Mushrooms have long sparked our imaginations, even if they aren’t tasty or hallucinogenic Misha Kaminsky/Getty

Can a psychedelic trip change the way people with life-threatening cancer face death? Results from two clinical trials suggest so.

Researchers have shown that a single dose of psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – combined with psychotherapy reduces depression and anxiety and increases feelings of wellbeing in people with cancer. What’s more, for most, these effects appeared to last for more than six months.

Psilocybin, along with other psychedelic drugs like LSD, was banned in the late 1960s. But an increased understanding of the drug’s physiological mechanisms has sparked a revival of research into its potential therapeutic benefits. Several small trials have shown its promise as a treatment for alcoholism, opiate addiction, depression and anxiety.


People with cancer often develop chronic symptoms of depression and anxiety, and antidepressants appear to be of little help. Some small studies have suggested that psilocybin could be an alternative.

To investigate, teams from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York carried out two trials involving 80 people with cancer and symptoms of depression and anxiety.

In one trial, each volunteer participated in a psychotherapy session aided by either a single high dose of psilocybin or a low placebo-like dose of psilocybin. Five to seven weeks after this session, they took part in a second session with the other drug.

The second trial was run in a similar manner, except it used Vitamin B3 as a placebo.

Inner experience

During each session, the subjects laid on a couch, wore a blindfold and listened to music. They were accompanied by two researchers and were encouraged to focus their attention on their inner experiences.

To assess the volunteers’ responses, the trials used a variety of psychological and physiological measures, including blood pressure and heart rate, clinician-based tests and self-reported questionnaires. These assessments were carried out before each session and at either two or three points over the next six months. At the end of the trial, their families, friends and work colleagues were also interviewed to gauge their thoughts on the participant’s wellbeing.

Results across the two trials showed that psilocybin produced immediate and significant decreases in measures of depression, anxiety and mood disturbance, and increases in measures of quality of life, life meaning, death acceptance and optimism. These benefits were still present in 80 per cent of participants after six months.

The core feature of a psilocybin experience is a sense of unity; a feeling that everything is connected at some level, says Roland Griffiths, who led the Hopkins trial.

“After this kind of experience, people feel that they’ve learned something that’s of deep meaning and value to them,” he says. “They attribute changes in how they approach life, interact with people and to their value systems to that experience.”

There were no serious adverse effects in either trial, although there were some reports of nausea, headache and transient anxiety. The results together form the most extensive trial of psilocybin for treatment of depression and anxiety.

Alternative treatment

Stephen Ross, lead investigator on the NYU Langone trial, highlights the need for an alternative to the available care for people with cancer. “Anywhere from 40 to 50 per cent of cancer patients will have diagnosable anxiety or depression,” he says. “The [current] treatments, like antidepressants, really don’t work any better than placebo.”

In a commentary published alongside the trials, Richard Shelton and Peter Hendricks, both at the University of Alabama, at Birmingham, call into question the integrity of the placebo design in both trials, as none of the participants were asked which drug they thought they had received after each session.

This is normally carried out to ensure that the placebo arm of a trial is realistic enough. If people cannot accurately guess which drug they were given, it ensures that the results are down to the drug and not any other factor. However, they note that due to the hallucinogenic effects of the real drug, it may be unfeasible to create a placebo that is indistinguishable from the real thing, as is often the case with studies of psychoactive drugs.

Ross says the study now needs to be carried out on a larger sample of people. “Even though our two trials together replicated the same study and would lead one to think this is a real effect, it needs to be done in a larger, nationally representative cancer sample,” he says. “And if that trial shows what we showed then psilocybin potentially could be rescheduled to become a prescription medication for cancer related anxiety and depression.”

Journal references: Journal of Psychopharmacology, DOI: 10.1177/0269881116675512; DOI: 10.1177/0269881116675513