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These are the scourges that define our age: addiction, depression, PTSD, suicide.
CAMBRIDGE: These are the wounds that define our age: addiction, depression, PTSD, suicide.
Drug overdoses killed 72,000 Americans last year. The number of victims of alcohol and cigarette addiction is even higher. Major depression affects more than 16 million Americans a year. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an epidemic among veterans and victims of violence. The number of suicides has risen sharply since the beginning of the century. Some 45,000 Americans lost their lives in 2016.
What is now called "desperate diseases" largely explains why life expectancy in the United States has declined three years in a row. And mental illness does not kill only; it paralyzes the right people, destroys families and harms the economy.
Thus, when researchers share notes on therapies that promise to mitigate these diseases and more, this should attract a crowd. People who attended a conference this month near MIT were also intrigued by drugs at the heart of therapies: psilocybin, LSD and MDMA, also known as ecstasy.
Fifty years ago, psychedelic drugs escaped the laboratory and exploded in the youth culture. Research on psychedelics was one of the first victims of the political reaction that followed. But the second psychedelic revolution began, led by scientists, not by rock'n'roll bands.
As they said in the 1960s, the research discussed at the conference is breathtaking.
Studies conducted at Imperial College London have revealed that psilocybin, the ingredient that puts magic into magic mushrooms, can relieve the symptoms of depression resistant to antidepressants. NYU and Johns Hopkins researchers show clear reduction in levels of anxiety, depression and "existential anxiety" in patients with terminal cancer after single treatment in psilocybin, 80% of subjects still feeling positive effects six months later.
Researchers at several hospitals and universities testing the use of psychedelic substances to treat alcohol, nicotine and opioid addiction are reporting spectacular success. MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for veterans with PTSD is so effective in clinical trials that it is available by prescription as early as 2021. Psychedelics appear promising in the treatment of other mental illnesses , issues of social anxiety experienced by adults with autism. obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia.
How can a class of chemicals deal with so many ailments? Using advanced brain analysis technology, neuroscientists have identified the "default mode network," part of the brain responsible for, among other things, self-direction. In traditional psychiatric terms, the DMN is the home of the ego. Under psychedelic drugs, the DMN darkens and other parts of the brain illuminate with new connections.
It's like pressing the button to reset a subject's sense of self, say the scientists. When the ego restarts, the subject may feel liberated from memory scars and mental habits appearing as a mental illness. Good things can happen when the ego restarts, especially with the help of a qualified therapist or an experienced guide.
One of the challenges for these scientists is to keep these drugs in the laboratory until they can be accepted as established tools in a clinical setting. The conference was dubbed "historic return to Harvard by psychedelic medicine" because that's where the previous generation of psychedelic research derailed.
It is at Harvard that two psychedelic research professors, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, have succumbed to a common enthusiasm for those who study and use these powerful substances. Leary has become a guru, a celebrity, an evangelist of the acid. "Turn on, tune in and give up" became his motto, and the school – academic, scientific and political – panicked.
Michael Pollan's latest bestseller, "How Change Change Mind," tells how the panic caused by LSD has led to the banning of drugs and the suppression of research, and to the way in which scientists and an underground network of activists kept the psychedelic flame ignited decades before its current rebirth. At the Cambridge conference, Pollan provided a historical perspective and shared his hope that ignorance and politics will not stop medical progress this time around.
But limiting these powerful substances to clinical parameters will not be easy. In truth, psychedelic drugs offer benefits to what scientists call "healthy normals," as well as to those with specific mental illnesses. It would be enough for some celebrities to tweet to take LSD and see God and the sensationalist press could trigger a new moral panic, pushing politicians to stop everything again.
Pollan said America was better positioned to avoid another psychedelic panic, in part because community research and culture community's opinion leaders know more about the psychedelic experience that 50 years ago. The rise of marijuana for medical purposes and the spread of opioid addiction have, in different ways, undermined the old assumptions of the war on drugs.
In addition, Pollan said, "we have a mental health crisis." We can not afford to remove the tools that can change the lives of countless people struggling with a desperate illness. This time, psychedelic drugs should be seen as a solution and not a problem.
You can contact Rick Holmes at [email protected]. You can follow his career on rickholmes.net. Like him on Facebook at Holmes & Co, follow him on Twitter @HolmesAndCo.
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