Unofficial Vital Student ‘Zine
Notes from Vital Psychedelic Training class of ‘23
Substances and mechanisms with Dr Charles Nichols
Dr Charles Nichols has discovered how psychedelics can treat psychosomatic physical conditions like asthma and psoriasis. And he’s pioneering tests for the tricky treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
My unofficial Vital Study Zine #16 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space
Pamela Simard, ‘BDL’
Dr Charles Nichols – son of canonical chemist Dr David Nichols – puts forward a single very good reason for extracting the profound components from psychedelics.
“These drugs are taking so long to develop because the FDA wants much more rigorous testing,” he informs us from the front line of medical authorisation.
One particular medicine on his to-do list Charles found by isolating the properties of mescaline, synthesised from the peyote cactus.
Turns out psychedelics interact with cells in the soft muscle tissue around the heart, as well as the brain. He’s already registered a patent.
While LSD for example “isn’t a very strong anti-inflammatory” Charles says, mescaline has an “extremely potent” effect on inflammatory-based issues like, for example, breathing condition asthma.
The discovery could have major implications for psychedelic healing of previously unconsidered issues. Not just physical struggles like asthma but also schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s which are all connected with inflammation.
“So much has to do with inflammation and the over-active immune system right now,” says Charles, pharmacology professor at LSU Health Sciences in New Orleans with a background at Purdue and Vanderbilt universities.
Charles on the job. Embroidered lab coats FTW
‘Inflammation’ is shorthand here for ‘chronic inflammation’. Oxidants produced in the aftermath of a stress hormone spike for example, linger around and screw stuff up over time.
“I never intended to follow my father into psychedelics actually”
It’s a cause of cancer, psoriasis, arthritis, asthma, allergies, Chron’s Disease, hepatitis, neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, and more. In younger folks chronic inflammation is mostly caused by stress, bad diets and poor sleep.
The chemical aspect in question has nothing to do with the ‘psychedelic’ properties of mescaline. It has the same anti-asthmatic effect on its own sans tripping when tested on Charles’ elite lab rats bred for psychometric testing.
The intrepid rodents tested it out against 25 other designer psychedelics from the drug cupboard Charles inherited from his father David: the pharmacologist who synthesised DMT for Rick Strassman, MDMA for MAPS and psilocybin for PsiloDep 2.
“I never intended to follow my father into psychedelics actually,” says Charles coyly when I ask in the Q&A if he’d ever noticed the hand of fate guiding his work – like it did when Albert Hoffman felt compelled to re-examine the LSD that’d sat on his shelf un-investigated for seven years.
Charles tried to evade his cosmic destiny in vain. Two separate freaky coincidences nudged him towards a career in consciousness expansion.
The eventual pharmacologist initially studied genetics. Even now Charles’ ‘animal models’, creatures bred for testing purposes, are much envied in scientific circles.
Exhausted by the minutiae of fruit fly genetics after finishing a Phd, the younger Charles was restless for change. Twirling absent-mindedly on his lab stool wondering how to enter the world of employment, Charles spied a promo ad for a new book from Vanderbilt University scientist Elaine Sanders-Bush, who he’d heard his father mention.
He called up and asked about assistant roles.
“It turned out the job involved studying the effects of LSD on mouse and rat brains,” says Charles, “it was one of only a handful of labs doing so at the time. They’d run out of budget for now and couldn’t hire anyone. But a few months later Elaine called and asked if I was interested.”
Charles met Sanders and showed her his resumé featuring his education at Perdue University. “Elaine said she knew a Dr David Nichols there, at which point I had to tell her,” confesses Charles.
“Eventually we might isolate the qualities of peak experience, ego dissolution and breaking stuck thinking”
The next turning point came as Charles was working at New Orleans University in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Struggling to find researchers he took a chance on a visiting Chinese scientist who needed facilities. By 2013 Charles and collaborator Bangning Yu had isolated the effects of mescaline-derived DOI on inhibiting tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-a mediated inflammation, which is associated with asthma, Parkinson’s Disease and many more conditions not previously part of psychedelic research.
