Inner space of safety

Medical

MDMA boasts striking therapeutic properties beyond increased connection

Chemical X, ‘Spectrum’

“I believe MDMA is the ideal drug for psychotherapy,” says non-nonsense Awakn founder and trauma expert Dr Ben Sessa.

The exciting bits are MDMA triggers a ‘oxytocin-dependent reopening’ of a ‘social reward learning critical period’. It puts your brain in the state of early childhood and adolescence, when it establishes key neural pathways. The hypothesis is that dysfunctional thought patterns can be adjusted in this state.

MDMA increases pre-frontal cortex activity like an ADHD stimulant, lowers activity in the amygdala ‘fear centre’ deep in the reptile brain, and is notable for its relationship to both dopamine and serotonin. It creates an ‘optimal level of arousal’ that is neither too little nor too much for the brain to process its thoughts and instincts. 

Added neuroplasticity helps memories reconsolidate so patients feel safer in safe settings, for example. MDMA scored strongly on PTSD patients with dissociative symptoms who often prove the toughest to treat. Trial data was consistent across the five test sites spread globally. 

Ecstasy was first named ‘Adam’ then ‘Empathy’

Trial subjects previously suffered severe symptoms that had resisted regular therapeutic treatment for many years.

‘MDMA was invented for shellshocked soldiers’ is a trope I may be guilty of falling for. It wasn’t an appetite suppressant either when patented by Merck in 1914. Forensic research into the German pharmaceutical firm suggests a humbler origins for the love drug as merely a stepping-stone towards developing an alternative to hydrastinine, used to prevent internal bleeding particularly in the uterus.

The military nonetheless had it knocking around for whatever reason in the 1950s around the first time scientists tested MDMA on humans and recorded the results. These soon reached the keen ears of Alexander Shulgin, who says he first synthesised it in 1965. It was originally named ‘Adam’, and also ‘Empathy’. 

Patients during MDMA-AT are given 125mg of what the subculture renamed ‘ecstasy’ with up to 75mg of booster. Apocryphally, a friend who took part in an Imperial MDMA trial said it was hella strong.

Results Based

Medical

Does psilocybin therapy work, or not?

Kirsten Liu Wong, ‘How Fast the Shadows Fall’

Does psilocybin therapy soothe depression? The short answer is yes.

But don’t go getting all ‘salvation fantasy’ on me now.

Kick ass John Hopkins studies out earlier in 2022 claimed more than half of test subjects suffering from major depressive disorder were in remission (statistically cured) after treatment and a year later, after eight hours of prep (with Bill Richards, mind) and two doses, with five follow-up appointments. Which is… mind-blowing.

Imperial’s comparison to SSRI escitalopram ‘PsiloDep 2’ ran into some IRL type stuff when the scale it used turned out to give mediocre – well, equal – results. Other scales fared far better. But symptoms returned within three to six months. Is it fair to say that “the miracle cure thing ain’t gonna stick” as Rick ‘The Strass’ Strassman laid down in his own Vital lecture? 

“Some will want longer term therapy, to understand or change things in a way that others may not”

Several patients went back to SSRIs. “For some people, psilocybin was very powerful,” says Vital lecturer Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, who acted as a guide on the trials, “They’re quite okay with saying ‘that's enough for now’. Others lived with the symptoms of depression in a new way, probably the majority, actually, did. The psilocybin brought relief.”

NYU trial subject Court Wing defended PsiloDep 2 on Psychedelics Today, saying he “received incredible benefits – my depression of five years went completely into remission and has remained there.”

Depression is one of humanity’s worst problems, barely understood. It’s a bit consumerist of us to think somebody’s suddenly sorted it, in such a romantic fashion. For now we can only defer to the inner healer, wish godspeed to the guides, researchers, and patients, then get our Forest Passage on.

“The longer term option will be costly”

From the sharp end, Ashleigh says: “I hope all options are available to people, to work very differently with the experiences that they've had in life. Some will want longer term therapy and really get to the roots, understand or change things in a way that others people may not.

