Psychedelics could offer relief to doctors who provided frontline care during the pandemic and later became depressed. That’s according to a small new study published in JAMA Network Open this month. Inside the study: Of the 30 participants in the double-blind, randomized trial, half received two preparation sessions; one dose of synthetic psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms; and three follow-up counseling sessions with a trained facilitator. The other half, the control group, received the same sequence of sessions, except a placebo was swapped for the psilocybin. While both groups saw their depression symptoms improve, participants in the psilocybin group had faster, bigger and more long-lasting drops in their depression scores. Because the study was small, its findings can’t be generalized to a wider population. By the numbers: More than 2,200 clinicians applied for the study’s 30 slots, which were awarded using a lottery system. All participants were frontline Covid-19 health workers who didn’t have a mental health diagnosis before the pandemic and had moderate or severe depression when they enrolled. The 15 men and 15 women chosen for the study ranged in age from 29 to 60. The group had seen levels of death and dying during the pandemic unlike anything they’d previously experienced, according to Dr. Anthony Back, the study’s lead investigator and a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. “I felt inept,” Dr. Sarah Kirsch, a Seattle-based internist who participated in the study, told researchers. “I had limited ability to help people at a time when they’re at the sickest that they’ll be in their life. We have remdesivir and steroids and ventilators, but those are not curative.” According to Back, the psilocybin treatment helped Kirsch and others in her group reframe their experiences in a way that allowed them to better understand what happened and to have compassion for themselves. What’s next: The Food and Drug Administration has designated psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy, a label meant to expedite a drug’s path toward approval. But it’s been a challenging year for the psychedelics industry, which saw enthusiasm for psychedelic medicine cool in August after the FDA rejected Lykos Therapeutics’ application to treat post-traumatic stress disorder with MDMA and talk therapy. Still, some psychedelics advocates are optimistic about President-elect Donald Trump’s second term. His pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has alleged that the agency is keeping psychedelics from Americans, writing on X this fall that he wants to end the “aggressive suppression of psychedelics.”
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