by Neha Tallapragada
LSD. Shrooms. Ayahuasca. Peyote. Dizzy spells. Trips. Hallucinations. These are all things we associate with psychedelics, which were popular during the Woodstock years but faded out of the zeitgeist due to various health and social stigmas. While modern medicine has made significant progress in treating mental illness, some people remain resistant to available treatments and still struggle with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. Today, these drugs may have an unexpected benefit for mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.
Beyond prescription medications like Lexapro and Zoloft, a new, controversial alternative has emerged–psychedelics. LSD, for instance, could be a feasible alternative for long-time patients who no longer respond to their current medications.1 These drugs could also be valuable for terminally ill individuals, as well as for those experiencing extreme levels of depression and anxiety.
A Johns Hopkins University double-blind study from 2018 treated 51 randomly-selected cancer patients who had potentially life-threatening diagnoses and symptoms of anxiety and/or depression with psilocybin, an eminent psychedelic drug more commonly known as “magic mushrooms,” to alter their emotional and mental states. The researchers compared the effects of administering a low “placebo” dose (1 or 3 mg/70 kg) of psilocybin to the effects of a higher dose (22 or 30 mg/70 kg), using a low dose to solve for any expectancy bias that might be introduced by the staff. They found that the higher dose caused statistically significant decreases in both self-measured and clinician-measured anxiety. Over 80% of the participants reported that they had a greater satisfaction with life and overall well-being following administration of the higher dosage.2 These effects carried over to a 6-month follow-up period. Clinicians rated the measures of clinical response to depression and rate of symptom remission for depression at 78% and 65%, respectively. For anxiety, these rates were 83% and 75%.
Scientists and psychologists are trying to uncover exactly what happens to your brain when you are under the influence of a psychedelic. Utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging scans and a set of homological scaffolds (computational structures which signal differences between data sets), King’s College London researchers constructed a representation of brain activity under the influence of psilocybin. They discovered that the structure of brain activity is fundamentally altered to create a greater number of connections between cortical regions of the brain.3 This project gives proof that psychedelics indeed have the potential to have somatic effects on our mind that don’t just work on our psychology, but also on our actual brain anatomy–one more piece of evidence that compels one to look more seriously at these drugs and the effects they may have.
A 2016 study from Washington University in St. Louis supports this fact. Scientists used multimodal neuroimaging to examine the change in brain activity after an LSD dosage. They found out two critical things. Firstly, they saw that there was greater functional connectivity in the visual cortex and in cerebral blood flow, which provides a potential explanation for the reported visual hallucinations experienced while on LSD, as well as supporting the King’s College London study on increased cortical connections. However, the St. Louis study goes one step further in studying the specific activity of the default mode network (DMN), a cortical region that has been associated with memories and emotions. The DMN has been hypothesized to be connected to anxious feelings, as well as to the development of a “self-identity.” There were signs of decreased activity in the DMN, which correlated with an altered state of consciousness associated with an altered or “lost” sense of self, often deemed as “ego-dissolution.”4 Interestingly enough, these findings parallel similar relationships between psilocybin usage and “ego-dissolution.” By experiencing a loss of their “ego,” or their traditional self-perception, subjects may also be losing the feelings of anxiety and depression that accompany this sense of self. Researcher and author Michael Pollan sums up this inadvertent consequence: “We tell ourselves that we’re not worthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour without a cigarette...psychedelic experiences shake us out of these patterns because suddenly we see them from a new perspective.”5 Sometimes, a new point of view may be all that one needs to break out of destructive thought patterns. Psychedelics may facilitate this shift.
While drugs like LSD and psilocybin still retain the cultural stigma that they had back in the 1970s, they may prove to be a recourse for many, from the treatment-resistant to the terminally ill. Two of the studies discussed above demonstrate that, even if the specific correlation between brain connectivity and psychedelic usage has not been completely determined yet, there is significant evidence that suggests that psychedelics have the ability to rewire the structure of the human brain, which is hugely impactful in and of itself. In a safe and supportive clinical setting, these hallucinogenic “trips” could actually be more helpful than harmful. Further studies continue to reveal more and more about the ways in which these drugs can restructure our brain function. This would certainly flip the way we see the world upside down.
Works Cited
[1] Begley, S. Scientists Are Starting to Test Claims About "Microdosing." Scientific American, August 23, 2018. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-are-starting-to-test-claims-about-microdosing/ (accessed October 2019).
[2] Griffiths, R. R., Johnson, M. W., Carducci, M. A., Umbricht, A., Richards, W. A., Richards, B. D., . . . Klinedinst, M. A. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2016, 30, 1181-1197.
[3] Petri, G., Turkheimer, F., Carhart-Harris, R., Nutt, D., Hellyer, P. J., & Vaccarino, F. The Royal Society. [Online] 2014. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873
[4] Carhart-Harris, R. L…..Nutt, D. J. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2016, 113, 4853-4858. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518377113
[5] Illing, S.). Why Psychedelic Drugs Could Transform How We Treat Depression and Mental Illness. Vox Media, August 25, 2018.https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/21/17339488/psychedelics-mental-health-michael-pollan-lsd-psilocybin (accessed October 24, 2019).