Psychotherapy with the use of psychedelic substances, including psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), ketamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), has demonstrated promise in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PP) represents a uniqu...
The current protocol is a pilot study of the effects and possible utility of psilocybin-facilitated experiences for professional religious leaders. We hypothesize that religious professionals, given their interests, training, and life experience, will be able to make nuanced discriminations of their psilocybin experiences, thus contributing to the scientific...
BackgroundPreliminary data suggest that psilocybin-assisted treatment produces substantial and rapid antidepressant effects in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), but little is known about long-term outcomes.AimsThis study sought to examine the efficacy and safety of psilocybin through 12 months in participants with moderate to severe MDD who rece...
Rationale and objectivesDifferences among psychedelic substances regarding their subjective experiences are clinically and scientifically interesting. Quantitative linguistic analysis is a powerful tool to examine such differences. This study compared five psychedelic substance report groups and a non-psychedelic report group on quantitative linguistic marke...
“Are magic mushrooms the miracle cure for depression we've been looking for?” (Khan, 2021). Attention-grabbing headlines such as this are becoming increasingly common and suggest that psychedelic medicines are some kind of magic bullet. This perception is increased by stories of people who had a single life-changing psychedelic experience that resulted in co...
Survey-based studies suggest naturalistic psychedelic use provides mental health benefits similar to those observed in clinical trials. The current study sought to confirm these findings in a large group of psychedelic users and to conduct a novel examination of associations between amount of psychedelic use and behavioral outcomes, as well as frequency of h...
Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin are under investigation for the treatment of several psychiatric conditions. They also have the remarkable property of producing persisting positive psychological changes in healthy volunteers for at least several months. In this study, 35 medium-high doses of psilocybin were administered to 28 healthy volunteers (12 fema...
Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin are under investigation for the treatment of several psychiatric conditions. They also have the remarkable property of producing persisting positive psychological changes in healthy volunteers for at least several months. In this study, 35 medium-high doses of psilocybin were administered to 28 healthy volunteers (12 fema...
William James proposed in 1902 that states of mystical experience, central to his idea of religious experience, can be identified based on their ineffability and their noetic quality. The epistemological category of the noetic quality, modified by W. T. Stace in 1960, plays a central but somewhat confounding role in today’s biomedical research involving psyc...
The past decade has witnessed a rapid growth of research on the basic science and clinical understanding of psychedelics. This chapter provides an overview of the human behavioral pharmacology of psychedelics focusing on three prototypic classic psychedelics-psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). A brief historical overvi...
RATIONALE: Classic psychedelics are currently being studied as novel treatments for a range of psychiatric disorders. However, research on how psychedelics interact with other psychoactive substances remains scarce. OBJECTIVES: The current study aimed to explore the subjective effects of psychedelics when used alongside cannabis. METHODS: Participants (n = 3...
Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings (SSAs) are subjective experiences characterised by a sudden sense of direct contact, union, or complete nondual merging (experience of oneness) with a perceived ultimate reality, the universe, "God," or the divine. These profound transformative experiences have scarcely been researched, despite extensive anecdotal evidence su...
Background: Practitioners in a variety of spiritual/religious traditions have described “mystical experiences”, defined by a common set of qualities. The “Mystical Experience Questionnaire” (MEQ30) provides a validated and quantitative measure of mystical experience, and has been used successfully to demonstrate that the hallucinogenic substance psilocybin t...
Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings (SSAs) are subjective experiences characterised by a sud- den sense of direct contact, union or merging with a perceived ultimate reality, the universe, or the divine. These profound transformative experiences have scarcely been researched, de- spite extensive anecdotal evidence suggesting their potential to catalyse drastic,...
Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings (SSAs) are subjective experiences characterised by a sud- den sense of direct contact, union or merging with a perceived ultimate reality, the universe, or the divine. These profound transformative experiences have scarcely been researched, de- spite extensive anecdotal evidence suggesting their potential to catalyse drastic,...
Abstract This article reports on the experiences of four healthy individuals who attended a legal psilocybin truffle retreat in the Netherlands. The study employed a qualitative phenomenological approach, using semi-structured interviews to gain an understanding of participants' psilocybin experiences and their after-effects. The experiential themes that eme...
Several measures have been designed to assess subjective experiences induced by psychedelic substances and other mind-altering drugs or non-pharmacological methods. Recently, two self-report questionnaires have been introduced to measure acute adverse effects following psilocybin ingestion and the phenomenon of ego-dissolution associated with psychedelic use...
Several measures have been designed to assess subjective experiences induced by psychedelic substances and other mind-altering drugs or non-pharmacological methods. Recently, two self-report questionnaires have been introduced to measure acute adverse effects following psilocybin ingestion and the phenomenon of ego-dissolution associated with psychedelic use...
BackgroundDespite tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)'s reputation for creating dramatic effects at high doses, empirical work rarely addresses cannabis's impact on subjective responses common to the tryptamine psychedelics. We focused on these effects because they have preceded and covaried with the therapeutic impact of psilocybin in previous work.AimsThe current s...
BackgroundPsilocybin is the psychoactive component in Psilocybe mushrooms ('magic mushrooms'). Whether and how the quality of the psilocybin-induced experience might mediate beneficial health outcomes is currently under investigation, for example, in therapeutic applications. However, to date, no meta-analysis has investigated the dose-dependency of subjecti...
