Is it Time to Treat Alcoholism or Depression With Psilocybin?

Move over medical marijuana. Psychedelics are the hot drugs of the moment, with articles and podcasts hyping their potential to treat drug abuse, depression, and PTSD. In particular, interest in psilocybin has mushroomed. Recent headlines tout psilocybin’s success <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2795625" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">in treating alcohol use disorder</a> and <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2206443" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">treatment-resistant depression</a>. The mainstream media creates an impression of a vast trove of clinical research supporting the use of psilocybin. But so far, the hard data is pretty sparse and narrow. The scientific literature mirrors the situation in the popular media. When I recently checked PubMed for “<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=psilocybin+alcohol" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">psilocybin and alcohol</a>” 139 articles popped up. That list contained only two clinical trials, both conducted by Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, Professor of Psychiatry at NYU. Only five articles reported basic brain research on psilocybin’s effect in animal models of alcoholism, and two of these were more than fifty years old. 95% of the articles were reviews and commentaries, speculating on the potential role of psilocybin. <a href="https://medium.com/invisible-illness/is-it-time-to-treat-alcoholism-or-depression-with-psilocybin-1a90da63bb7b">Read More</a>