A recent study has found that magic mushrooms are able to ‘reset’ key neural circuits in the brain to treat depression. The active ingredient in magic mushrooms - a psychedelic chemical called psilocybin, is reported to produce ‘rapid and sustained antidepressant effects’.
As part of the study, scientists carried out brain scans on nineteen patients before the treatment and the day after. All of the patients suffered from depression and were given the drug, and roughly half of them said that they experienced an ‘afterglow’ effect, which lasted up to five weeks.
Professor Mitul Mehta, from King’s College, has said that the hallucinogenic reduces the blood flow to many parts of the brain which think ‘about the self’, and to the area called amygdala, which is responsible for processing emotion.
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Dr Robin Carhart-Harris from Imperial College London where the study was carried out, said ‘We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments.
‘Several of our patients described feeling 'reset' after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been 'defragged' like a computer hard drive’
Carhart-Harris adds that ‘psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary ‘kick start’ they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a ‘reset’ analogy.’
Although more research needs to take place to determine whether the ‘afterglow’ can be found in a larger number of patients, this is a very exciting finding. Early next year there’s going to be a new trial, testing magic mushrooms’ psilocybin against a commonly used antidepressant to see if it holds its own.
Now it may not be a good idea to self-medicate on the Class A hallucinogenic drug, and it has been described as ‘addictive and risky’, but the good news is that we could just be about to discover a totally new method of treating depression.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.