A shorter treatment or less intensive psilocybin therapy might be sufficient for them. I'm worried that the longer term option will only be available privately [not via the UK National Health Service], because it will be costly of treatment. And I'd really like the longer term treatment to be available at an affordable cost.”

Thought leaders like Dr Ros evoke 12-step-esque community circles. But, Ashleigh observes, “There’ll be a push to making shorter term treatments like we have in traditional talking therapies already now, because of budgets, and funding. The people that want to resolve aspects of their mental health experiences are disadvantaged by that.”

Unconditionally loving cuddles: Yes or No?

Medical

What if the patient would benefit from a clasp of the shoulder or supportive hug? Easy tiger…

Ravers in east London

Don’t put it past anyone’s shadow self not to get off with a pilled-up patient.

That’s the message from therapy ethics expert, transpersonal psychologist and addiction counsellor Kylea Taylor.

I’d hate to wipe any glamorous, lifestyle magazine-sheen from the Vital Student Zine. Yet seeing as this is ‘The Ethics Issue’ of Unofficial Vital Student ‘Zine it’d be remiss of me not to mention the sordid revelations to have swept the psychedelic space of late. 

First fell Francoise Borat, the French figure fancied by many more than myself. Women like Maria Papasyrou, Adele LaFrance, Celia Morgan and Reanne Crane are tackling the least agreeable and most necessary areas of the psychedelic renaissance right now, and Borat pioneered that. Investigations showed she lived up to her femme fatale archetype.

The scandal also exposed the wellbeing industry’s appalling lack of oversight, from passing your email address on to cat charities to… not actually removing famous people from your public register after you’d struck them from the official register for shagging clients. The stink was mostly coming from Bourzat’s hubby Aharon Grossbard in the form of detailed and sustained allegations by counsellor, campaigner and award-winning blogger Will Hall.

“Have a safe word. Even if it’s just: Stop”

Next, just when you were thinking some boomers may be OK, MAPS therapist dyad Richard Yensen and Donna Dryer blotted the saintly org’s copybook during landmark 2015 trails. It’s worth watching the CCTV. Trial subject Meaghan Buisson, a PTSD sufferer who took the edge off her condition with a career in the tough sport of inline speed skating, then moved near the couple as her only option to continue treatment. Yensen and her slept together during the period.

In 2022, welcome to a world of headlines like A psychedelic therapist allegedly took millions from a Holocaust survivor, highlighting worries about elders taking hallucinogens. Campaigning website Psymposia which produced the Power Trip podcast with New York Magazine that brought many of these stories to a wider audience, does a sterling if militant job of sniffing out stuff like this.

Thing is, some patients really would like a hug during MDMA therapy. Recreational users might sympathise. Written and thoroughly discussed pre-agreements are the done thing, says Taylor. 

“Have the safe word, even if it’s just ‘stop’, and tell the patient, ‘Remember you can say stop’ even when you’re merely putting a blanket over them,” advises Taylor, “a lot of people are recommending a dual consent process involving a written agreement on touch, that is sacred and not changed in the middle of the session.” 

The subject should be fully felt through: “Explain the reasons why they might want it, and might not want it, and that if they say no now, they won’t get touched in the session,” says Taylor. California bioenergetics bodywork teachers have legal license to handle clients when required. 

Strictly unconditionally loving cuddles can be a productive part of emotional breakthrough, release and recovery, say many therapists.

“A third agreement is ‘If you do ask me to touch you in the session, I will’,” suggests Taylor, “If they do want that, then watch out for obvious gestures suggesting they might require physical comforting. If their body language suggests it, then you might – for example – touch the back of their hand, and read their reaction.”

It’s a jungle out there and not all accusations, unfortunately, carry complete legitimacy. Professionals in an area as unpredictable as psychology, let alone shamanism, expect accusation of some sort eventually according to Vital students in the field. Soccer players in the UK are advised to simply stay away from any form of ‘nightlife’ as it’s known in sporting circles, and most now do.

The New Bethlehem. Not like the Old Bedlam

Medical

The UK NHS, Compass Pathways and King’s College promise a ‘beacon for mental health treatment’ in South London

South London architecture collective Resolve

Compass Pathways are partnering with the UK’s National Health Service and King’s College London – at the once-notorious ‘Bedlam’ asylum in London.

