To study how psychedelic drugs can help treat mental illness, Dr Paul Liknaitzky is giving Australian trial participants high doses of psilocybin – a hallucinogenic compound found in some fungi.
"People will typically experience old problems in very new ways, and will get a much wider set of perspectives on themselves and others in the world," he tells Susie Ferguson.
Psilocybe Cubensis, a species of psychedelic mushroom Photo: Flickr user afgooey74 / CC BY 2.0
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Dr Paul Liknaitzky head of clinical psychedelic research at Monash University in Melbourne Photo: Supplied
All around the world, clinical psychedelic research has entered a very dynamic phase, says Dr Liknaitzky, who is chief principal investigator on trials run at Melbourne's Monash University.
His researchers are testing the effects of psilocybin in combination with psychotherapy.
When administered in high doses, the psychedelic compound dramatically alters a person's state of consciousness for about six hours, Dr Liknaitzky says.
"People often report one of the most personally meaningful and often challenging and unusual experiences of their lives."
Psychedelics first made a mark as a potential psychiatric treatment back in the 1950s and 1960s, but this research was "shut down" by a number of factors, he says.
“There was a slow resurgence, something of a cottage industry, from about the early 2000s.
“And really, in the last two years or so, we've seen the field grow exponentially around the world. And that includes in Australia now and also I’m happy to say there is work happening in this space in New Zealand, too.”
At Monash, the researchers administer not drug therapy but what Dr Liknaitzky calls “augmented psychotherapy".
“The trial that's furthest along in my lab is using psilocybin-assisted therapy in the treatment of generalised anxiety disorder.
“We use a reasonably short treatment programme, it's about 10 weeks long. There are a whole set of psychotherapy sessions - it's about 9 or 10.”
Psychotherapy augmented with psychedelics allows researchers to really drill down into the causes of a person's psychological problems, he says.
“Psychedelics seem to produce this remarkable, and often unprecedented, level of contact with the sources of distress in a person's life.
"People will typically experience old problems in very new ways, and will get a much wider set of perspectives on themselves and others in the world.
“Those new perspectives are crucially not just thoughts about themselves, or their futures or the world, but rather, they're very deeply felt often quite embodied, almost revelations if you like.”
Subsequent psychotherapy sessions can reinforce a patient's new feelings of hope, Dr Liknaitzky says.
“They'll often go into further psychotherapy, and have a sense of hope and have a sense of the kind of work that they need to do in order to resolve some of the negative patterns in the way they think or feel.”
He believes that used this way psychedelics can act as a catalyst for personal change.
“My view is that we get the potential for a substantial improvement and the beginning of a virtuous cycle of improvement with psychedelics, but sustaining the change is a challenge.
"And it's not likely to be the case that we can continually re-dose with psychedelics and get the same levels of safety and effectiveness in the long term.
“My sense is that this is a way to kickstart a process, but then we need to, for many people, continue that process along with other means.”