‘Our data suggests,’ reads the modest blurb, ‘that sub-behavioural levels of certain psychedelics represents a new, steroid-sparing, small molecule strategy for the treatment of peripheral inflammatory related diseases.’
Targeting diseases on the fringe of psychedelic potential is not where Charles’ quietly vast ambition ends, though.
The basic neuro-scientific explanation of how psychedelics do their thing is the chemicals interact with receptors in the body’s cells. In particular ones given the code ‘5-HT2a’ usually given over to the neurotransmitter serotonin.
LSD contains serotonin in its chemical make-up. It latches on to receptors; hence the lengthy trip. Serotonin certainly isn’t simply ‘the happiness chemical’. It’s related to memory, learning, imagination, sexual arousal, appetite, anxiety and ‘diseases with complex etiologies.’
“Pressing different 5-HT2a receptors, and others, creates the various effects,” says Charles. Identifying medical properties could be just the beginning, he insists: “Eventually we might isolate the qualities of peak experience, ego dissolution and breaking stuck thinking.”
That’s not all. A new testing system Charles has designed examines the long terms effects of a single dose, identifying ‘persistent normalisation of stress-induced hippocampal dysfunction relevant to depression and other psychiatric conditions’
Find out more about Charles’ astonishing findings and their implications in this issue’s contents just below. You can also see Charles present his findings here, talk about inflammation and more with Mind and Matter here, and his thoughts on psychedelics and genetics plus more over on the New Psychonaut YouTube lecture channel. Follow Charles on Twitter at @lab_nichols.
If you want to go deep on neuroscience may I recommend Tokyo-based, Cambridge-educated neuroscientist Dr Andrew Gallimore’s extensive guide.
Here’s what’s in this week’s issue of your multi-syllabic Vital Student Zine, themed along Vital Psychedelic Training’s core pillars of study:
These five items I pulled from the week’s research are themed along Vital’s natural element-themed structure. Air provides an overview of psychedelic use, Fire concerns therapeutic applications, Water covers ‘space holding’ – the art of keeping it together, Earth is where you’ll find medical matters, and Ether discusses integration, the process of bringing psychedelic power into regular life. Click straight through to your pet subject.
Appliance of Science
Purists sneer at scientific tinkering. But lab studies showed Dr Nichols how psychedelics heal the body. Could he uncover the secret of profundity too?
Approach
Purists sneer at scientific tinkering. But lab studies showed Dr Nichols how psychedelics heal the body. Could he uncover the secret of profundity too?
Neuroscience is different to other aspects of psychedelic study, ‘since it is so spectacularly and usefully right over so many things.’
Raymond Tallis wrote those semi-satirical words in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Neuroscience ‘is often given authority where it has none’ warns Tallis.
Grudgingly I admit all those long words and graphs might come across well in a formal context. During a presentation to drug legislators, for example. Certainly compared to showing a clip of Tales from the Trip on the the meeting room’s wall-mounted LCD screen.
So it’s sweetly satisfying for heads to beat bureaucrats at their own game with the slew of pro-psychedelic neuroscience stats flooding out of respected institutions.
Granted, the arcane apparatus of the psychedelic experience itself remains beyond even the grasp of they who have mastered the most multisyllabic words from this incomprehensible, in-style, inculcation.
“That’s still a wide open mystery,” confesses Dr Charles Nichols, eminent psychedelic pharmacologist and Vital neuroscience lecturer.
“Specific pathways may be involved in the psychedelic process”
Charles is the son of Dr David Nichols, chemist to the stars. David made the DMT for Rick Strassman, MDMA for MAPS and psilocybin for Johns Hopkins.
“Back in the 2000s my father’s lab looked at the cross talk downstream from when G-alpha-i protein interacts with a specific beta and gamma that activates a hormone called Src, which then activates a series of enzymes. That’s the very top effector.”
Right. No wonder nobody’s got to the bottom of it as yet.
“Specific pathways may be involved,” Charles whispers conspiratorially to the cheap seats.
No talk of neuroscience in these pages is complete without a mention of Greatest Living Englishman Dr Robin Carhart-Harris.
