Cancer patients experience
immediate, significant and long lasting relief from their existential anxiety
and depression when they’re treated with psilocybin, the active ingredient in
psychedelic mushrooms (known as magic mushrooms), and two studies have found. As
many as 40% of patients with advanced cancer experience anxiety or depressions,
and antidepressants work only about as well as placebo treatments. A study, led
by doctors at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, divided into two
groups 51 patients with life threatening cancer diagnoses. They were given either
a therapeutic or a very low dose of psilocybin in a first treatment, and then
got the opposite dose five weeks later. The results “show that psilocybin
produced large and significant decreases” in depression, anxiety, “and
increases in measures of quality of life, life meaning, death acceptance and
optimism,” the authors said. “These effects were sustained at six months.” Roland
Griffiths, lead author of the study said, “The finding that a single
administration of a relatively short-acting drug has rapid substantial and
enduring anti-depressant and anti-anxiety effects is really unprecedented.”