Plants to treat over 650 NHS patients with Compass’ Comp360 psilocybin-based treatment plan include a new facility amongst 200-acre woodland.

Mired in scandal back in the 1700s for making a tourist attraction of inmates St Mary Bethlehem Hospital has actually moved site at least once and is now in un-psychedelic Croydon. It’s run by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), the largest mental health trust in the UK National Health Service (NHS). Research will be conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology at Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s, which was founded in the 12th Century and has partnered with Compass since 2007.

It’s the first of its kind for the UK state healthcare system that’s under siege from the demographic time bomb and mental health epidemic. 

“It will be a centre of excellence for new therapies that don’t always involve psychedelic drugs but also the key therapy that goes along with it” says Professor Allan Young from IoPPN.

“The focus is on people who use mental health services day to day, developing effective new medicine for patients with depression, anxiety, addiction and other mental health issues,” says NHS exec David Bradley.

No news yet on who will be designing this New Esalen but South London’s Resolve must be high on the shortlist. 

London-based Compass has come out swinging in 2022, taking on autism alongside the NHS with its, er PSILAUT program and fighting off off a challenge to Comp360 by Freedom to Operate, whose founding legal eagle Carey Turnbull said, “We are confident that the PTAB's extremely narrow interpretation of Compass's patent claims will provide generic manufacturers of psilocybin with wide latitude to produce and commercialise psilocybin without risk of violating the Compass patents.” So everybody’s happy… for now.

Village Green Preservation Society

Medical

A radical healthcare program centred on human interaction emerges in Somerset

Frome stained glass artist Jo Eddleston

Here in Albion a new psychedelic model of healthcare is saving the National Health Service millions.

“What we should be doing is spreading wellbeing with an integrative approach, not just treating diseases,” says Dr Zelner, "Wellbeing is an inherently holistic concept. You can only create it with an integrative approach.”

Glorious Somerset is the supposed site of King Arthur’s Camelot and the 4,500 year-old stone circles in Stanton Drew where Currunos and The Wild Hunt roam (it is also reasonably close to glastonbury and Stonehenge, yes). It’s also a hotbed of middle-class flight from post-COVID London. Property prices are going through the thatched roof. Born within this liminal fuzzbox is The Frome Model of Enhanced Primary Care. In place for over a decade it’s saved the NHS £6 for every £1 spent on it.

This gently radical approach to public health provision is focussed on community interaction, especially including the most vulnerable. Over its 12 years in progress, the sleepy West Country town of Frome’s accident and emergency admissions have reduced by 16% while the local average has risen 30%. 

“It proves community improves wellbeing”

‘Primary care’ is health work intended to prevent disease before it requires any treating. Face-to-face contact has proven to be the most effective way to do this. The model mixes primary care innovations with organic community development programs. 

Dr Zelner explains, “Around fifteen years ago the health workers in Frome observed a lot of patients coming in were suffering from loneliness. They decided to treat loneliness as a medical condition: training up health connectors who’d look out for people who seemed lonely, and community connectors who connected them with community organisations.”

‘Why buy when you can borrow?’ is A Library of Things’ slogan

Further innovations followed in what Compassionate Communities director Dr Julian Abel, former vice president of Public Health Palliative Care International, calls ‘Integrated well being networks that enhance naturally occurring ones.’

“They set up ‘talking cafes’ where you could chat to strangers freely,” expands Dr Zelner, “in-person visits for hospital dischargees, and hubs inside the surgeries. It became known as ‘Compassionate Frome’. There’s been enough time for empirical evidence and all admissions have declined by 30-40% relative to neighbouring areas. It proves community improves wellbeing.” Indeed, 81% of patients felt their wellbeing increase and 94% said they found it easier to mange their health.  

The programme is being rolled out across the UK.

Echoing Stanislav Grof’s view of the Freudian mental health model, Abel writes, “‘Survival of the fittest’ is not a phrase that accurately reflects our evolution. Instead, ‘survival of the kindest’ describes how animals, especially humans, have evolved to be social creatures. We are dependent on each other, and how we treat the people around us has a profound effect on us all’.”

