive. The article, headlined “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning in Again,” mentioned clinical trials at several universities, including N.Y.U., in which psilocybin was being administered to cancer patients in an effort to relieve their anxiety and “existential distress.” One of the researchers was quoted as saying that, under the influence of the hallucinogen, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” Patrick had never taken a psychedelic drug, but he immediately wanted to volunteer. Lisa was against the idea. “I didn’t want there to be an easy way out,” she recently told me. “I wanted him to fight.”
Patrick made the call anyway and, after filling out some forms and answering a long list of questions, was accepted into the trial. Since hallucinogens can sometimes bring to the surface latent psychological problems, researchers try to weed out volunteers at high risk by asking questions about drug use and whether there is a family history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. After the screening, Mettes was assigned to a therapist named Anthony Bossis, a bearded, bearish psychologist in his mid-fifties, with a specialty in palliative care. Bossis is a co-principal investigator for the N.Y.U. trial.
After four meetings with Bossis, Mettes was scheduled for two dosings—one of them an “active” placebo (in this case, a high dose of niacin, which can produce a tingling sensation), and the other a pill containing the psilocybin. Both sessions, Mettes was told, would take place in a room decorated to look more like a living room than like a medical office, with a comfortable couch, landscape paintings on the wall, and, on the shelves, books of art and mythology, along with various aboriginal and spiritual tchotchkes, including a Buddha and a glazed ceramic mushroom. During each session, which would last the better part of a day, Mettes would lie on the couch wearing an eye mask and listening through headphones to a carefully curated playlist. Bossis and a second therapist would be there throughout, saying little but being available to help should he run into any trouble.
I met Bossis last year in the N.Y.U. treatment room, along with his colleague Stephen Ross, an associate professor of psychiatry at N.Y.U.’s medical school, who directs the ongoing psilocybin trials. Ross, who is in his forties, was dressed in a suit and could pass for a banker. He is also the director of the substance-abuse division at Bellevue, and he told me that he had known little about psychedelics—drugs that produce radical changes in consciousness, including hallucinations—until a colleague happened to mention that, in the nineteen-sixties, LSD had been used successfully to treat alcoholics. Ross did some research and was astounded at what he found.
“I felt a little like an archeologist unearthing a completely buried body of knowledge,” he said. Beginning in the 1950s, psychedelics were used to treat a wide variety of conditions, including alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association held meetings centered on LSD. “Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding,” Ross said.
As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.
“I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it,” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”
I was surprised to hear such unguarded enthusiasm from a scientist, and a substance-abuse specialist, about a street drug that, since 1970, has been classified by the government as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. But the support for renewed research on psychedelics is widespread among medical experts. “I’m personally biased in favor of these type of studies,” Thomas R. Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (N.I.M.H.) and a neuroscientist, told me. “If it proves useful to people who are really suffering, we should look at it. Just because it is a psychedelic doesn’t disqualify it in our eyes.” Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (nida), emphasized that “it is important to remind people that experimenting with drugs of abuse outside a research setting can produce serious harms.”
Many researchers I spoke with described their findings with excitement, some using words like “mind-blowing.” Bossis said, “People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to address existential distress. Xanax isn’t the answer. So how can we not explore this, if it can recalibrate how we die?”
In follow-up discussions with Bossis, Patrick Mettes spoke of his body and his cancer as a “type of illusion” and how there might be “something beyond this physical body.” It also became clear that, psychologically, at least, Mettes was doing remarkably well: he was meditating regularly, felt he had become better able to live in the present, and described loving his wife “even more.” In a session in March, two months after his journey, Bossis noted that Mettes “reports feeling the happiest in his life.”
"As a scientific phenomenon, if you can create conditions in which seventy per cent of people will say they have had one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives? To a scientist, that’s just incredible,” said Griffiths.
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Psychedelic mushrooms could cure anxiety for cancer patients
By April Short
When O.M. was 21 he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was a pre-med student at the time. His first reaction was denial, followed by an overwhelming and lasting anxiety, as described in an Atlantic article by Roc Morin. Even after six rounds of chemotherapy helped O.M. kick the cancer, he was plagued with a devastating fear that the disease might return. He checked his lymph nodes so often to see if they’d grown that he developed callouses on his neck.
He experienced this debilitating end-of-life anxiety from the moment he was diagnosed until the day he ingested psilocybin, extracted from hallucinogenic mushrooms, while laying on a psychiatrist’s couch during a New York University study. O.M. is one of 35 study participants, all of whom suffered from severe anxiety due to cancer.
The double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study, which is still ongoing, looks at the potentials for psilocybin to treat anxiety and other psychological distress stemming from advanced cancer. The second half of the study will look at the effect of psilocybin on “pain perception, depression, existential/psychospiritual distress, attitudes toward disease progression, quality of life, and spiritual/mystical states of consciousness.”
O.M. told the Atlantic that when he ate the mushrooms, it was “like a switch went on.”
“I went from being anxious to analyzing my anxiety from the outside,” he said. “I realized that nothing was actually happening to me objectively. It was real because I let it become real. And, right when I had that thought, I saw a cloud of black smoke come out of my body and float away.”
