Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy with Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu | Being Well Podcast
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- čas přidán 24. 07. 2024
- There’s been an explosion of interest in psychedelics over the last 10 years, and phrases like “psychedelic-assisted therapy” have gone from the relative fringes of the mental health conversation to bursting into the mainstream. Alongside a great deal of hype is a growing body of research revealing the potential of substances like psilocybin and MDMA as novel treatments for depression, addiction, and PTSD.
On today’s episode of Being Well, I am joined by Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu from the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. We explore the history and current state of psychedelics research, their subjective effects, the necessity of the “trip,” how psychedelics work in the brain, why researchers are so interested in these substances, and what a psychedelic-assisted therapy session looks like.
About Our Guest: Dr. Garcia-Romeu is a member of the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research examines the effects of psychedelics in humans, with a focus on psilocybin as an aid in the treatment of addiction.
Key Topics:
0:00 Introduction
1:55 Dr. Garcia-Romeu’s background
3:00 What substances have been the focus of research?
8:35 The history of psychedelics
11:55 Usefulness and subjective effects of classical psychedelics (LSD/Psilocybin)
18:45 Ego loss or “ego-death” and the role of spirituality in mental health
23:10 What is happening neurologically with Psilocybin?
29:55 Psychedelics may be the best current treatment option for some conditions
37:40 How close is the research to proving efficacy?
38:45 The relative safety of psychedelics
44:05 What does a psychedelic-assisted therapy session look like?
50:35 Self-guidance in a session
53:30 Duration of treatment, financial and legal access
58:05 Using psychedelics for personal growth, spiritual practice, and even recreation
1:02:20 Where is the field going?
1:03:40 Recap
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Who Am I: I'm Forrest, the co-author of Resilient (amzn.to/3iXLerD) and host of the Being Well Podcast (apple.co/38ufGG0). I'm making videos focused on simplifying psychology, mental health, and personal growth.
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YAY Forrest for your transparency in noting the prejudice (Puritanical?) towards these substances!
Psychedelic’s definitely have potential to deal with mental health symptoms like anxiety and depression, I would like to try them again but it’s just so hard to source here
Psychedelics are the reason why i didn’t take my life when i was at my end. I was stripped of my ego and saw the beauty of life and interconnectivity and even though i still battle anxiety and depression, I’m doing better everyday and will never think in such a self destructive way again.
LSD and mushrooms completely changed my whole outlook on life. I became a better version of myself
This experience gave me a lot of confidence about my self and my body. A bunch of bad thought / behavior patterns were broken. One of these was pretty bad OCD that made me wash my hands a lot. It gave me a lot of hope that things will be fine, this is the one thing that I heard throughout the trip: Everything is alright. The main reason for the trip was my severe depression and it definitely helped me (although it's not gone). Before all I could do was lay in bed. Now I am trying to rebuild my life one step at a time which wasn't possible before."
[_James_tray]
Got psychs
@@sarahh321 Where to search?? Is it IG?
Last year, I took shrooms at Las Vegas thinking it was going to hit like an edible or something. Shit was scary at first but amazing once you start getting deeper into your thoughts
I am currently in a study with Psilocybin at Johns Hopkins with Dr. Albert García-Romeu
His account of "subjective effects" so affirms my experience! Why is it that hearing someone else articulate from their experience, background, knowledge, etc. what resonates so deeply with me is so affirming?
This is so interesting to me, especially after watching the Netflix Fantastic Fungi doc. Thank you for exploring it.
;)
This will require a huge shift from pharma to alternative treatments. Bigpharma will continue to do everything to block holistics and psychedelics until they can cash in, but we still need this word to spread. I am a combat vet and have found Zen/Microdosing and live in Ecuador ;) peace
Come to Colorado! MAPS 2023 Conference was held here this past June. Amazing expansion!
Surely economic viability compared to long term use of pharmacological drugs such as antidepressants and long term stays in hospitals etc and revolving door patients,not to mention long term sickness benefits.
Being on prescribed pharma drugs in some cases for life cannot be cheap either..I have no idea abut costings and also do not see psychedelics as a total panacea and think there are definite risks but I welcome this research and it looks very promising.
I also think alot more peer supported therapy with people who are trained and who also have gone thorugh those psychedelic expereinces and so know the terrain as it were is could also and may also be a thing,so thereby not always having conventioanlly trained therapists as it were who charge extortionate hourly rates and who also often do not help people even after many many years.
I certainly do not think psychedelics are something to mess with and as mentioned the setting and context and quality of support seem to be as important but I think there has to be ways of offering and also supporting people better with mental health than the current model which lets face it has not been working for decades now and has left many people disabled by their experiences in the so called mental health system.
Great podcast though,I'd like to think the future of mental health treatment and our understanding of the causes is changing and therefore so are the treatments.
Just to clarify what I said during the episode about expense/payment/etc., I think the for-profit medical model is a disaster and the fact that we even need to raise these questions is dystopic. And I completely agree with Albert that the studied interventions seem to aid entrenched, difficult to treat conditions very quickly all things considered.
That said, the simple reality is that paying out of pocket for 16 hours (really 24 hours given that two clinicians are present for the psilocybin session) of one-on-one clinician time is beyond the reach of most people. So if we remain stuck with the current model the question of whether insurance will cover these treatments is an enormous one, and it represents a major block to access.
My own direct experience has been using magic mushrooms to stop Cluster Headache dead in its tracks (and no other treatment can come close). In the case of CH such treatment is finally moving into the mainstream. But what is really interesting to me is the hypothesis that CH, as one of so many illnesses that medical science still cannot explain (let alone find a "cure") - has some psychogenetic rooting. My own experience has been that, after 25 years of episodic CH, once I looked at it as a mind-body issue (I do NOT mean its "all in your head') involving the steady development of...lets call them "faulty"... neuro pathways, which lead to learned pain at the subconscious level etc., and once I recognized this, I stopped getting CHs completely (which is apparently relatively rare among "clusterheads"). Of course, my mind then quickly found another source of chronic, unexplained pain, but that is besides the point here.
I know there are sceptics and doubters on the mind-body connection in chronic pain (and/or all the many "syndromes" that have no clear cause or treatment). But I'm pretty convinced that what the mushrooms were doing, and what I was doing in recognizing mind-body factor (i.e. addressing trauma and anxiety, with a therapist) were somehow doing the same things fundamentally, in terms of re-wiring the pathways or having them fire in "better" ways. Thus for me the idea of combining psychedelics with therapy makes perfect sense.
Perfect explanation. Well balanced and meaningful. I am strongly in favor of evidence-based medical development of these drugs, but at the same time the experiential dimension is at least equally as important and in my view more relevant. In the end, everyone dies alone, and it is a unique experience with common, shared aspects. The same can be said of living, and anything that subjectively improves the quality of living and the process of dying as experienced by a person should not be dismissed, but rather given the utmost attention.
Mindmed for the win baby!!!