Psilocybin, the psychoactive compound from magic mushrooms, is being used to treat depression and anxiety in terminally ill patients in a new trial at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital.



The trial, headed by St Vincent's clinical psychologist Dr Margaret Ross, will begin in April with 30 patients recruited from the hospital's palliative care who have not responded to anti-depressant or anti-anxiety therapies.

The patients will be given a single dose of 25mg of synthetic psilocybin in conjunction with psychotherapy sessions.

Ross told BuzzFeed News that this a mid-range dosage that will provide patients with a psychedelic experience that will last in the range of four hours but they will be supervised for up to eight hours after the psilocybin has worn off.

"We don't want it to be underwhelming, we don't want it to be overwhelming," she said.

"We know that higher doses are associated with anxiety but if it's too low a dose you're not really going to experience that psychological shift in the thinking that we're really looking for."

While Ross said that risk of physical dangers is low, patients with a history or predisposition to psychosis or who have suffered from trauma-related disorders will be excluded from the study.

The rate of depression among terminally ill patients is high, with up to 77% of patients thought to suffer from the condition. It has also been found that the more symptoms that a patient is experiencing of disease, the higher the likelihood that the patient will experience depression.

Anxiety is also common, with up to 48% of terminally ill cancer patients reporting major anxiety symptoms and approximately 14% classify as having an anxiety disorder.

Dr Vince Polito, a researcher from the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University who is not involved in the study, told BuzzFeed News that internationally results with psilocybin in depression and anxiety treatment have shown a lot of success so far.

"It's reasonably early days for this kind of research but the results have been really promising. There have only been a handful of studies but they've had quite dramatic results," he said.

So, how does the magic mushrooms compound help to treat depression?

In a 2016 study led by Johns Hopkins University, a high dose of psilocybin (20mg per 70 kilograms of body weight) produced a substantial decrease in depression and anxiety symptoms among terminal cancer patients that was sustained after a six-month follow-up.

The Johns Hopkins researchers found that participants attributed improvements in attitude, mood, relationships, and understanding of spirituality to their dose of psilocybin.

Ross notes that the St Vincent's trial will expand on this research by including terminally ill patients with more forms of illness including kidney and respiratory diseases.

Previous studies have shown that psilocybin is effective in treating forms of depression that are resistant to traditional treatment methods.

"There is this small subset of people with depression for whom at the moment we just don't have any treatment gaining any kind of traction," said Polito.

"These initial reports indicate that psychedelics may be effective in these cases where other treatments haven't worked."



A study from London's Imperial College in 2017 showed decreased depressive symptoms in patients with treatment-resistant depression after receiving two doses of psilocybin (a small 10mg dose followed by a 20mg dose one week apart) in addition to therapy.