for five years he tried antidepressants
talking therapy and nothing helped in
May 2015 in Imperial College he was
given psilocybin also known as magic
mushrooms and since that time he’s been
depression free this is Ben he suffered
from depression for thirty years and in
that time he tried everything CBT group
therapy a list of medications prescribed
to him by his doctor and nothing helped
in June 2015 he was given psilocybin and
since that time he has been depression
free not only had the symptoms of his
depression gone but in the last year he
has done an acting course a printing
course he’s flown on a plane for the
first time in a decade and his career
and social life are flourishing I can’t
show you his face because magic
mushrooms are an illegal psychedelic
drug and he’s asked to remain anonymous
magic mushrooms you might think of the
60s dropping out jumping out of windows
thinking you can fly you might think of
going crazy quite the opposite of what
magic mushrooms did to to bed into Kirk
and despite its bad reputation we need
to ask the question what does this
mushroom know that we don’t what does it
do that we can’t I’m a clinical
psychologist at the psychedelic research
group at Imperial it’s a vibrant group
of scientists and clinicians asking
these very unconventional questions in a
most conventional way it is led by Robin
Carhartt Harris he’s a pioneering
neuroscientist and also overseen by
David Nutt who was a world-renowned
psychopharmacologist and together they
cut through ribbons and ribbons of red
tape so that we could do the first
psilocybin for depression study last
year and in the study 20 individuals
with treatment resistant depression
were given a high dose of psilocybin in
a therapeutic setting now the numbers
may seem small but the results were
remarkable we kept seeing these drops in
their depression scores after the
psilocybin treatment over and over again
their symptoms of depression were going
right down much bigger reductions in
depression scores than you would expect
to see in trials of conventional
treatments like antidepressants and
talking therapy the depression scores
were going right down and they were
staying down six months after the dose
six of them were still in remission no
symptoms of depression three of them
didn’t really respond to the drug so
there were small reductions in their
depression but only for about a week but
for 11 their depression was greatly
reduced for about two months and then
the symptoms of depression started to
creep back again now that might sound
very disappointing but with
antidepressants you have to take them
every day they have some unpleasant side
effects it takes weeks for them to work
and they are a palliative treatment not
a cure but with psilocybin treatment we
were seeing immediate reductions in
depression symptoms immediate relief
that last four months without side
effects and it seemed to be working on
the root causes rather than just
suppressing symptoms depression is a
relentless haunting affliction Winston
Churchill calls it the Black Dog
patients in a study called it a concrete
coat a sack over the head a locked box a
prison
they had tried between 3 and 11
different types of talking therapy and
after sorry 3 and 11 types of
antidepressant and six types of talking
therapy but nothing had released them
they were stuck in their individual
prisons of depression and they’re not
the odd ones out we are entering an
epidemic of depression it’s the number
one cause of disability globally and it
will affect everyone in this room either
someone you care about or you directly
and we don’t understand depression we
don’t really know what causes it and
despite enormous scientific endeavor we
have not yet found a complete a
conclusive cure we don’t really
understand it it it’s a complex mixture
of so many different factors and when it
hits it can be a wave of sadness shame
and grief or it can be just a shroud
that kills all feelings and it’s not it
illness that we can just test for and
treat is different for every person so
how to unlock depression the key is
never simple and it will be different
so in our study we were originally
looking at the effect of psilocybin on
the patient’s brains so it makes the
rain go from rigid to flexible
hyper-connected you could say that it
unlocks the brain so in our study we did
these brain scans and we could see this
increased flexibility and we also in
Crete included a symptom measure so we
could see that depression symptoms were
going right down but that doesn’t tell
the full story we wanted to know from
patients in their own words what was
happening what was the psilocybin doing
so we interviewed them all six months
after the dose and we analyzed the
interview traps transcripts and came up
with two themes about what psilocybin
was doing but before I get onto those
themes I think maybe actually clarify
what a psychedelic experiences so
psychedelics allow the unconscious mind
to become conscious important material
that has been built up over the course
of life but that is being pushed out of
sight where you can’t see it emerges
like it’s kind of crumpled clothes that
you push to the back of your wardrobe
and it emerges it comes out you don’t
just see it you embody it memories
emotions pain love grief whatever has
been hidden emerges and demands you feel
it it can be incredibly painful and
incredibly beautiful patients in our
study described overall having three
main types of experience so firstly
visiting past traumas secondly having
insights about your life negative
patterns and how to change them and
thirdly these connect these experiences
of harmony and and connection and unity
and sometimes they would have all three
experiences in the course of one day
sync session so here’s our treatment
room and you would have the two
therapists either side of the patient
they’d be given ice shades and asked to
sit back and listen to the music and
just surrender to whatever comes up and
they would have had sessions with the
therapists before
and so that they trusted them and they
felt safe but the therapist doesn’t
