Researchers are studying psychedelics as a possible treatment for conditions like depression, PTSD and substance use disorders. But they don't know exactly how these drugs work. Getting the answer to this question is especially difficult when people often take psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin for the "trip." This week on Short Wave, we're talking to researchers about how they're trying to untangle the effects of this "trip" from the ways psychedelics might change the human brain ... and why the answer could help direct the future of psychedelic research. Catch the rest of this series on psychedelics and related drugs this week by following us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Have other questions about psychedelics and the brain? Let us know by emailing [email protected]! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and what is the podcast about?
Hey, short wavers. Chances are you've heard about psychedelics once or twice. And shortwave producer Rachel Carlson has been diving into the science behind them. She's joining me this week to talk all about them. Hey, Rachel.
Hey, Gina. So psychedelics are being studied to treat lots of different kinds of conditions.
Chapter 2: What conditions are psychedelics being studied to treat?
Chronic Lyme disease, Alzheimer's disease, anorexia nervosa, chronic back pain, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder.
That's Albert Garcia-Romeo. He's a psychologist and psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University. Albert ran a study using a psychedelic called psilocybin. It's the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And he wanted to see if it could help people who'd previously had Lyme disease.
Chapter 3: What was Lori Unruh Snyder's experience with Lyme disease and psilocybin?
Because you may not realize it, but Lyme disease often comes with lots of psychological symptoms in addition to all the physical ones. Lori Unruh Snyder is one of Albert's patients in that study. She's an agriculture professor. She got a tick bite. She got Lyme disease. But it took doctors four years to get to that diagnosis.
Wow, that's a long time.
Yeah, and even after she took a course of antibiotics for treatment, she told me she still didn't feel like herself at all.
I remember distinctly when I was teaching a class, I literally got up in front of the students and my mind just like almost blanked, stopped. I thought I was having early symptoms of like Alzheimer's or dementia and was like, something's really wrong with me.
So she tried psilocybin in this study. Does she feel better?
She does. She told me she felt like she was expressing herself differently. She changed the way she taught her classes. even ones she'd been teaching for years.
Usually as professors, after, you know, 15, 20 years teaching, you roll out the same PowerPoint as the last time. But I couldn't do that. I literally stopped myself and I said, I'm seeing things differently.
But here's the thing, Gina. Researchers like Albert, they don't know exactly why Lori sees things differently. Is it because the drug altered her brain chemistry? Or was it the journey she took while she was on psilocybin? I called myself, like, the new Lori.
Like, there's the Lori before psilocybin and the Lori after. But it's like, I went through this journey of Hearing those that I loved that had passed, you know, saying to me, it's okay, you'll be fine.
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Chapter 4: How do researchers distinguish between the 'trip' and brain changes caused by psychedelics?
And he said it kind of boils down to one question.
How do you control for a transformative experience?
Chapter 5: What challenges do scientists face in controlling for transformative psychedelic experiences?
And once I heard him say it that way, I couldn't get it out of my head.
How do you control for a transformative experience?
So I went on my own journey, not like my stuffed animals are talking to me and I can't look directly into a mirror kind of journey. Not like that. But a reporting journey with lots of scientists who had lots of opinions.
So today on the show, psychedelics. How do we entangle the ways they change our experience of the world with how they might change our brains?
Is it possible for researchers to separate those things when weighing their potential benefits? And does the difference matter?
We're breaking down the history of psychedelics and some of the roadblocks researchers are facing when it comes to how to study them now. I'm Rachel Carlson. And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Rachel, I have a question. Haven't people been talking about and, like, studying psychedelics for a long time?
Like, why is all this research happening now?
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Chapter 6: What is the history of psychedelics research and why is it resurging now?
All right, quick history lesson.
Yes, I love history. Let's do it.
So psychedelic substances have been around for millennia in indigenous medicine. Okay. And in the late 1930s, this guy named Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD. Then the actual term psychedelics was coined in the 1950s. Okay. Now, those drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline are called classic psychedelics. In the brain, they all activate something called the serotonin 2A receptor.
Chapter 7: How do classic psychedelics affect the brain chemically?
Serotonin is a chemical in our brains. It regulates things like sleep, mood, appetite. And at this specific receptor, classic psychedelics have these very powerful psychoactive effects.
which include feelings of sometimes ego dissolution or what you might think of as feelings of unity where the boundaries of self and other can sort of dissolve.
Yeah, I mean, this is the sort of thing that I think of when somebody mentions psychedelics, like this trippy magic mushroom experience.
Yeah, exactly. So in the 50s and 60s, psychedelics, both in recreational use and in research, are huge. But then, in the early 70s, the U.S. does this big crackdown on controlled substances, and that, coupled with tighter regulation on pharmaceutical testing, really shuts down most psychedelics research on humans. And the next big phase in neuropsychiatry in the 80s is super different. Yeah.
Boris told me the goal became to have sort of a one-size-fits-all mental health approach.
You know, it's like the industrial revolution in medicine, that you can really reduce things down to a drug, you would take it every day, you know, something that you can define.
So Gina, this is when SSRIs come on the scene. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. They also target serotonin receptors. antidepressants like SSRIs work for about two-thirds of people who take them, but there were still some major problems. They don't work for the other third, even after trying multiple different drugs. Right. Which leaves a lot of people like just in the lurch. Yeah.
And I mean, there's other factors, too. You have to take them every single day. You have to be on them for at least a few weeks until you can even really feel a change. Yeah. And so there's this urgent need for alternative treatments for mental health conditions, which is why around 2000 or so, researchers start studying another drug called ketamine.
You might know it as a recreational drug, but it's also been used since the 1960s as an anesthetic in clinical settings. So it's not a psychedelic. It's not a psychedelic, at least according to most people I talk to. Okay. But it can have these similar-ish effects depending on the dose. Like it can make people feel numb or give them this sometimes euphoric or dissociated feeling.
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