Dr Carhart-Harris’ sympathetic yet rigorous research at scientific bastion Imperial College London brought the psychedelic experience its medical legitimacy. His REBUS, ‘relaxed beliefs under psychedelics’ model is widely considered the neatest summation of psychedelic neuroscience. (without wishing to damn it with faint praise).
“My lab studies what psychedelics do that serotonin doesn’t”
For anyone too embarrassed to ask the scientific way to say ‘tripping’ is ‘Relax the precision of high-level priors or beliefs, thereby liberating bottom-up information flow, particularly via intrinsic sources such as the limbic system.’ Obviously.
Dr Charles Nichols is a pharmacologist developing new drugs. Unlike his celebrated psychedelic chemist dad Dr David, Charles has the benefit of Carhart-Harris’ research, or its slipstream at least.
Charles uses his prodigious skill with the pestle, mortar and petri dish to identify, isolate and augment certain properties within his arsenal of exotic designer psychedelics.
Specifically, “The study is my lab now is around what psychedelics do that serotonin itself doesn’t,” says Charles.
Which is a lot.
He’s already found that mescaline-derived DOI has a tremendously positive effect on inflammatory conditions including asthma. And, he’s worked out that it’s not even one of the bits that makes you trip. Which has implications aplenty for widespread use. And the sensitive conversation around non-psychedelic psychedelics.
(Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes wrote in 1938, “Some of the ills listed as responding to peyote were tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever, intestinal ills, diabetes, rheumatic pains, colds, grippe, fevers and venereal diseases.” Cheers Mark Gunther of Lucid News).
Psychedelics possess less ‘inhibitory’ effects on brain receptors that might suppress ‘excitatory’ ones, compared to serotonin. They hit the accelerator while cutting the brakes: boosting neurotransmission while hindering the body’s autonomous attempts to bring body chemistry back to ‘normal’.
“The profound and mystical effect itself is still a mystery”
This initiates a ‘synaptic cascade’ of excitatory messages. Once that gets to the Raphe nuclei in the brain stem connected to the whole brain, it’s blast off.
The resulting “downstream cross talk” takes an unusual route through the nervous system. Precisely what is a little vague. Zen meditation buff Dr Bryan Roth is on it with a system he calls ‘TRUPATH, an open-source biosensor platform for interrogating the GPCR transducerome’. He’s also the guy making the non-psychedelic psychedelics for DARPA.
“All psychedelics have a surprisingly different set of reactions with the 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors associated with serotonin,” says Charles, “but they all work on 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor 2a.”
Neuroscientists gave it with the catchy nickname ‘5-HT2a’. Relax, they’ve got loads more.
Mescaline for example only activates two other receptors besides 5-HT2a. LSD’s “complex pharmacology” on the other hand means it interacts with 17 different receptors in total.
‘The phrase 5-HT2a agonist has supplanted psychedelic, which still carries faint whiffs of hippie-era hedonism,’ tech bible Wired tipped us off in its recent feature The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs.
Neuroplastic Smiles
“Biology drives the effects of psychedelics but therapy shapes them,” says the latest scion in the Nichols psycho-pharmacological dynasty.
Therapy
“Biology drives the effects of psychedelics but therapy shapes them,” says the latest scion in the Nichols psycho-pharmacological dynasty
Ron English, ‘Rabbit Grin’
The freshly ‘neuroplastic’ brain and new grey matter created during ‘neurogenesis’ both require careful curation from therapy afterwards, declares Dr Charles Nichols.
It’s notable that a hardcore neuroscientist stresses the importance of combining his drugs with talk therapy.
“If you don’t have therapy in the weeks after you may go back to that baseline state,” says the star chemist, “the process strengthens newly made connections and dampens old ones.”
It’s a clear decision he’s come to after a career formally studying the effects of mind-altering chemicals, under exhaustive laboratory conditions. And taking fatherly advice from dad David, the most prolific psychedelic chemist of his generation.
‘Neuroplastic’ effects last for many days after the psychedelic experience itself. Little spiky nodules sticking out from the surface of brain cells called ‘dendrites’ grow in cells all over the brain. This provides fertile ground for fresher, healthier thinking patterns to germinate and grow.