The lollipop of optimism

Medical

The placebo effect “is scientific and real.” Psychedelics may just supercharge it

Ann Veronica Janssens, Installation in situ at Panthéon, Paris until 30 Oct 2022

“Psychedelics were never found to be especially useful as brainwashing tools,” says Dr Strassman going deep as per usual, “you have to want to be healed… or to become an assassin.”

He continues during his Vital lecture on contemporary research, “Sure, there’s neuroplasticity and neurogensis. But why’s the experience is so rich? That intensity is down to the activation of the placebo effect. Which is scientific, biological, endocrine and inflammatory.”

Microdosing trials struggle to distinguish between placebo and psychedelic. But this only compounds the theory, he grins.

The Strass went big on his theory that psychedelics replicate the placebo effect at ‘Psychedelic Neuroscience Symposium 19’ celebrating the University of Michigan’s breakthrough DMT research.

“Effective placebos have to be rare, costly, foul-tasting or ideally all three”

He pointed out how recent trials had highlighted psychedelics’ powers of suggestibility, and the importance of set and setting, plus how in his own 1990s DMT tests “We found that ultimately people’s experiences represented simply more of who they already where. The nihilist became more nihilistic, the software designer saw the origin of information bytes.”

“Panaceas work through suggestibility. What if we’re talking about a ‘super placebo’ here? That’s why the integration process is so important. If you’re forming new neurons you want them in the right direction. How you occupy your mind after psychotherapy is important. If you watch violent hardcore porn you’re going to get a different result than meditating in the forest for a week.”

Another fan of the placebo effect – and not just in drugs – is advertising guru and UK columnist Rory Sutherland.

“Placebos really do work because that’s how our minds work”

The Ogilvy agency wallah’s favourite anecdote is how in some other countries painkillers are marketed for specific ailments – back pain, headache – despite being identical products. Yet they work better, because of the placebo effect. 

“Yes, I know it’s bullshit,” he wrote, “But that’s the peculiar thing. We instinctively respond to things which are inefficient. Effective placebos have to be rare, costly, foul-tasting or ideally all three. In manners, in art, in friendship (in advertising, too) we are drawn to the unnecessary, the effortful or the extravagant. If rationality and efficiency were all that valuable in evolutionary terms, accountants would be really sexy.”

Interior designer and thinker Charles Leon speaks about how placebos work even better if you tell the subject they are a placebo. “It suggests the ability of the brain and mind to heal is much more powerful than we give it credit for. Feelings can be inherited, whereas reasons have to be learnt. For instance, we are born with a fear of snakes. Experience may teach us why, but the reaction is first. Placebos really do work because that’s how our minds work.”

Although I prefer to think of it as unleashing the true power of the human imagination, it would be the ultimate trickster gag if psychedelics simply empowered the placebo effect. The joke’s closing punchline being that there is one set of substances that are famously straightforward to tell from a placebo.

More healthy, less normal

Medical

The performance enhancing and problem solving powers of psychedelics are growing in legitimacy and acceptance

By Sidone Roddam via Gallery 46

Psychedelic philosophy endorses mind-expanding supplement use as ethically sound plus highly beneficial to discovery and innovation.

Scientific problem solving with psychedelics is the pet subject of Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide author Dr James Fadiman to this day.

“It would be horrific if psychedelics just turned into anti-depressants,” says Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes, “What a waste of our psychedelic renaissance.”

The ideology begins its case for supplemental LSD use with historical examples, like Nietzsche’s concept of moral relativity. The moustachioed firebrand challenged conservative christian ethics he concluded were toxic to society. Nietzsche believed the church promoted a ‘slave morality’ that he claimed advantaged the unadventurous and the unmotivated – crucially at the expense of the more inspired.

“As with after-work drinks not everyone wants to take part”

Admittedly Nietzsche could come across as a little problematic. So the argument in favour of psychedelic use for self-improvement also deploys topical markers of acceptability.

