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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Treatment with Psychedelic Drugs NYU Langone Health

In the ancient village of Eleusis, outside Athens, for more than 2000 years there was an annual all-night secret ceremony that is believed to have involved ingestion of a hallucinogenic brew known as κψκεον (Wasson et al., 1978). We know almost nothing about the ceremony other than that profound insights about life could be achieved, and it was apparently a treasured once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any Greek citizen who had not been convicted of murder. Psychedelics are a class of drug that cannot be fully understood without reference to a number of other fields of research, including anthropology, ethnopharmacology, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and others. This review will focus mostly on pharmacology, both preclinical and clinical, but on occasion reference will be made to aspects of some of those other areas. I wrote a comprehensive review on the subject in 2004, so the literature considered for this review will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the years from 2004 to the present. Others are made in laboratories.2 They come in many forms including tablets, blotter paper, dried mushrooms, powders and crystalline powders.

In the absence of federal funding for such therapeutic research in people, the new center will rely on the gifts announced today to advance the emerging field of psychedelics for therapies and wellness. If your use of psychedelics is affecting your health, family, relationships, work, school, financial or other life situations, or you’re concerned about a loved one, you can find help and support. Taking psychedelics in a familiar environment in the company of people who are known and trusted may alleviate any unpleasant emotional effects. The effects of psychedelics can last several hours and vary a lot, depending on the type of psychedelic used. The term psychedelic was coined by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond during written correspondence with author Aldous Huxley and presented to the New York Academy of Sciences by Osmond in 1957.

In that study, nearly all of the compounds studied had greater potency in inducing AA release than in stimulating PI turnover. Some of these differences are noteworthy; for example, in psilocin, the potency for activating AA release was nearly 30-fold greater than for stimulating PI turnover. The most well understood and recognized signaling pathway mediated by the 5-HT2A receptor is coupling to Gαq, resulting in stimulation of PI-specific PLC (Conn and Sanders-Bush, 1984; Roth et al., 1984).

Halberstadt and Geyer also characterized the effect of LSD on the PPI in rats and compared it with the nonhallucinogenic ergoline lisuride. It had previously been shown that lisuride did not evoke the head twitch in mice (González-Maeso et al., 2007). Although lisuride was found to decrease PPI, this effect was not blocked by the 5-HT2A antagonist MDL11939 or the 5-HT1A antagonist WAY , but was blocked by the dopamine D2/3 antagonist raclopride.

Based on the convergence of ideas about the substrates of consciousness and the recognition that Psychedelics target the most important of these, it should be no surprise that psychedelics, in particular agonist ligands for the 5-HT2A receptor, can be powerful tools to study how the brain works. The 5-HT2A receptor has been identified as a mitogenic receptor in human placental choriocarcinoma cell lines as coupled to several mitogenic signal transduction pathways and potentially oncogenic for its transforming properties in transfected NIH3T3 cells (see references in Sonier et al., 2006). They tested the effect of 5-HT and DOI on MCF-7 cell proliferation using 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide cell proliferation assays. Their results showed that 5-HT2A receptor mRNA and protein are expressed in MCF-7 cells, and that 5-HT has a positive proliferative effect on these cells, at least partly through stimulation of 5-HT2A receptors. A dose-response effect was determined for both 5-HT and DOI, revealing that 5-HT stimulated MCF-7 proliferation up to 52.2% at a concentration of 10 μM.

In mechanistic studies, cells of the lung were further analyzed by both gene expression and flow cytometry. Some, but not all, proinflammatory cytokines were found to be repressed in the R-DOI pretreated animals. For example, expression of IL-4, a proinflammatory cytokine implicated in asthma was unaffected by R-DOI, whereas expression levels of others including IL-5, IL-13, and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor were all significantly reduced. These results suggested that unlike conventional anti-inflammatory treatments like steroids, which simply repress the immune system, R-DOI selectively targets only certain key components relevant to the pathology. During the very early years, when LSD was considered to be somewhat of a miracle drug, the possibility was investigated that psychedelics might be useful in ameliorating the symptoms of autistic spectrum disorders.

This study was open label with a very small sample size, so it remains to be seen whether similar results could be obtained in a larger, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Food and Drug Administration would approve clinical studies employing ayahuasca because of the lack of control in its preparation and its variable alkaloid content. Thus, studies of the potential antidepressant effects of a psychedelic in endogenous depression likely will have to focus on psilocybin or LSD, at least in the United States.