Posted on 02/15/2022 9:45:02 AM PST by Red Badger
Previous studies by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers showed that psychedelic treatment with psilocybin relieved major depressive disorder symptoms in adults for up to a month. Now, in a follow-up study of those participants, the researchers report that the substantial antidepressant effects of psilocybin-assisted therapy, given with supportive psychotherapy, may last at least a year for some patients.
A report on the new study was published on Feb. 15, 2022 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
"Our findings add to evidence that, under carefully controlled conditions, this is a promising therapeutic approach that can lead to significant and durable improvements in depression," says Natalie Gukasyan, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She cautions, however, that "the results we see are in a research setting and require quite a lot of preparation and structured support from trained clinicians and therapists, and people should not attempt to try it on their own."
Over the last 20 years, there has been a growing renaissance of research with classic psychedelics—the pharmacological class of compounds that include psilocybin, an ingredient found in so-called magic mushrooms. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, psilocybin can produce perceptual changes, altering a person's awareness of their surroundings and of their thoughts and feelings. Treatment with psilocybin has shown promise in research settings for treating a range of mental health disorders and addictions.
For this study, the researchers recruited 27 participants with a long-term history of depression, most of whom had been experiencing depressive symptoms for approximately two years before recruitment. The average age of participants was 40, 19 were women, and 25 identified as white, one as African American and one as Asian. Eighty-eight percent of the participants had previously been treated with standard antidepressant medications, and 58% reported using antidepressants in their current depressive episodes.
After screening, participants were randomized into one of two groups in which they received the intervention either immediately, or after an eight-week waiting period. At the time of treatment, all participants were provided with six to eight hours of preparatory meetings with two treatment facilitators. Following preparation, participants received two doses of psilocybin, given approximately two weeks apart between August 2017 and April 2019 at the Behavioral Biology Research Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Participants returned for follow-up one day and one week after each session, and then at one, three, six and 12 months following the second session; 24 participants completed both psilocybin sessions and all follow-up assessment visits.
The researchers reported that psilocybin treatment in both groups produced large decreases in depression, and that depression severity remained low one, three, six and 12 months after treatment. Depressive symptoms were measured before and after treatment using the GRID-Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, a standard depression assessment tool, in which a score of 24 or more indicates severe depression, 17–23 moderate depression, 8–16 mild depression and 7 or less no depression. For most participants, scores for the overall treatment decreased from 22.8 at pretreatment to 8.7 at one week, 8.9 at four weeks, 9.3 at three months, 7 at six months and 7.7 at 12 months after treatment. Participants had stable rates of response to the treatment and remission of symptoms throughout the follow-up period, with 75% response and 58% remission at 12 months.
"Psilocybin not only produces significant and immediate effects, it also has a long duration, which suggests that it may be a uniquely useful new treatment for depression," says Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., the Oliver Lee McCabe III, Ph.D., Professor in the Neuropsychopharmacology of Consciousness at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. "Compared to standard antidepressants, which must be taken for long stretches of time, psilocybin has the potential to enduringly relieve the symptoms of depression with one or two treatments."
The researchers emphasize that further research is needed to explore the possibility that the efficacy of psilocybin treatment may be substantially longer than 12 months. Johns Hopkins is one of the sites of a national multisite randomized, placebo-controlled trial of psilocybin for major depressive disorder.
Explore further
Psychedelic treatment with psilocybin relieves major depression, study shows
More information:
Natalie Gukasyan et al, Efficacy and safety of psilocybin-assisted treatment for major depressive disorder: Prospective 12-month follow-up, Journal of Psychopharmacology (2022).
DOI: 10.1177/02698811211073759
Journal information: Journal of Psychopharmacology
Provided by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
You have no psychotropic effects from microdosing, aka is there is no perception of tripping or feeling altered at all. The science behind it is really cutting edge. Seratonin receptor resetting and also works on processing emotional memories out of the amygdala. I won’t address the idiots here who have not done the research and in between swigging their Yuengling and swallowing SSRIs, want to judge some of us you take charge of our health naturally.
No stems, no seeds that you don’t need, Acapulco Gold is.............bad ass weeeeeeeeeeeed!
Yes, it will.
Big news, getting high helps you feel better for a while.
Later you are worse and brain damaged but what do they care.
Not to deny your personal experience, but I think our enemies want us addled, addicted and brain damaged. Drug abuse is being constantly promoted and not see articles like this as part of the campaign.
What about what I’ll call the Adderall like effect someone mentioned?
Shrooms Dude !
just wait until it’s all legal and we can grow out own, the world will be a lot more mellow that’s for sure.
I think the two of us are from the 70s excuse the out-of-date reference.
Is Sinsemilla still a thing or is that out of date as well ??
That happens quite often on FR, let it go, if it makes you feel good and is legal it’s none of their GD business.
Psilocybin is good stuff for those who don’t abuse it. Same story with booze. You can have a couple of drinks, or you can become a hopeless drunk.
I had psilocybin back in the ‘60s, when, I believe, it was still legal. Friend and I drove up to Big Sur and had it out in the woods near a waterfall. Unforgettably delightful day. If we’d had it on the street in LA, and did it frequently, we would have gone quite bonkers.
This particular study sounds iffy. Who will be supervising? A Trudeau authoritarian monster could drive you around the bend.
Hmmm. Mushrooms. Available now at your local cow pasture.
Yup.
Yeah.... I think so. But the way I hear it, most commercial marijuana is now sinsemilla. Word on the street (that I occasionally hear whispers of) that the new generation of weed is hydroponically grown, and double the strength of what we had way back when. I’m told that seedless weed is now the “norm”.
LOL! I remember that!
Same as marijuana then?
Where I used to live ( I will not say where ) the crap was growing everywhere...hell, I got out of my car in the McDonald’s drive thru and picked them when I was young.
You got to eat quite a few of them to be “ tripping”.
Slice them up and cook them in spaghetti sauce...
Mushroom pasta with garlic sauce. It’s what they ate at the first dinner party with Christopher Columbus and the Indians, with “all the trimmings.” :) Sounds good, anyway.
“Carlos Casteneda approves of this message.”
Fun books, those. We read them back in the early 1970s. We read them for the anthropology. :)
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