“Carey Mullins said he ‘learned to use his visual problem solving imagination’ and that led to the applications of DNA,” is one of Psychedelic Philosophy author Dr Chris Letheby’s favourite pieces of lecture ammo. 

Mullins’ open declaration of how much impact LSD had on his studies also makes an appearance in the summer ’22 paper in Drug Science, Policy and Law.

“Many scientific insights were partially if not wholly dependent on criminalised activity”

Psychedelics as potential catalysts of scientific creativity and insight by Drs David Luke and Sam Gandy presents a watertight case for creative problem solving under low doses of LSD (40ug to 100ug have been used in limited official trials over the decades) and otherwise. 

The clarion call deploys history, philosophy, scientific thinking and direct quotes from the likes of Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” The paper covers the importance of dreams and ‘visions’ in personal and scientific breakthroughs, citing declarations from Google creator Larry Page and Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table. It lists the inventors who’ve cited their psychedelic use itself: Apple boss Steve Jobs claimed the drugs advised him to focus on product quality over revenue generation, and contemporary physicist Carlo Rovelli claims psychedelics gave him an understanding of the nature of time which inspired his career.

“Many of the insights outlined, including the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of PCR, were partially if not wholly dependent on criminalised activity… the potential of psychedelics as agents to support creative thinking demonstrates the restrictiveness of a ‘health-only’ classification that fails to holistically consider the breadth of risks and benefits of drug use,” it concludes.

Real life, as ever is far ahead of academia and the medical establishment, let alone politics. Data scientists like Ahnjili ZhuParris, who’s provided frameworks for microdose self-tests and speed learning on psychedelics, are at the cusp of both the ‘Quantified Self’ movement – an army of science nerds self-testing for self-improvement – and the subculture’s citizen science element. 

“It would be horrific if psychedelics just turned into anti-depressants”

Ironically it’s exactly the attitude that eager start-up execs are drawn to. And modern-day corporatism is colonising the culture in its inimitable way. An article in the June ’22 issue of financial bible The Economist declared ‘Bosses want to feed psychedelics to their staff. Are they high?’

It turns out tripping in the office could be a case of two steps forward, one step back.

‘As with after-work drinks, not everyone wants to, or can, take part,’ The Economist reminds us more enthusiastic readers, ‘an asset manager at a big family office reports agonising over whether or not to accept an invitation from a firm in her portfolio to an (illegal) Ayahuasca retreat at a villa in California, with a shaman flown in for the occasion.’

A portent perhaps, that even in the psychedelic renaissance we are still fretting about our workplace networking obligations. Perhaps we were naive to assume we’d glide towards a seamless new interconnectedness.

More ancient forces, The Economist warns, are at play: ‘A mind-bending experience can lead workers to question everything—including capitalism and the nature of work.’

Truly we must be mindful when turning on the staff. The New Health Club and Field Trip are among the companies vying to usher in this new age of glad-handling. Which to be fair sounds a lot more compelling than Friday evening in the local Irish pub.

Apparently though, life is not all about work. And neither does our career have a monopoly on problems that require solving.

“I loved and desperately wanted my wife. This was a surprise to everyone including ourselves”

Within the pages of 1967’s The Problem Solving Psychedelic PG Stafford and BH Golightly went to the heart of the matter.

“Marriage may begin with a great deal that favours success and yet there is an appalling rate at which the relationship deteriorates… the ‘advice’ given by LSD is for the most part benevolent. Instead of encouraging disparagement of a mate for shortcomings, as may result from greater intellectual clarity, the drug generally activates emotional tolerance, if not empathy, and highlights hidden or forgotten attractive qualities.”

The writers quote two husbands who underwent LSD therapy in the 60s:

“I am able to talk to my wife more freely and frankly than I ever used to be. I am not so afraid of saying what I really think even if I know she will not agree. Apart from the restoration of intercourse, we really get on much better than before."

“I loved and desperately wanted my wife. This was a surprise to everyone, including ourselves, because as I said we had been through a bad time together. But under LSD it is impossible to fake anything: she was my connection with life.”

Certainly a more worthwhile state of affairs than after-work drinks.