structure the sessions at all or direct
the content in any way but there was a
structure two sessions there was a
beginning a middle and an end and a flow
of ideas and symbols that built on each
other in the most sophisticated way as
if as if it had been planned by a most
excellent therapist now in my previous
work as a non psychedelic psychologist I
would provide him talking therapies in
the NHS I would I would plan my sessions
for my patients and think how can I help
them talk about traumatic experiences or
how could I help them get a different
perspective or develop some self
compassion or some motivation for change
and I try and instill all these things
but it’s all coming from the therapist
the patient experiences it somehow
outside of themselves and it sometimes
just misses the mark but with the
psilocybin sessions I was witnessing
patients go on their own journeys of
healing the ideas all came from inside
themselves and they were powerful and
transformative because the lessons were
were planned by the most accurate
therapists there is themselves so the
themes what did the patients say the
okay click a broken can I have another
click done okay okay so the next slide
isn’t coming up but I’ll tell you what
it says it says that the first theme was
of an inner unlocking so patients
described going from being emotionally
locked up inside to being emotionally
liberated they they described going from
being a void of emotion to accepting
emotion so they talked about how in
depression when stressful or painful
painful things happened
emotions were distance or suppressed
they our society doesn’t really value
suffering it’s seen as a weakness
so they’d learned to put their feelings
in boxes Sam remembered growing up and
being told boys don’t cry so he learned
to suffer in silence and many of the
patients just they weren’t they couldn’t
deal with their feelings because so much
had happened in their lives they had so
many years of hurt they just didn’t have
the resources to face it all and they
had many different ways of avoiding
their pain self-medicating through
through food through television through
painkillers and then often through
antidepressants which didn’t really work
on the root causes of their suffering
just none the worse of the pain but they
also numbed other emotions too and so
many of the patients described feeling
numb and unable to feel many of them had
described experiencing trauma in their
lives often in early childhood and
they’ve never been able to process it or
think about what had happened and in the
psilocybin experiences they were able to
John here John
he had suffered from abuse in childhood
and in his psilocybin dose he saw a
great big cask and he knew that in that
cask with all of his pain and shame that
he’d never been able to think or talk
about and he grappled with it it was
extremely painful but in the course of
the session he was able to unlock that
box and accept his past and it was so
powerful many of them cried for the
first time in years this cathartic
experience of accepting emotion and just
being able to live it we thought in six
hours what you would often see in six
years
of therapy and now the second theme is
of an outer unlocking so they describe
going from disconnection to connection
so they talked about depression as a
gradual turning inward slowly becoming
disconnected from from the people you
love from your identity and becoming
just kind of trapped in their minds
trapped in a small corner of their minds
locked there with constant negative
thinking attacking them all the time and
the psilocybin started a process of
reconnection so been described it this
way he said it was like when you defrag
the hard drive on your computer I
experience things being rearranged in my
mind I witnessed it as it was all put
into order and I thought my brain is
being defrag how brilliant is that and
since that time my thoughts make sense
and I ruminate less and other patients
describe the same process but in a
different way some described as the fog
lifting or being able to see clearly
John said it was like turning on the
lights in a dark house and after that
mental reboot they were able to connect
to their senses they were connect to
their their self their identity Kirk
said he felt like he was gliding through
life and they could connect through
other people John went for dinner with
his wife for the first time in seven
years and said that they were like
teenagers again many of them felt a
connection to nature they didn’t just
see nature as a thing like a television
or a picture but they felt part of it
and they collected to a spiritual
principle for the first time some of
them overall they went from being
so altered states of consciousness have
been held in high esteem for thousands
of years around the world but the
scientific research is in its infancy
and we’re excited to be doing a bigger
study this year but we’re still treading
carefully we don’t know so much about it
yet and it won’t be right for everyone
so we’re treading carefully and we’re
going to learn so much over the next
five years about how and when psilocybin
it can help us but I believe that it
could revolutionize mental healthcare
patience in our study described all
these superficial treatments short-term
therapies sticking plasters that didn’t
help nothing had ever helped because
nothing had ever got to the heart of
their pain and in this epidemic of
depression there are so many people in
need so many people need help and the
NHS can’t afford to provide long term
treatments and years and years of
psychotherapy for everyone but I believe
that if we incorporate psilocybin into
existing short-term therapies like the
therapies I used to work in that we can
make them so much more effective so much
more powerful its supplementing therapy
with a medicine that lets you find a way
out of your suffering rather than just
padding the cage so can magic mushrooms
unlock depression the answer is no it’s
not the mushroom that unlocks depression
it’s the patient the mushroom just shows them the key