‘Neurogenesis’ is different. It’s the generation of new brain cells. Those ones your school nurse said you’d never get back. Admittedly establishment science is yet to entirely admit she was be wrong. Humans are only capable of neurogenesis in the hippocampus, boffins reckon. We get it from aerobic exercise, sex, worthwhile achievement and all the other good stuff.
No prizes whatsoever for guessing what else is said to cause neurogenesis.
Say neurogenesis is real and not some figment of the ever-lively psychedelic imagination. Given it definitely happens in chimps and rats it probably is. These new brain cells require injecting with healthy thought patterns by integration tactics and therapy too.
What’s more, Dr Charles Nichols, born of David, categorically states that psilocybin is a more effective anti-depressant treatment than ketamine.
“If you don’t have therapy in the weeks after you may go back to that baseline state”
Although ketamine boasts impressive effects including its distinct ‘glutamate surge’ and anti-microbial properties, Charles’ rats felt psilocybin’s anti-depressant powers for much longer.
Real psychedelics use their own neuropathic pathway to create neuroplasticity, believes Charles, not the MTOR pathway usually associated with glutamate-derived GABA and any ketamine-led ‘surge’ thereof.
Charles’ lab rats are still above their baseline satisfaction scores three months into the official testing period and counting. On ketamine they were back to baseline after one week. “Both will snap back but the difference is significant,” comments Charles.
Brain architecture and morality
Keep those hearts open to differing emotions triggered by corporate psychedelia. And watch our for N-BOMes.
Space
Keep those hearts open to differing emotions triggered by corporate psychedelia. And watch our for N-BOMes
DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency AKA the US military, have funded UNC’s Dr Bryan Roth to the tune of $26 million for development of a non-psychedelic anti-depressant.
This jars with many in the space who prefer their medicines to not only come from plants but look like them too. The ketamine crew were jumping skyclad through bonfires at sunrise when they found out a fungus generated it (to kill worms) earlier this year.
I don’t entirely blame them. Breaking up nature’s gifts feels hubristic. ‘Pharmahuasca’ contains only the big guns, DMT and MAO-inhibitors, of ayahuasca the jungle brew, which contains as many as 28 different ingredients in total.
“Is this bullshit thing started by this random company going to replace psilocybin for example? I don’t think so,” Empath Ventures founder Brom Rector told Psychedelics Today recently, “In business you need to make a big improvement, otherwise no one really cares.”
The anecdote that rings true with me the most in this argument is ‘In hospital they could give you morphine that doesn’t make you high, but the proper stuff works best.’ THC in marijuana is thought to increase the efficacy of CBD, while the latter makes the former safer.
Pioneering psychedelic scientists like Vital neuroscience lecturer Dr Charles Nichols’ dad David, Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD, and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin reviver of MDMA are lionised in the space.
Indeed Charles follows in the footsteps of his father Dr David Nichols: who coined the term ‘entactogen’ for MDMA, first synthesised pharmaceutical DMT for The Strass’ 1990s experiments. He also made the MDMA for MAPS and psilocybin for Johns Hopkins.
Dr David Nichols is still working. Considered a leading expert in research into the neurotransmitter dopamine, his recent discoveries are already being trialled on Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Charles inherited a library of over 100 new chemicals from his father upon beginning his own research.
“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires”
Compass Pathways, not satisfied with supposedly trying to patent psilocybin, have developed 150 new psychedelics with the assistance of committed scientist Professor Jason Wallach. Wired ran a gushing profile of Wallach, who fits its brand image of the passionate inventor in its summer 2022 feature ‘The Race to Develop new Psychedelic Drugs'.
Wired journalist John Semley got less copy from Pathways CEO George Goldsmith and cofounder Lars Wilde: “Ask them what they had for breakfast and they’ll tell you how excited they are to build a new future for mental health,” wrote the frustrated hack.
Modern-day chemists and their backers get a far harder rap than the old guard, let alone more colourful contemporaries like billionaire Tyringham Initiative sponsor Anton Bilton, and Tokyo-based neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore whose book Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds, on how to learn from DMT hyperspace visits lands very soon.
