OPEN Foundation

Day: 18 September 2013

Self-Medication of LSD and MDMA to Treat Mental Disorders: A Case Series

September 18, 2013 / Anxiety disorders / PTSD, Depression, LSD, MDMA, Other subjects, Papers, Psychiatry, Psychology, Publications / By /

Abstract

50 years ago LSD was prescribed to treat a variety of mental illnesses. More recently LSD and MDMA (ecstasy) have become widely used outside medicine as both recreational drugs and by some patients as ‘self-medication’. These brief reports gather together five patients’ experiences using psychedelic drugs to treat their mental disorders. They are discussed in relation to the medical profession’s current growing interest in re-visiting psychedelic drugs as therapeutic treatments in psychiatry. The first case describes the successful self-treatment for depression using LSD, followed by a case in which doctors administered LSD in the 1960s and 1970s to successfully treat a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and chronic fatigue syndrome. The third and fourth cases describe the successful self-treatment of OCD using respectively MDMA and then LSD and the final case describes a self-treatment with LSD to manage Anorexia Nervosa. All the participants describing their use of these drugs give a positive report of self-treatment with minimal adverse effects. They also all support a resumption of more research into the therapeutic use of hallucinogens/psychedelic drugs as potential clinical therapies.

Sessa, B. (2010). Self-medication of LSD and MDMA to treat mental disorders: A case series. The Journal of Alternative Medicine Research, 2(2), 245-249.
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Broadband cortical desynchronization underlies the human psychedelic state

September 18, 2013 / Mushrooms / Psilocybin, Neuroscience, Other subjects, Papers, Psychopharmacology, Publications / By / , , , , , ,

Abstract

Psychedelic drugs produce profound changes in consciousness, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms for this remain unclear. Spontaneous and induced oscillatory activity was recorded in healthy human participants with magnetoencephalography after intravenous infusion of psilocybin—prodrug of the nonselective serotonin 2A receptor agonist and classic psychedelic psilocin. Psilocybin reduced spontaneous cortical oscillatory power from 1 to 50 Hz in posterior association cortices, and from 8 to 100 Hz in frontal association cortices. Large decreases in oscillatory power were seen in areas of the default-mode network. Independent component analysis was used to identify a number of resting-state networks, and activity in these was similarly decreased after psilocybin. Psilocybin had no effect on low-level visually induced and motor-induced gamma-band oscillations, suggesting that some basic elements of oscillatory brain activity are relatively preserved during the psychedelic experience. Dynamic causal modeling revealed that posterior cingulate cortex desynchronization can be explained by increased excitability of deep-layer pyramidal neurons, which are known to be rich in 5-HT2A receptors. These findings suggest that the subjective effects of psychedelics result from a desynchronization of ongoing oscillatory rhythms in the cortex, likely triggered by 5-HT2A receptor-mediated excitation of deep pyramidal cells.

Muthukumaraswamy, S. D., Carhart-Harris, R. L., Moran, R. J., Brookes, M. J., Williams, T. M., Errtizoe, D., … & Feilding, A. (2013). Broadband cortical desynchronization underlies the human psychedelic state. The Journal of Neuroscience, 33(38), 15171-15183. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2063-13.2013
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30 April - Q&A with Rick Strassman

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