With deadly mass shootings and suicides on the rise, America appears to be in the throes of a mental health crisis. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, reported that suicides are becoming increasingly more common in all age groups. Shockingly, the demographic that’s seen the sharpest spike in suicides is mid-lifers.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 6.7 percent of all Americans experienced at least one major depressive episode in the year 2016. Thankfully, some exiting news in the mental health field was recently announced. Researchers are on a fast track to creating a depression treatment utilizing the psychedelic compound psilocybin according to Healthline. Psilocybin is famously known as the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.
The United States Food and Drug Administration, FDA, recently assigned “breakthrough therapy” designation to a psilocybin concentrated drug. COMPASS Pathways is currently testing the drug. So far, it has exhibited impressive preliminary evidence showing it would be a significant improvement over therapies now available. The “breakthrough therapy” label means the psilocybin based drug has been granted an accelerated research and approval process.
The communications director for COMPASS Pathways, Tracy Cheung, informed Healthline, “The early studies have shown that psilocybin therapy can provide an immediate and sustained reduction in depression following a single treatment.”
She added, “The effect has been described as psilocybin shaking the brain up like a snow globe, or rebooting the brain, providing new connections and deactivating connections that might have caused depression.” The company Cheung works for is administering the first extensive psilocybin clinical trial for depression deemed resistant to treatment.
The exciting study will occur in North America and Europe over the next several months. In a statement, the chairman and co-founder of COMPASS Pathways, George Goldsmith, remarked, “The FDA will be working closely with us to expedite the development process and increase the chances of getting this treatment to people suffering with depression as quickly as possible.”
More than 400 patients are enrolled in the study. The clinical trial will last for an estimated 12 to 18 months. Instead of mushrooms, the study’s participants will receive psilocybin capsules.
In 2017, researchers at Imperial College London discovered that patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression experienced improvement for as long as five weeks after consuming psilocybin. The small study consisted of 19 patients who were given two doses of the magic mushroom ingredient. The individuals also received psychological support.
Scans of the participants’ brains uncovered diminished blood flow to parts of the brain associated with emotional processing, fear, and stress. More stability also existed in the area of the brain associated with depression.
Psilocybin isn’t the first drug, known mainly for its abuse potential, to be studied for therapeutic possibilities. Just this year, the FDA gave the greenlight to Epidiolex, a treatment for epilepsy manufactured from cannabis. FDA approval is also being requested for esketamine. This drug is created from the often-abused sedative, ketamine, which causes you to experience a trance-like state.
The head of Imperial College London’s Psychedelic Research Group, Robin Carhart-Harris, referred to the “breakthrough therapy” label as “a strong endorsement for the potential of psilocybin therapy.” During an interview at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology annual meeting, Carhart-Harris remarked that psilocybin works on the brain’s serotonin system, explicitly your serotonin 2A receptor.
He stated, “You take a globe that’s got those little snow bits… and it’s settled. The snow is all at the bottom. Say you pick it up, you shake it, and there’s disorder there. But then the snow will settle again.” Continuing, Carhart-Harris commented, “And this is this principle of a re-setting or re-configurating the brain, and it’s an analogy that’s being used traditionally in the context of electroconvulsive therapy, but it’s also being used now in the context of some of the novel treatments that are being explored for, say, treatment-resistant depression, the likes of ketamine.”
Explaining this interesting phenomena further, Carhart-Harris said, “The notion is that you take a system that’s become entrenched in pathology. It’s fallen into a pattern or patterns that aren’t healthy, and those patterns have become reinforced for whatever reasons. And so you can introduce psychedelics and you can shake things up, and you can work on revising or updating some of those patterns and likely the beliefs which they relate to and so essentially revise your belief structure.”
The use of non-traditional drugs like psilocybin could drastically change the way physicians treat depression in the country soon. Those whose lives are being devastated by this heartbreaking, serious mental health issue might indeed welcome this change.
