Potential Health Benefits of Psilocybin
Magic mushrooms have been used for more than 10,000 years in various spiritual and medical rituals for their ability to alter consciousness and trigger mystical experiences.
Most people who have tried psilocybin share that their experience it’s life-changing. Turns out, those aren’t just the ravings of a hallucinogenic mind. In fact, a growing group of researchers is excited about the potential benefits of psilocybin, the primary hallucinogenic compound in ’shrooms, which is showing a lot of promise for helping people overcome hard-to-treat (or treatment-resistant) and life-disrupting conditions like addiction and major depression.
What’s most interesting about psilocybin is its ability to address a few different types of conditions. “The most promising potential is for addiction—smoking, alcoholism, cocaine,” says Matthew W. Johnson, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and associate director of the Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research. His ongoing pilot study on nicotine addiction has found that 80% of participants who underwent psilocybin therapy quit smoking, and 60% of them were still abstinent 16 months later—impressive compared to the 35% success rate of varenicline, the most effective of other smoking cessation therapies. “The idea that something could be efficacious for multiple substances is, itself, very atypical and exciting,” says Johnson. “There’s a very good case that psilocybin can treat the psychology of addiction, not just alleviate the withdrawal symptoms and reduce cravings.”
In addition to treating addiction, psilocybin has also shown impressive results in treating depression and death anxiety. For instance, one small recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that patients with major depressive disorder experienced significant improvement after being treated with psilocybin in combination with psychotherapy, and more than half were in remission four weeks afterward. “The most advanced work is with patients with life-threatening cancer, where we saw dramatic reductions in depression and anxiety that showed persistent benefits six months later, which is extremely atypical,” says Dr. Johnson.
Beyond those applications, researchers are also looking at psilocybin for anorexia, Alzheimer’s (related to both depression and cognitive decline), post-traumatic stress disorder, demoralization syndrome (suffering characterized by feelings of hopelessness and loss of purpose/meaning in life) experienced by long-term HIV survivors, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. “We don’t have the answers yet, but I would say they’re good bets,” says Johnson.
Depression
Depression is among the most researched indications for psilocybin therapy. As Health-line previously reported last year, psilocybin therapy was given “breakthrough therapy” designation (a review fast track) by the FDA for the treatment of depression.
The Usona Institute, a psychedelic research center, is currently in the planning stages of their phase III trial, which will likely begin this year.
Smoking cessation and other addictions
In a small pilot study from Johns Hopkins University
Trusted Source, researchers found that psilocybin therapy significantly improved abstaining from smoking over a 12-month follow-up period.
Matthew Johnson, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, led that study.
According to him, psilocybin also has potential to treat other substance use disorders, including alcohol and cocaine addiction.
“The general idea is that the nature of these disorders is a narrowed mental and behavioral repertoire,” he told Healthline. “So, [psilocybin] in well-orchestrated sessions [has] the ability to essentially shake someone out of their routine to give a glimpse of a larger picture and create a mental plasticity with which people can step outside of those problems.”
In fact, a small open-label study on psilocybin and alcohol dependence found that following treatment, both drinking and heavy drinking declined.
Researchers in Alabama are also currently conducting trials for psilocybin therapy on cocaine addiction.
Cancer-related psychological distress
“There’ve been some promising preliminary results in such areas such as the treatment of overwhelming existential anxiety in people who are facing the end of life,who have diagnoses of advanced-stage cancer,” Dr. Charles Grob, professor of psychiatry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, told Healthline.
Grob, who’s also affiliated with the Heffter Research Institute, has studied psilocybin extensively and authored research on the subject, including, among other things, a pilot study
Trusted Source in 2011 on psilocybin treatment for anxiety in people with cancer.
A randomized, double-blind trial from Johns Hopkins in 2016 found that a single dose of psilocybin substantially improved quality of life and decreased depression and anxiety in people with life-threatening cancer diagnoses.
“The thing that we have the most evidence for is cancer-related depression and anxiety. That seems really strong, and I’d be surprised if those results didn’t hold up,” Johnson said, who was part of that research.
This information is for education purposes and we can not make any claims as per the benefit of using psilocybin. Please see the risks of using psilocybin and drug interaction.