Humanity’s developed a love-hate relationship with pharmacology. Sometimes we can’t get enough of its magic beans; later we become deeply suspicious of what it’s up to in its windowless labs.
That’s not just a projection of our own shame. Several high-profile incidents over the decades have stoked the embers of misgiving. It was the Thalidomide scandal, where a generation of noticeably deformed children resulted from a less than rigorous safety testing program, that put the kibosh on early LSD research.
The chemical generation’s complex relationship with drug use, and a preference for talk therapy amongst… talk therapists that veers into militancy haven’t helped.
The pharma sector’s also deeply partial to bureaucracy in its many forms, and that rarely goes down well with those seeking caring and compassion. Anecdotally, there’s also the feeling that the corporadelic guys, with their lanyards and anodyne PR-speak are not really one of us.
Corpos drew groans at London’s Psych Symposium when a panel on decriminalisation was told we can’t be trusted to grow and eat our own magic mushrooms, because we can’t rate the dosage accurately enough.
Besides, where are all these revolutionary new psychedelic-derived medicines?
“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires,” says Dr Nichols during his Vital lecture that opens the course’s Medical Overview of Psychedelics and Clinical Evaluation core module.
But it’s that level of investigation and learning that often yields major discoveries. In scientific circles LSD is noted for the knowledge about serotonin studying it led to.
Frankly why should everyone with asthma have to take a trip? Not everybody likes metaphysical poetry, ambient music, plus discovering the inner secrets of the universe… maybe the effing Death Door.
Besides space explorers are already enjoying the fruits of next-generation psychedelic research. And citizen scientists in the front line of consciousness exploration make for finer subjects than lab rats.
Designer drugs combining psychedelic and empathogen (entactogen) effects are not your regular liberty cap and MDMA punch though. ’N-bombs’ or NBOMes to give them their scientific name are described as ‘ultra potent’ by the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
There’s a niche for the ambitious space holder.
Wicked Wheeze
A chemical component of mescaline can treat asthma, perhaps many more physical problems. And it’s not even the bit that makes you trip.
Medical
A chemical component of mescaline can treat asthma, perhaps many more physical problems. And it’s not even the bit that makes you trip
Keith Coventry, ‘Inhaler’ in the permanent collection at the Southbank
Dr Charles Nichols’ major research breakthrough is the isolation of anti-inflammatory properties from the active agent in peyote.
Mescaline, in 1917 the first psychedelic ever synthesised, could treat conditions ranging from asthma to psoriasis and complex neurodegenerative disorders.
Dr Nichols’ lab has isolated anti-inflammatory properties within a designer drug variant of mescaline called DOI.
Mescaline enjoyed significantly better results than steroidal treatments when tested on Charles’ premium lab rats. And mice.
It’s almost certainly down to 5-HT2a receptors in the soft muscle around the heart becoming activated by psychedelics too.
Charles’ experiments showed mescaline/DOI prompted ‘extremely potent inhibition of tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α-mediated inflammation.’
I hope you’re sitting down to take in what happens after that, ‘cos it might be a bit much to get your head around straight away:
‘5-HT2A receptor stimulation with the agonist (R)-1-(2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodophenyl)-2-aminopropane [(R)-DOI] rapidly inhibits a variety of TNF-α-mediated proinflammatory markers,’ says the report barely managing to contain its enthusiasm. That’s not all.
‘Including intracellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1), vascular adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM-1), and interleukin (IL)-6 gene expression, nitric-oxide synthase activity, and nuclear translocation of nuclear factor κB, with IC50 values of only 10 to 20 pM.’
Unbelievable.
Importantly, these anti-inflammatory aspects of mescaline/DOI are chemically separate to its psychedelic properties. Any medicines derived from them wouldn’t prompt a psychedelic experience.
This isn’t just good news for any asthma sufferers who don’t fancy turning themselves on each time they need a blast of their inhaler.
“We analysed 25 different psychedelics and revealed no correlation between behavioural potency and their ability to cure asthma”
It’s also a boon for folks who could do with help for their conditions as soon as possible.