Gabrielle Agin-Liebes, the research manager for the NYU study, told the Atlantic that O.M. had one of the highest possible anxiety ratings possible prior to the study. The day following his treatment, O.M. scored a zero. He had absolutely no anxiety, and stayed that way for seven months following the treatment.
As Morin's Atlantic article notes, psilocybin was used for medicinal purposes for centuries by indigenous peoples before Western Christian globalization stomped out its mainstream usage. In the wake of WWII, hallucinogens-as-medicine made a comeback among psychiatrists. When psychoactive substances gained recreational popularity as street drugs, the Nixon administration waged its war on drugs, passing the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Psilocybin was given restrictive Schedule I classification along with LSD, cannabis and other psychoactive substances. Nixon's war on drugs still rages on today, filling prisons with nonviolent drug offenders and targeting minority populations.
1970s-era policies have also suppressed most research of psychedelics for decades, but thanks to the efforts of determined scientists and research groups like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), government-approved human studies of controlled psychedelic substances are breaking ground again. While the federal government still deems them dangerous and void of medical purpose, research continues to reveal a promising medical potential of most psychoactive Schedule I substances to treat issues ranging from pain and anxiety to addiction and cancer.
A recent FDA-approved study looked at LSD in the treatment of end-of-life anxiety. It was the first controlled study of LSD in humans in 40 years, and the results were overwhelmingly positive, with every patient reporting reduced anxiety and no negative side effects.
The NYU psilocybin study is not the first of its kind. Charles Grob conducted a study with similar outcome measures at Harbor-UCLA. However, the NYU study uses higher doses of psilocybin and examines 32 subjects instead of the 12 Grob examined. The results of the current psilocybin study are still being examined, but principal investigator Stephen Ross told the Atlantic that, “the vast majority of their patients have exhibited an immediate and sustained reduction in anxiety. Consistent with similar studies involving psilocybin, approximately three-fourths of the participants rate their experience with the drug as being one of the top five most significant events of their lives.”
O.M. was among the overwhelming success cases.
“At the hospital they gave me Xanax for anxiety,” he told the Atlantic. “Xanax doesn’t get rid of your anxiety. Xanax tells you not to feel it for a while until it stops working and you take the next pill. The beauty of psilocybin is: it’s not medication. You’re not taking it and it solves your problem. You take it and you solve your problem yourself.”
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Ketamine infusion therapies for end-of-life care
For a terminal illness ketamine may be a great treatment option. Psychedelic drugs and their derivatives, such as ketamine, help patients cope with existential concerns, and can reduce anxiety leading up to death. Ketamine infusion therapies can offer end-of-life patients peace of mind.
Patients who have access to psychedelic medications as part of treatment for their terminal illness have found that they weren’t scared of death anymore. They frequently say that the treatment was one of the most meaningful experiences they’ve had, ever. They talk about gaining a sense of peace with the universe, and having a sense of universal oneness and serenity. Their anxiety typically decreases significantly.
Palliative and hospice care professionals, as well as all of the individuals who care for their loved ones, do an exceptional job caring for those in the various stages of dying. But often the depression, anxiety, and melancholy that come with having a terminal diagnosis go untreated. Ketamine infusions may be one good option for addressing this part of end-of-life care. In most cases, ketamine works instantly and helps to treat those often-overlooked symptoms in a way that few if any treatments beyond psychedelics can.
An appropriate treatment regime may involve a series of outpatient infusion therapies followed by maintenance treatments from time to time as needed by the patient.
The opportunity to provide some relief from depression, anxiety and fear may be a great gift for many facing death. And for those who are particularly struggling it may be especially welcome.
-Dr. Allison Wells
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I suffer from anxiety-based food aversion; my mind convinces my body that it doesn't need food. When at my worst I was consuming less than 500 calories per day. I started microdosing with psilocybin, and pulled a complete 180. After the initial nausea fades, the microdose puts me very much in tune with my body and it's needs. It allows me to easily circumvent whatever "reason" it is on that day that I've used to justify not eating. Basically, it makes my hunger unignorable to the point where I have to do something about it. My appetite is much healthier now thanks to this practice.
-non-zer0
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LSD helped me with debilitating anxiety and also helped me quell and control the subsequent substance use that the anxiety was causing. This is a game changer for me after trying so many harmful drugs from my doctor that never came close to the efficacy of LSD.
-anon
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I would say that psilocybin cured my social anxiety pretty much overnight. I went from not really talking to anyone to becoming friends with pretty much everyone. I learned how to talk to people much better. The mushrooms made me try more at social interactions and to not worry about the consequences so much.
-anon
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4-AcO-DMT worked wonders for my social anxiety. I assumed the opposite would be true, but I was completely worry-free when interacting with strangers in very public places.
-TNS
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I feel qualified to talk about social anxiety and psychedelics, as I've had a lot of experience with both. My recommendation is to take a low-to-moderate dose of a psychedelic in a setting with strangers. If you can't tolerate the idea of tripping around strangers, then trip with a group of friends. It's important to do it in a setting that challenges your anxiety.
