Depression Help

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Anchor lead: Psilocybin may help depression when other therapies fail, Elizabeth Tracey reports

A small Johns Hopkins study led by Alan Davis has shown that some people with depression that hasn’t responded to other types of intervention may respond to psilocybin therapy.

Davis: Many of them had had depression, on average, for decades. Most of them had tried several trials of antidepressants, several times had been in therapy, some of them reported benefit to that but never complete remission. Some of them said that nothing ever helped. This was not what would be considered an easy to treat population of people with depression. These people had not really responded to other attempts at helping their depression and so the fact that we saw so many of them improve was really quite exciting.   :31

More than half of study participants experienced remission of their depression symptoms and remained that way for at least four weeks after the intervention. Davis says these results add to the growing body of evidence for a clinical role for psilocybin and bring hope to the millions of people worldwide who experience depression. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.