In 2014, 7 % of the European Union (EU) population reported having chronic depression. One in eight Irish people have experienced chronic depression recently, according to a new health study by Eurostat, the EU central statistics office.
Many studies are showing psilocybin has remarkable success in helping people with depression, with research recently being approved by the Federal Drugs Administration in the US and being conducted by Imperial College, London and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College, London.
A recent study in the journal Neuropharmacology has revealed that organic compounds found in certain mushrooms can be used to treat depression by opening disused neurological pathways in the brain and is seen as a major step forward in the emotional well-being of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) victims.
“I believe that psychedelics hold a potential to cure deep psychological wounds,” asserted study author Leor Roseman, Imperial College London PhD
Clinical Studies
High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety.
At 6-month follow-up, these changes were sustained, with about 80% of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety.
Johns Hopkins Study, Journal of Psychopharmacology (Griffiths, et al, 2016)
Long-term Relief
The study showed that one-time treatment with the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin quickly brought relief from distress that then lasted for more than 6 months in 80 percent of the 29 study subjects monitored, based on clinical evaluation scores for anxiety and depression.
One of the key findings was that improvements in clinical evaluation scores for anxiety and depression lasted for the remainder of the study’s extended monitoring period—specifically, eight months for those who took psilocybin first.
NYU Study, Journal of Psychopharmacology (Ross, et al, 2016)
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Media Coverage
Psychedelic compound psilocybin decreased symptoms in treatment-resistant patients
“Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary ‘kick start’ they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a ‘reset’ analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy.”
A hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms can “reset” the brains of people with untreatable depression, raising hopes of a future treatment, scans suggest.
Psilocybin it could have significant implications in helping individuals heal from sexual trauma
The evidence supporting the use of psychedelic drugs to treat treatment-resistant depression continues to build. In the latest volley, a study finds that psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, may open an entirely new door to treating depression – by allowing deeply entrenched beliefs to become changeable.
Two new studies confirm the hypothesis that the psychoactive compound found in “magic mushrooms” may be a useful new treatment for depression, avoiding some of the side effects of conventional antidepressants.
The launch in the UK this week of a clinical trial using psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in “magic mushrooms”.