The ONLY way to overcome social anxiety is to confront it. Psychedelics can help you do this.
-TheAppleCore
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Clinical trials demonstrate the remarkable benefits of magic mushrooms
In a recent Time Magazine article, Dinah Bazer recounts her personal experience with psilocybin. A cancer survivor struggling with severe anxiety (driven by her fear of a recurrence), Bazer agreed to participate in a magic mushroom trial conducted at the NYU Langone Medical Center.
While fear gripped her when the drug first brought her "tumbling through space," the experience ended up being a profoundly healing one:
"… I started to feel love. I felt like I was being bathed in love and it was overwhelming, amazing, wonderful … The feeling of immense love lingered for weeks, and four years later I still feel it at times. My fear and anxiety were completely removed, and they haven't come back … The experience changed how I wanted to live my life. I used to get up, grab a quick snack and eat it in the car. But I no longer want to be in a hurry. Now I get up an hour early, make a real breakfast and read my paper … I used to imagine what it would be like if the cancer recurred, but I don't think about it the same way anymore. When I don't feel well, and thoughts of a recurrence creep into my mind, I lack fear and simply think, 'Let's just see what happens.'"
According to lead author Dr. Stephen Ross, director of substance abuse services and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone, their investigation revealed that psilocybin “was a rapid, immediately acting anti-anxiety and antidepressant.”
“The high-dose psilocybin resulted in significant decreases in both clinician-rated and self-reported measures of depressed mood and anxiety among the patients. The effects lasted in 78 percent of patients for depression and 83 percent for anxiety in a follow-up assessment six months later."
-Dr. Joseph Mercola
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As someone who has had severe clinical depression off and on for decades and tried psilocybin once (at what I think was a lower dose than they used in the study) I can verify that it works, and works very well. It's positive, it promotes joy and imagination, and I feel much more in touch with my feelings.
I stopped taking my antidepressant that was making me feel even more detached. I felt the medication that I'd been taking was pushing me in the wrong direction. After taking the psilocybin I never took that medication again.
-Ursula
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Psychedelic mushrooms found to relieve anxiety in cancer patients for months at a time
The Johns Hopkins study looked at 51 similar patients who were given a low dose of psilocybin relative to their body weight (3mg), or a high dose (25mg). Five weeks later, patients received the opposite dose. Similarly, researchers found that most patients felt their mental health symptoms had been alleviated 6 months after tripping on the high dose, and 65% reported no longer feeling any depression or anxiety, respectively.
Stephen Ross, a psychiatrist at NYU and lead author of one of the studies, told the Atlantic he was surprised by how well tripping on psilocybin seemed to work for patients. “The moment patients get psilocybin, their distress comes down,” he said. “That’s very new in psychiatry, to have a medication that works immediately and lasts that long.”
-Katherine Ellen Foley
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Psilocybin for cancer depression
By Ron Cassie
The diagnosis of Clark Martin’s liver cancer came at the same time as the birth of his daughter, with doctors informing the clinical psychologist that he had about a year and a half to live. “It was emotionally very upsetting,” the soft-spoken Martin recalls. “Not because of the dying, but because of my daughter.”
His late-stage cancer, however, proved one of the rare cases that responded to the initial chemotherapy. “I was lucky,” he says. But not out of the woods. During the next two decades, cancer cells would reappear in his lungs, metastasizing into tumors. On each occasion, Martin battled the disease into remission, but the endless regimens and surgeries and ever-looming threat of cancer drove him into bouts of anxiety and depression as he obsessed over his health and micro-managed his treatment plans. “I have a scientific background and became very narrowly focused,” he says. “I felt like I needed to know more than the doctors. I withdrew from life.”
Ultimately, his friends and daughter—entering college by this time—convinced him that he needed to address his mental wellbeing. He tried counseling, but it didn’t improve his outlook. Neither did antidepressants. Partly from desperation to “pop out” of his funk and partly out of professional curiosity, the Vancouver, WA-based Martin flew to Baltimore to participate in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins where he would ingest a powerful dose of psilocybin—the naturally occurring psychoactive ingredient found in “magic” mushrooms.
“All of a sudden, things in the room, things you feel inside, start feeling unfamiliar. Like my brain was going offline,” Martin says. “The experience in my head was just of being in a void,” he continues. “I’m a boater and I’ll use this analogy: Imagine you fall off a sailboat into the open ocean and when you turn around, the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone."
“At one point, I was in a stadium-like building with stained glass—it may have been a giant cathedral. At another point I had the feeling of living on a bubble. I had my space on the bubble and other people had theirs. But mostly there was just an experience of tranquility,” Martin continues. “No people, no architecture, no thoughts, no ideas—nothing. Just calm presence.”
Today, six years later, Martin credits psilocybin—as well as the preparation and guidance that went with it—with parting the fog of his depression. He also credits his psychedelic session with transforming and opening his relationships with his daughter, friends, and even his Alzheimer’s suffering father. “I still think about it every day,” he says, choking up for a moment. “I’m still unpacking and integrating what I learned into my daily life.”
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