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Ilona Meagher

Health | Can psychedelic drugs treat depression? - 0 views

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depression medication health

shared by Ilona Meagher on 27 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Although mind-bending drugs such as psilocybin are still used most often by people looking to get high, researchers around the country have begun to explore whether these and other illegal drugs can help treat intractable depression, anxiety, and other mental-health problems.
  • n the past month alone, studies have been published on the benefits of MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) in people with post-traumatic stress disorder and on the fast-acting antidepressive effects of the club drug ketamine (aka "Special K").
  • But research into the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs ground to a halt in the early 1970s, after the federal government criminalized LSD and psilocybin -- and after the drugs were eagerly adopted by college students and the hippie counterculture. "These studies had to be shut down because of the cultural reaction,"
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  • The new wave of research on psychedelics -- "version 2.0," as Ross calls it -- began in the early 1990s, when the Food and Drug Administration sanctioned a few preliminary studies on psilocybin and MDMA. (The latter had been used in psychotherapy beginning in the 1970s, without the FDA's blessing, and was ultimately outlawed in 1985.) The research has picked up dramatically in the past few years.
  • When everything goes well, the drugs induce a "peaceful and blissful" state of unity with oneself and the cosmos, resulting in a new level of self-awareness and knowledge that can make an individual more responsive to cognitive therapy and other forms of psychotherapy, Vollenweider says. (Ironically, the drugs show promise in the treatment of alcohol addiction, he adds.)
  • In the MDMA study published in July, for instance, 10 of the 12 people who took the drug no longer met the criteria for post-traumatic stress two months later. And all five of the patients that have enrolled in Ross's study so far -- eventually it will include a few dozen -- have shown significant decreases in anxiety and depression.
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