A study, which an NPR article calls "rigorous," but also includes some red flags from psychedelic researchers, shows that people who were given enough LSD to experience "what people might call a trip" experienced a reduction in anxiety.
"By the next day, they were showing strong improvements," says Dr. David Feifel of Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in San Diego, one of the 22 centers that participated in the study. "And those improvements held out all the way to the end of the study, which was 12 weeks."
But it's unclear whether some of the improvement was related to non-drug factors like the sensory environment in which people were treated, says Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelics researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study…
…Carhart-Harris, like many scientists who study psychedelics, believes that successful treatment is more likely if a person has the right mindset when beginning a trip and if the trip occurs in a place with the right sensory environment.
NPR
More and more studies are being performed, and it seems a future where psychedelic treatment for GAD and other mental health issues may become commonplace. I welcome anything that works.
"Give it a couple of years and we'll be seeing drugs like psilocybin [and] magic mushrooms as medicines," Carhart-Harris says. "A whole mindset shift is going to happen around that."
The FDA seems open to that possibility. It has already given MM120 "breakthrough therapy" status, which is meant to speed up the evaluation of promising new drugs.
NPR
Previously:
• Video about using psychedelic drugs to treat anxiety, addiction, and OCD
• LSD: new scientific study shows microdosing elevates mood and cognition
• Psychedelics are 'anti-distressants'with benefits beyond treating depression
• First clinical LSD trial in 40 years shows positive results in easing anxiety of dying patients
