Are Magic Shrooms A Cure For Gloom?

The race to bring the next generation of anti-depressants to the market is on, and shrooms are leading the pack. As a trial gets underway to test the effectiveness of psilocybin – the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms – in treating depression, WH reports from the lab on the front line of the psychedelic renaissance

- Charlotte Haigh

The curtains are closed against the afternoon sun and pink salt lamps bathe the room in a warm glow. Pictures of trees cover every wall, as if to emulate a forest. In the middle of the room there’s a bed covered in crisp, white sheets, with an eye mask atop the pillow. It has the ambience of a luxe wellness retreat, but beneath the sheets is a standard-issue hospital bed belonging to the Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research in London. It’s in this space that researchers are trying to prove the efficacy of a treatment that could revolutionize psychiatry.

They’re exploring the potential of magic mushrooms’ psychoactive component – psilocybin – as an aid for depression. Back in 2017, the same team showed that psilocybin could ‘reset’ the brains of those with treatment-resistant depression. In this trial, they’re comparing the effects of psilocybin with those of a conventional selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant. “Psychedelics work completely differently to SSRIs,” says psychologist Dr Rosalind Watts, the team’s clinical lead. “Where SSRIs are designed to flatten emotions to help you cope, psychedelics heighten emotional responses so that you can look into the source of your issues and find new ways of dealing with them. You don’t avoid anything – rather, you embrace it, and that can be transformative.”