“One reason for isolating non-psychoactive components is the Federal Drug Association,” says Charles, “Even a minute psychoactive component requires much more rigorous testing.” New medicines derived from psychedelics that don’t blow the patient’s mind, make it to market much faster.
“Pretty much every everything nowadays seems to involve some aspect of of inflammation,” comments Charles, “the neuro-immune network hypothesis has become a really hot field. It underlies a lot of psychiatric disorders,” he says, citing depression, schizophrenia plus Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
This doesn’t mean that someone on the wrong end of Alzheimer’s should be obliged to trip balls. Or kids with asthma.
“Inflammatory cells exist in the lungs, that affect asthma, and all over the body,” says Charles, “the brain has a primitive immune system too. Biopsies have revealed inflammation in the brains of a subset of depressed patients: cytokines and microglia are increased. Unmedicated schizophrenics have a significant amount of neuro-inflammation, plus it’s associated with drug abuse.”
“LSD is actually a poor anti-inflammatory and DMT has none of the properties at all,” says Charles when I ask him about his asthma breakthrough.
It only came about when he was left without a researcher after Hurricane Katrina, and took a chance on visiting professor Bangning Yu who needed a lab and complimented his own research.
“We analysed 25 different psychedelics and revealed no correlation between behavioural potency and their ability to cure asthma,” says Charles, “We will be able to engineer drugs that have less psychedelic activity, potentially even no psychedelic activity, but full anti-inflammatory properties.”
He’s already honed a version of lab psychedelic DOI that has two-thirds less of the mind-expanding effects, but offers the same relief from asthmatic wheezing.
Transcendental family systems
Ready for ceremonies with you, mum and dad, the grandparents plus your kids and even the dog?
Ready for ceremonies with mum and dad, the grandparents plus your kids and even the dog?
Shanthi Chandrase, ‘Neural Introspection’
Tribal gatherings could be on the cards for all the clan.
Phase one tests showed microdoses of LSD did no statistical harm to Alzheimer’s sufferers.
“LSD’s complex pharmacology works on so many different 5-HT receptors,” 17 to be exact, “that it impairs several of the various functions that lead to Alzheimer’s Disease,” says Vital neuroscience lecturer Dr Charles Nichols.
Testing LSD on Alzheimer’s patients is an adaptation described as “surreal” in the post-lecture discussion by a psychiatrist studying on Vital.
Corresponding tests in the UK are taking place around Liskeard in an idyllic corner of Cornwall, England. Phase one tests for safety have indicated no harm using microdoses of up to 20ug.
There was however a noticeable increase in ‘psychotic episodes’ amongst the placebo group. Suppress your giggles triggered by thoughts of oldies on an LSD placebo turning up at the health centre convinced they’ve seen a pink elephant.
“Psychedelic protocols with children will happen”
Sounds like the elders can join in the ancestor ceremony; as befits them.
So can the younger generation.
“Absolutely there's a place for effective and safe psychedelic therapy in younger people,” said Dr Ben Sessa in the Q&A after his Vital lecture back in the Therapy module.
“I have seen too many teenagers lose the battle to mental disorder and kill themselves in my career,” continued Dr Sessa in fine style, “I have no doubt that psychedelic protocols with children will happen.”
It’s on already in fact. "MAPS are currently leading the pack in terms of MDMA for PTSD, are going to be doing PTSD research in initially teenagers 14 to 17 then younger age group 11-14, and then possibly six to six to 11,” says Dr Sessa.
And mum? She can feel really special down at the ceremony.
“Hormone replacement therapy significantly increases 5-HT2A expression”
Charles’ is admired for his ‘animal models’. Not a collection of balsa wood dinosaurs that adorn his lab windowsill; rats bred to be especially sensitive to psychometric testing. This sensitive rat pack is mostly female, which has led Charles’ team to discern a key detail for menopausal psychedelic voyagers.
“Oestrogen, and hormone replacement therapy significantly increase 5-HT2a expression,” he reveals, “So we have to optimise women and men differently.”
