(NewsNation) — Psychedelics have long been associated with recreational drug use — think magic mushrooms as depicted in Harold and Kumar producing a gnarly vision of a unicorn frolicking in front of a character’s eyes.
However, emerging research suggests that they could be more impactful than simply a mind-bending trip — they could also be an effective tool for dealing with depression and PTSD.
Across the country, psychiatrists are experimenting with the use of psilocybin, MDMA and other drugs to aid in the treatment of these ailments. Because the use of these drugs isn’t legal in most states, researchers have to get government approval to do the tightly regulated trials.
Sandeep Nayak is a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who has conducted several trials with psilocybin involving people who had depression.
“Many of the people that come to these depression trials have already tried other treatments. They’ve already found other treatments to not be effective,” Nayak said.
The trials Nayak and others around the world have conducted generally have the same structure.
First, therapists speak to patients for a few hours to build rapport and then train them on what the experience of taking the psychedelic may be like.
When staff administer the doses, they are present during and after the experience.
“A good psilocybin session could look something like somebody lying still for hours not talking, just having a very internal experience. They’re wearing eye shades, they’re listening to music, it’s very internally focused, and people are sort of coached to trust, let go, be open to just attend to their internal experience,” he explained.
In the weeks after the treatment, patients meet with therapists to talk through what they saw and felt during the treatment.
“They meet with a therapist and try to make sense of the experience they had, which can be oftentimes very confusing … but also, many people find that they have learned new skills, new emotional skills from going through this experience,” he said.
The clinical trials that have been conducted thus far have shown promise. Nayak pointed to one trial where people with PTSD who had failed to recover from other treatments were given MDMA.
“A third of people were completely in remission, they did not have a whiff of PTSD, who had gotten the MDMA versus … 5% who had gotten the placebo treatment,” he said.
It’s the promise of successful treatments that has motivated Barbara Rothbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University, to do her own research into psychedelics as a treatment for PTSD.
While she shared Nayak’s optimism about the drugs, she did offer some caveats.
“There are not a lot of psychiatrists trained in MDMA-assisted therapy,” she noted, pointing out that psilocybin is being used legally in Colorado and Oregon for treatment but not in most of the country.
She worried that some therapists who are not properly trained to administer these drugs will start using them with patients.
“That scares me,” she said.
Nayak also added that traditional approaches to ailments like depression can aid many people and that psychedelics may not be for everyone.
“Many people should probably not take psychedelics, we have pretty clear exclusion criteria. We don’t give them willy-nilly,” Nayak said, noting that they wouldn’t be appropriate for people with bipolar disorder, as one example.
But as clinical trials continue, both researchers see psychedelics as a cutting-edge solution for some people for whom other treatments haven’t worked.
“MDMA will probably be the next medication that receives an FDA approval for PTSD,” Rothbaum said.
