“To get the kind of lingering benefits that we’re seeing that are weeks, months, even more than a year later, that seems to suggest that there is some kind of cognitive shift or changes in one’s sense of meaning going on,” says David Yaden. , an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.
People who took part in psychedelic studies often say that the experience was one of the best most meaningful of their lives, equivalent to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Many report feeling a sense of connection to the universe. “This psilocybin journey has been the most transformative experience of my life,” wrote Mr. Fernandez in a Medium message in 2018. “It forced me to reconcile with the mortality of being human. It eased my anxiety and gave meaning to my life.”
It is this existential catharsis and the personal insights that come with it that make Dr. Yaden and others believe they are so important to people’s healing. To support the theory, multiple studies have found that the feelings of belonging and meaningfulness and the mystical experiences people have during their journey correlate with their therapeutic outcomes.
Regardless of which side is right, seeking an answer to how psychedelics treat depression brings scientists one step closer to understanding not only how to alleviate the symptoms of mental illness, but possibly how to remove them. That’s because the truly revolutionary vision of both psychedelic therapy and its non-psychedelic chemical cousins is not to take the drugs daily or weekly, but only once or twice and possibly heal for good. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a drug that you can take before bedtime and you would wake up the next day and you were no longer depressed?” said Dr. Bryan Roth, a professor of pharmacology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who is also working on the development of non-hallucinatory psychedelic compounds.
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Beginning in the 1960s, scientists thought that depression resulted from low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, and traditional antidepressants, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, worked by correcting that chemical imbalance. But there were holes in this hypothesis. Most notably, SSRIs increase serotonin levels immediately, but symptoms of depression usually don’t disappear until several weeks after starting the medication.
A new theory It emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s that depression, as well as anxiety and PTSD, can stem from the loss of synapses in the brain — the connections between neurons. Scientists found that people with depression have less volume in areas of the brain that are important for mood, executive control and feelings of reward. Chronic stress and genetics are believed to contribute to the atrophy of neurons and their connections.