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Psychedelic assisted therapy part 2
In this two-part series we cover psychedelic assisted therapy, its benefits and risks in treating mental health disorders. In part 2, we uncover how this can affect youths, who is doing well in implementation, microdosing, and resources.
How does this affect youths?
Once you have that first psychotic break, you are exponentially at greater risk. And just intuitively, most people get it. The more breaks, more episodes you have just in general, the more debilitating the lower the prognosis. It’s just this kind of like a cataclysm of series event.
People who used when they were adolescents were more likely to become psychotic as adults if they had a family predisposition.
What organizations, people, governments are doing well with implementation?
It’s hard because in the psychedelic community there is a lot of infighting and there are indigenous communities that feel commercialized companies are a negative influence. Even M.A.P.S., whose really well known like have their own backlash. if you ask someone in Western Africa about ibogaine, they’d say we’re doing it the best because we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.
And on the other end of things, you have drug development, pharmaceutical companies that are saying there’s no evidence to say that that is the best way to do it, and you don’t actually know that. And then you’ve got everything in between. So you’ve got M.A.P.S. that comes up with a model. Johns Hopkins has come up with a model. I think a lot of us are trying to figure out what best practices looks like. And that’s just going to take some research and funding. Unfortunately, you can’t get government funding. It has to be private funding.
If you are designing content specific for these types of interventions, what does that content look like? Are we basically just talking about therapy in general? Are there added elements? Does it have to be different?
It does have to be somewhat different. You have to consider things like setting.
So there’s no research to back it, but you have a ton of people who have different microdosing protocols that say that they know exactly what happens. I would argue that that that remains to be seen. Microdosing basically refers to a sub therapeutic dose of a substance. It shouldn’t be anything you can feel. You shouldn’t feel like you’re high. You shouldn’t be seeing things, like none of that. So, it’s just a really, really low dose and some type of schedule. For some people, microdosing actually makes them more anxious or irritable. I think it’s actually a really good idea that folks know that that’s possible. It’s not it doesn’t work for everybody. It’s not great for everybody.
So aside from psychosis risk, mental illness what are some of the lesser risks? Because it does seem like whenever there’s the precipice or a panacea, everyone just gravitates to it. Right? Because CBD right now is supposed to be curing everything from anxiety to dementia to just the ills of life.
Ketamine, same thing. If you just take some ketamine, everything’s better. No, not at all. Yeah, I think that those are some things worth really talking about. And challenging trips do exist. So sometimes people just go do substances by themselves and they have a really hard experience and they haven’t set up any sort of support to work through that and that can cause all sorts of downstream effects.
How does this impact the recovery community? Like what kind of risk is there? is there a protocol for those types of individuals?
My favorite fun fact. Bill W, one of the founders of AA, actually got sober because of LSD. So, is there a protocol around it? No. If you’re a hardcore 12 stepper, you probably are not super excited about this wave that’s coming. But I would argue that a lot of people who are in recovery and have utilized psychedelics would say that it’s the difference between white knuckling your recovery and actually living through your recovery. There is some beautiful evidence around alcohol use disorder and opioid use disorder as well as nicotine specifically that suggests psilocybin is incredibly helpful. And I would say that by and large, most people say that doing something like psilocybin or ayahuasca changes, at least changes their relationship with substance, if not outright kind of relieves them of the urge or the want to continue to use.
If people want to learn more what are some of the better, better sites Resources?
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence By Michael Pollan
Five years from now, this will just be kind of one of the options in a menu of treatments that people can pursue and my hope is that it will be done responsibly and ethically, that people will be well trained. I would say, in maybe five years, I think it will still be kind of like this sexy, cool like, oh my gosh, you’re doing what? But I would say ten years from now, people would be like, Oh yeah, I’m going to go.
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