From The Guardian: “UK regulators have given the go-ahead for the first clinical trial of the use of the psychedelic drug dimethyltriptamine (DMT) to treat depression. The trial will initially give the drug – known as the “spirit molecule” for the powerful hallucinogenic trips it induces – to healthy individuals, but it is expected to be followed by a second trial in patients with depression, where DMT will be given alongside psychotherapy…”
Read MoreFrom www.guardian.com: “Kerry Rhodes says a series of hallucinogenic trips he took as part of a documentary helped him understand himself more deeply. “Once it kicks in there are prisms and shapes and stuff like that, I could see visually stunning stuff. I literally had to tell myself, ‘You’re OK, you’re good, this is what you signed up for.’” The first “purge” – vomit – into a bucket brought a particularly bizarre vision: Rhodes, at his playing peak one of the NFL’s pre-eminent safeties, was brought face to face with a foetus…”
Read More“Oakland, California has become the second city in the United States to decriminalize the use and possession of psychedelic mushrooms, The Associated Press reports. The Oakland City Council unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday night, just weeks after Denver voters narrowly approved a similar measure. Along with mushrooms containing psilocybin, the resolution also decriminalizes other psychedelics naturally derived from plants or fungi, such as ayahuasca, peyote and DMT. Synthetic psychedelics like LSD and MDMA, are still illegal…”
Read MoreFrom Forbes.com: “This isn’t the psychedelic you remember from college. It isn’t an eight-hour marathon experience tripping through the woods like Alice. It’s fast-acting, short-duration — sometimes lasting as briefly as seven minutes — and is a rocket-ship ride into the center of the cosmos. In a recent European study, after one single use, the substance 5-MeO-DMT was shown to produce sustained enhancement of satisfaction with life, and easing of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)…”
Read More“Ross and Dwyer are at the centre of the country's first clinical trial of psychedelic drugs for treating severe depression in the terminally ill. Within a month, they will begin recruiting 40 depressed and incurable patients in an attempt to relieve their distress with a novel treatment: between one and two 25-milligram doses of synthetic psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient found in "magic mushrooms", accompanied by intensive psychotherapy sessions…”
Read More“A new systematic review states that serotonergic hallucinogens help users recognize emotions in facial expressions. Sufferers of anxiety and depression often only read negative emotions in other people's faces, adding to their malaise. While more research is needed, psychedelics could prove to be a powerful agent in battling mental health disorders…”
Read More“The irony. The generation who brought psychedelic drugs to the attention of the world, may just be the ones who use them as medicine to treat anxiety and depression or simply to face death. But while researchers around the world are looking at some formerly illicit drugs in a new way, they’re doing it with caution...”
Read More“A milky, psychoactive secretion that oozes from the glands of a North American toad could provide a fast-acting and extremely potent treatment for depression, according to a new study. The amphibian in question is the Colorado river toad, or Bufo alvarius…”
Read More“The first formal centre for psychedelic research in the world will launch at Imperial College London today. Funded by more than £3 million from five founding donors, the new Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research will build on over a decade of pioneering work in this area carried out at Imperial, including a clinical trial that has kick-started global efforts to develop psilocybin therapy into a licensed treatment for depression…”
Read More“Though psychedelic drugs remain illegal, guided ceremonies, or sessions, are happening across the country, as more Americans seek out safe, structured environments to use psychedelics for spiritual growth and psychological healing. This new world of psychedelic-assisted therapy functions as a kind of parallel mental health service…”
Read MoreSteve Hupp was a stone-cold career criminal. And by his own admission, he was “damn good at it,” too. “I was a bank robber, a car thief and a lot of other stuff. I was the worst kind of offender you could face because you would never know I was coming, and you usually didn’t know I was there till I was gone.”
Read MoreSo, what about using ancient plant medicines to treat addiction? It may seem completely contradictory to treat someone who has a substance use disorder with a psychedelic drug that may induce hallucinations, but there's emerging evidence to support this approach…
Read MoreSome of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors are betting that the eventual legalisation of psychedelics could create the next big frontier in the mental health industry. For instance, Peter Thiel is behind one company, Compass, that has reportedly already made tens of thousands of doses of the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, Psilocybin, for the treatment of depression…
Read More"Leon" is a young Brazilian man who has long struggled with depression. He keeps an anonymous blog, in Portuguese, where he describes the challenge of living with a mental illness that affects some 300 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization…
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