how psilocybin affects those struggling with mental health and trauma. Getting in touch with your emotions.
A BC man claims that microdosing psilocybin for 8 months has eased his PTSD symptoms tremendously. The man states that he no longer experiences panic attacks and believes that psilocybin represents “freedom from being stuck in a dark place in your head”. The documentary VeraCity: The Psychedelic Frontier dives deeper into his journey through PTSD.
The psychedelic treatment revolution is shifting the model of psychiatry away from daily medication for mental health treatment, according to psychiatrist Dr. Craig Heacock. Heacock believes that mental health issues like depression, anxiety, addiction, and PTSD “are more often than not tied to a deep, and largely untouchable, river of trauma that lies beneath our reach in the unconscious mind”. Psilocybin therapy is proving to be an effective treatment option because it brings deeply repressed trauma to the surface so that patients can “begin to rework and reframe their experience without fear”.
A clinical trial showed psilocybin-assisted therapy was 4 times more effective at treating major depressive disorder than antidepressant drugs. 27 participants with a long-term history of depression received 11 hours of therapy in addition to two full-day psilocybin-assisted therapy sessions, two weeks apart. Patients received the doses of psilocybin while lying on a couch with eyeshades and listening to music through headphones, and clinical monitors provided guidance and support throughout the experience. Four weeks after the treatment, 71% of participants saw at least a 50% reduction in depression scores, and 54% of participants were in remission from depression.
In a study published in Psychopharmacology, 44% of survey respondents reported that microdosing psychedelics significantly improved their mental health, with 50% reporting that they were able to stop taking antidepressants completely. In a separate study, microdosers were significantly less likely to report a history of substance use or anxiety disorders, with an average dose of 0.3 grams of psilocybin or 13 micrograms of LSD taken every three days. In the 2019 Global Drug Survey, microdosers often reported “enhanced mood, creativity, focus, and sociability”, with the most common reported challenge of microdosing being “none”.
A study at Johns Hopkins Behavioral Biology Research Center found that 80% of participants were able to quit smoking for at least six months after taking one dose of psilocybin, including one participant who was a heavy smoker for over 25 years. This suggests that psilocybin therapy is over twice as effective as the leading smoking cessation drug, varenicline, which has a 35% success rate after six months. Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu explains that psilocybin is effective for treating addiction because it changes the way the brain makes connections, which can “interrupt old patterns, well-worn neuro pathways, or habits.”
