LSD, magic mushrooms and
mescaline have been banned in the U.S. and many other countries since the
1970s, but psychedelic medicine is making a comeback as new therapies for
depression, nicotine addiction and anxiety. The drugs have another scientific
use, too: so-called psychotomimetics, or mimics of psychosis, may be useful
tools for studying schizophrenia. By creating a brief bout of psychosis in a
healthy brain, as indigenous healers have for millennia, scientists are seeking
new ways to study—and perhaps treat—mental illness. Researhers think that
schizophrenia is a group of psychoses, which may have different causes. The new
approach is to try to understand specific symptoms: hearing voices, cognitive
problems, or apathy and social disengagement. If you can identify the neural
bases of these, you can tailor the pharmacology.
They have found an existing drug
for anxiety that blocks specific effects of psilocybin, the psychoactive
ingredient in magic mushrooms. When healthy people were given the drug before
tripping, they did not report visual hallucinations and other common effects,
according to a study published in April 2016 in European
Neuropsychopharmacology. The effort is part of a burgeoning movement in
pharmacology that seeks to induce psychosis to learn how to treat it. And
schizophrenia desperately needs new treatments. Seventy-five percent of
afflicted patients have cognitive problems. And most commonly used drugs do not
treat the disorder's “negative” symptoms—apathy, social withdrawal, negative
thinking—nor the cognitive impairments, which best predict how well a patient
will fare in the long term.
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