Scientists in the United States and Great Britain are experimenting with using hallucinatory drugs to treat people with post-traumatic stress syndrome and other psychological issues that do not always respond to conventional therapy. They are finding that some patients experience breakthroughs to better mental health and even positive personality changes that could be permanent.
The hope is that drugs such as "magic mushrooms" and Ecstasy could someday be used in clinical settings to help people deal with treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress syndrome, as well as helping terminally ill patients come to peace with death.
One big take-away message from these scientists is "Don’t try this at home."
The research teams emphasize that in their experiments with "magic mushrooms," participants were screened for mental health issues, and many had post-graduate degrees. Participants were supervised during every session, and every aspect of the setting, such as the music played and the degree of light in the room, was carefully controlled.
"We’ve conducted our research under conditions where we’ve screened out people who are potentially vulnerable to adverse effects. And we’ve given the drug in a hospital setting with two people at their side throughout, so there’s virtually no opportunity for the patient to do something dangerous," said Roland R. Griffiths, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and author of one of the studies.
"But we know that, shockingly, all the time people who use mushrooms recreationally sometimes end up getting into accidents or engage in homicidal behavior or suicide. So we certainly don’t want to imply that there’s not risk associated with these compounds," he said. "And we wouldn’t want to be a reason for an uptick for non-medical, uncontrolled use of this sort of thing."
In experiments performed in South Carolina, Dr. Michael Mithoefer recruited 20 women who had been in therapy for an average of 19 years because of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He gave twelve of them a drug commonly known as Ecstasy, with a chemical name of MDMA or 3.4-methylonedioxyamphetamine. Eight women got a placebo. Ten of the twelve women who got the drug showed significant improvement within two months after the second time they took it. They had no serious side effects and no long-term negative side effects.
The main problem that these women had in conventional trauma treatment is that every time they remembered their original trauma, they would experience negative emotions such as fear and panic. They told Dr. Mithoefer that Ecstasy did not provide a euphoric experience, but it enabled them to remember the trauma without feeling overwhelmed. One patient said, "I feel like I am walking to a place I’ve needed to go for so long and just didn’t know how to get there." Another said that she no longer felt that her anger and fear were too big to deal with. This study was published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Professors David Nutt and Ben Sessa are now beginning clinical trials recreating Dr. Mithoefer’s work in Great Britain.
"Post-traumatic stress syndrome is an extraordinarily disabling condition and we don’t have any really effective treatments," said Dr. Nutt. "In order to deal with trauma, you have to be able to re-engage with the memory and then deal with it. For many people, as soon as the memory comes into consciousness, so does the fear and disgust."
Another study, this time by Dr. Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University, was published in the same journal. He and his colleagues asked 51 carefully screened people to complete a series of personality tests, and then to participate in three to five sessions that were three weeks apart. Each session lasted eight hours.
The participants took psilocybin, the ingredient in "magic mushrooms" native to the tropics of South America, Mexico, and the United States. Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary first popularized its use and LSD in the 1960s when he advised people to "Turn on, tune in, and drop out (of society)."
The 30 participants who told Dr. Griffiths that they had experienced a mystical experience under the influence of the drug showed improvements in traits such as openness, aesthetics, feelings, ideas and values. The changes lasted even 14 months later when they were retested. The 22 who had no mystical experiences showed no such changes.
"Now this finding is really quite fascinating," Dr. Griffiths said. "And that is because personality is considered a stable characteristic of the psychology of people. It’s been thought to be relatively immutable, and stable across the lifespan. But, remarkably, this study shows that psilocybin actually changes one domain of personality that is strongly related to traits such as imagination, feeling, abstract ideas and aesthetics, and is considered a core construct underlying creativity in general, and the changes we see appear to be long-term."
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