Standards are useful in the development of medicine because they enable communication and consistency in experimentation. Standards, however, often require expensive tools like laboratories and clinical trials. How, then, might citizen scientists develop standards given the difficulty of obtaining these tools? This article provides one answer, by describing ...
Veterans are at increased risk of experiencing symptoms of trauma. Although many benefit from available treatments, some find treatment inaccessible or ineffective and explore alternative substances. One such substance is psilocybin. This Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis study aimed to provide an initial insight into the experiences of veterans who h...
Lifetime psychedelic substance use has previously been linked to nature relatedness and pro-environmental behaviour. Yet, participants’ responses to the self-report measures in these studies may have been affected by stereotypical associations or confirmation bias. We therefore re-examined this link by measuring three pro-environmental dependent variables: n...
Depression is highly prevalent and represents the leading cause of global disability and primary contributor to overall global burden of disease. Several lines of evidence from early-phase experimental trials suggest that serotonergic psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, with therapeutic support show great promise in the treatment of depression with large ...
Alcohol-dependent patients commonly show impairments in executive functions that facilitate craving and can lead to relapse. However, the molecular mechanisms leading to executive dysfunction in alcoholism are poorly understood, and new effective pharmacological treatments are desired. Here, using a bidirectional neuromodulation approach, we demonstrate a ca...
IntroductionDespite the rapid advance of psychedelic science and possible translation of psychedelic therapy into the psychiatric clinic, very little is known about mental health service user attitudes.ObjectivesTo explore mental health service user attitudes to psychedelics and psilocybin therapy.MethodsA questionnaire capturing demographics, diagnoses, pre...
Objective: Recent clinical trials have demonstrated that psilocybin may have strong antidepressant effects, and may be effective in the treatment of depressive disorders when embedded in a psychotherapeutic protocol (psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy; PAP). However, despite promising results, the mechanism(s) that may be responsible for the antidepressant ef...
Hallucinogenic mushroom is a kind of toxic strain containing psychoactive tryptamine substances such as psilocybin, psilocin and ibotenic acid, etc. The mushrooms containing hallucinogenic components are various, widely distributed and lack of standard to define, which made a great challenge to identification. Traditional identification methods, such as morp...
Depression is a widespread and devastating mental illness and the search for rapid-acting antidepressants remains critical. There is now exciting evidence that the psychedelic compound psilocybin produces not only powerful alterations of consciousness, but also rapid and persistent antidepressant effects. How psilocybin exerts its therapeutic actions is not ...
People with advanced cancer are at heightened risk of desire for hastened death (DHD), suicidal ideation (SI), and completed suicide. Loss of Meaning (LoM), a component of demoralization, can be elevated by a cancer diagnosis and predicts DHD and SI in this population. We completed a randomized controlled trial in which psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy (PAP...
Little has been written on the financial support behind Timothy Leary's unorthodox research into mind-altering drugs like LSD and psilocybin and his subsequent psychedelic movement. Indeed several individuals and organizations helped the psychedelic cause by directly funding Leary's ventures, offering legal and logistic assistance, and organizing fund-raisin...
A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic and serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) agonist, may be associated with antidepressant effects. The mechanism behind its antidepressive action is unknown but could be linked to increased synaptogenesis and down-regulation of cerebral 5-HT2AR. Here, we investigate if a single psychedelic dose of psilocybin changes synapt...
Since a 1957 exposé in Life Magazine, chemical compounds derived from Psilocybe mushrooms have been the focus of dozens of attempted and successful patents, most recently to treat depression. Regrettably, the Mazatec indigenous communities who stewarded these traditional medicines for millenia are not party to any of these patents, despite a number of intern...
Novel synthetic compounds have been available for decades as quasi-legal alternatives to controlled substances. The hallucinogen-like effects of eight novel substituted tryptamines were evaluated to determine their potential abuse liability. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were trained to discriminate 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (DOM, 0.5 mg/kg, i.p., 30 min)...
The 5-HT2A receptor is thought to be the primary target for psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) and other serotonergic hallucinogens (psychedelic drugs). Although a large amount of experimental work has been conducted to characterize the pharmacology of psilocybin and its dephosphorylated metabolite psilocin (4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine)...
Attachment insecurity is determined early in life, is a risk factor for psychopathology, and can be measured on two separate continuous dimensions: attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Therapeutic changes toward more secure attachment correlate with reduction in psychiatric symptoms. Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy has demonstrated promise in the t...