The substance that makes some mushrooms “magic” also appears to help people with major depressive disorder. A study of 27 people found that a treatment featuring the hallucinogen psilocybin worked better than the usual antidepressant medications, a team reported Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.”
The effect was more than four times greater,” says Alan Davis, an author of the study and a faculty member at both Johns Hopkins University and Ohio State University. The study comes after earlier research offered hints that psilocybin might work against depression and after a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins found that it could ease depression and anxiety in patients who had life-threatening cancer. In the new study, patients received two doses of psilocybin on different days and also received about 11 hours of psychotherapy. The drug was administered in a supervised yet homey setting designed to put participants at ease, Davis says.” They have a blindfold on, they have headphones on, listening to music,” he says. “And we really encourage them to go inward and to kind of experience whatever is going to come up with the psilocybin.”
Half the participants began treatment immediately. The rest were put on a waitlist so they could serve as a comparison group until their own treatment began eight weeks later.” There was a significant reduction in depression in the immediate-treatment group compared to those in the waitlist,” Davis says. And patients responded much faster than with typical antidepressants.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/04/931377532/rigorous-study-backs-a-psychedelic-treatment-for-major-depression?fbclid=IwAR37SPi2jAa41mxJjm6aDydWTN4ZMYlz37gc3D1p2gRTnx1M0CqQdYQ4aFo
The effect was more than four times greater,” says Alan Davis, an author of the study and a faculty member at both Johns Hopkins University and Ohio State University. The study comes after earlier research offered hints that psilocybin might work against depression and after a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins found that it could ease depression and anxiety in patients who had life-threatening cancer. In the new study, patients received two doses of psilocybin on different days and also received about 11 hours of psychotherapy. The drug was administered in a supervised yet homey setting designed to put participants at ease, Davis says.” They have a blindfold on, they have headphones on, listening to music,” he says. “And we really encourage them to go inward and to kind of experience whatever is going to come up with the psilocybin.”
Half the participants began treatment immediately. The rest were put on a waitlist so they could serve as a comparison group until their own treatment began eight weeks later.” There was a significant reduction in depression in the immediate-treatment group compared to those in the waitlist,” Davis says. And patients responded much faster than with typical antidepressants.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/04/931377532/rigorous-study-backs-a-psychedelic-treatment-for-major-depression?fbclid=IwAR37SPi2jAa41mxJjm6aDydWTN4ZMYlz37gc3D1p2gRTnx1M0CqQdYQ4aFo