To test for depression whether treated with psilocybin, ketamine or SSRIs, rats are usually challenged to swim across a small basin of water towards an exit duct. Paddling around searching around for the way out is known as ‘active coping’ and therefore healthy. Zoning out in the middle of the water awaiting your watery end ‘cos what’s the point anyway? is ‘passive coping’, and bad news of course.
Plus with dogs and cats taking Prozac and other SSRIs it can’t be long before your favourite furry fellow sentient beings are in a higher state of consciousness too.
Fun for all the family.
Psilocybin for depression with Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner
Fall back for Imperial College London and its historic PsiloDep Two trial, presented by Ashley Murphy-Beiner.
My unofficial Vital Study Zine #11 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space
‘White Light’ from Paul Cocksedge Studio
“We have really explicit conversations about sex, about violence, about death and ego death…”
Plus of course, “Paranoia, wanting to go to the toilet, feeling like you're going to the toilet, and the physical bodily experiences,” says Ashley Murphy-Beiner, psychologist and guide at Imperial College’s landmark ‘PsiloDep 2’ trial, which sounds suitably like a Quatermass movie.
Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner is exactly the sort of impressive individual driving the psychedelic renaissance: a mediation coach and Peruvian ceremony facilitator alongside her studies at Imperial College London, she’s noted for her research on ayahuasca for treating depression too. She’s talking about preparing psychedelic novices for their first trip on synthetic psilocybin, the active ingredient in old-fashioned magic mushrooms. It’s used mostly due to stigma around LSD.
“We let them know we’re not going to judge them on anything weird… although they’re not going to do anything like that, because mainly they're worried it’ll really embarrass them or, or cause shame,” she continues, giving a window into life with depression.
Depression is a ‘global burden’. The main cause of disability and the number one reason for taking time off work affects a quarter of a billion people worldwide, and more in The West. One in six Brits are on anti-depressants, and US figures rose by up to 30% during the COVID-19 crisis. Doomongers will be pleased to know there are plenty more sad stats in this week’s ‘zine.
Imperial College psychologist, meditation coach and ayahuasca advocate Asheligh Murphy-Beiner
Can psychedelics cure long term depression where talk therapy and medications failed? Although arguably still spectacular in comparison to existing treatment, results are frankly not as good as those for psychedelic studies on treating trauma, addiction, and end-of-life crisis. That’s partly because depression mostly remains a mystery, with the widely-accepted ‘serotonin imbalance’ theory recently publicly debunked. Ashleigh calls the causes “biopsychosocial” meaning there are biological, psychological and social implications. Many patients have come crashing down to Earth when faced with the cruel reality of life in late capitalism. Preparation and integration are absolutely essential, say trial patient advocates Ian Roullier and Leone Schneider of advocacy group PsyPAN. Dr Rosalind Watts created a treatment model, Acceptance, Connection and Embodiment to cover the ground between secular dystopian life and the psychedelic experience.
Results of psilocybin for depression trials so far though are certainly optimistic compared to market anti-depressants. A major advantage is that psychedelic treatment opens up the mind, rather than numbing out all feelings, like current anti-depressants are said to. Opportunity and relish can once more be a part of depressive’s mindset. Plus they can dump their daily regime of equally barely-understood serotonin pills with side-effects like a plummeting libido.
This is one subject for which there is certainly no silver bullet. Here’s Ashleigh talking about ayahuasca, and the ACE therapy model used at the trials with Dr Ros, plus the ethics of the trials and therapy itself, and rounding up the trial results on the Chasing Consciousness podcast, all of which you can see on the New Psychonaut YouTube channel.
This week’s topics arranged along Vital’s core learning pillars are below.
Next issue: MAPS MDMA-AT program designers Michael and Annie Mithoefer.
Each ‘Zine features the most mind-blowing bits I scrawled down during each of Vital’s exclusive live lectures by the finest minds in the space. Browse them by issue or go straight to the introductions with lecturer details.
And search by the topics: Traditional and Modern Approaches, Therapy, Space Holding, Medical and Clinical, and Integration. Funnies at the end too.
Purists sneer at scientific tinkering. But lab studies showed Dr Nichols how psychedelics heal the body. Could he uncover the secret of profundity too?