Posted: Tuesday 24 January 2012

Today's news includes research from Professor David Nutt, the former government drug adviser, and his team, on using psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, for depression. He suggests that such substances should not be banned from research just because of their legal status.

Street drugs and licensed psychiatric drugs are all psychoactive substances – they affect brain chemistry, and the way we feel, perceive, and understand our surroundings, at least for a short while after we have taken them.

People tend to regard street drugs as unsafe and ill-advised and psychiatric drugs as safe to take, whereas in reality they all have both good and bad effects. And just as we need to recognise that long-term use of psychiatric drugs can cause (rather than correcting) long-term chemical imbalances in the brain, as well as significant adverse physical effects, so we should also accept that street drugs can have positive effects (the reason many people take them), and we should study these and make use of them.

But we need to be cautious. LSD was used in the 1960s and '70s to 'facilitate' psychotherapy. In the '90s a number of people rang our infoline to say that they had been given LSD in this way in the past, they felt that they had been damaged by it and had never recovered, and the reason they were ringing Mind was to find out who they could sue for the long-term harm they had been caused.

So my feeling is that all substances that we know to be psychoactive should be open to further investigation as to their therapeutic potential, regardless of their current legal status.

On the whole the physical side effects of street drugs tend to be better tolerated than those of a lot of psychiatric drugs. However, if people are to be treated with medicines derived from what are currently illegal substances, they first of all need to give fully informed consent - something which may well have been missing in the LSD cases - and those treating them have to be quite sure that they can deal with any harms that may arise.

Any technique that takes someone into a deeper level of consciousness, whether a drug or a talking treatment, should not be used unless the therapist or doctor can be quite sure they can get their client back from it.

Bad trips will happen; we don't want them to join the list of dreadful memories that many people have been damaged by and are trying to come to terms with. And using psilocybin to help people with depression recall happy memories does first of all rely on the supposition that they have some to recall.

Professor Nutt is quoted as saying "This drug has such a fundamental affect on the brain we should be trying to understand why." 

Yes, of course we should. The legal status of such substances is quite irrelevant – we should be finding out as much as we can about why they do what they do.

Dr Katherine Darton, Information officer

Read about the main mental health effects of the most commonly used street drugs, including psilocybin and LSD.

7 Comments

• mik replied on 24 Jan 2012 at 17:13

  I dont agree after taking magic mushrooms i went on to suffer from drug induced psychosis was majorly depressed and suicidal aswell as paranoid I think its too big a risk to take if it will have this effect on other people.

  
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• sue replied on 24 Jan 2012 at 17:56

  there is a link between past drug use and mental health and I had psychosis and have bipolar and i used lsd and magic mushrooms so I too think its a big risk too - look at Timothy Leary !!! And many people who suffer from schizophrenia have used drugs and drink in the past which has contributed to their condition in some cases, especially in the work I do in mental health as a support worker I can see this too

• lego replied on 24 Jan 2012 at 18:02

  @Mike No offence, but one person's bad experience shouldn't hold back research into something that could improve people's lives. A medically approved derivative of LSD in a controlled environment is a world apart from someone taking a portion of mushrooms in Amsterdam nevermind someone getting them from a dealer in the street. Not that I'm trivialising or implying the circumstances of your bad trip, I understand it was a traumatising situation for you, and noone should have to deal with that. But, a boy broke my heart once, doesn't mean I should tell everyone not to date.

• John replied on 25 Jan 2012 at 10:18

  
  

  I am bipolar and once when very depressed I found magic mushrooms growing over the park and it took me away from my very low mood by blowing everything out of the water for a few hours. It was strange that the mood did not colour the trip. However, that is not an antidepressant effect as you could say that getting drunk or snorting coke is anti-depressant too. Depends what they mean by 'research', if it is getting people out of their faces on psychodelic drugs or using modified or low dose compounds to change brain chemistry to improve mood or whatever which makes sense. Last time I took magic mushrrooms, my body turned (in my perception) into a rotting piece of meat....not touched them since as it was very disturbing.

• mindreader replied on 25 Jan 2012 at 10:18

  The non-prescribed drugs = dangerous risk of psychosis line has been massively hyped up by psychiatry, I don't believe a word of it given most young people try out street drugs - our hospitals would be overflowing!
  Anyone can have a bad reaction to any drug legal or illegal, and mental health service users live a few years less than the general population, one reason being the long term consequences of taking anti-psychotics - diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity related diseases [because of drug-induced weight gain], blood & neurological conditions.
  I've seen people benefit from using cannabis as it moderates extrapyramidal side effects and has even helped some people cope with differences in perception. Just as MS sufferers have found it clinically helpful. For some people taking mushrooms is a walk in the park compared to their visual differences in perception!

• Tina replied on 25 Jan 2012 at 10:18

  
  

  Well, I don't necessarily think street drugs should be held back in terms of research any more than legal psychiatric drugs. However I do wish more research was funded for prevention of mental health issues and implementing natural approaches to wellbeing - before reaching for the drug cabinet.. Drugs - whatever form, ought to be a last resort - not a first attempt...

• mindreader replied on 26 Jan 2012 at 14:56

  Too right Tina, drugs are typically the first line of treatment within services whatever your diagnosis but it's a dead cert with psychosis, everything else is secondary to it. Decades of billions of pounds put into drug research with uninspiring results on the whole. Imagine if all that money was used to research other approaches and interventions.
  There are so few non-medical or user-led crisis services [any services] in the UK, and 'recovery' services are not the same thing. We'll wait a long time for a drug vs alternative approach research..too much at stake

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