Three Things To Read This Week
1. “At Least 8,000 Newly Trained Therapists Will Be Needed In The Next Decade.”
NBC News’ Danica Jefferies reports that the California Institute of Integral Studies, which is teaching the next generation of psychedelic therapists using “methods used in clinical trials” and “approved by the Food and Drug Administration” has already “trained roughly 800 students in its psychedelic program [including] many licensed therapists, psychiatrists and physicians.”
ICYMI: In Oregon, where the first psilocybin service centers will come on line later this year, “a new kind of therapist is being minted” as institutions like InnerTrek offer a 6-month-long training and certification program to prepare facilitators to administer psilocybin assisted therapy.
2. “If My Dad Had Access To Psilocybin Treatment … Could That Have Helped Him?”
For The Los Angeles Times, Emily Alpert Reyes wrote a moving feature about 51-year-old Melanie Senn, who participated in a clinical trial studying psilocybin’s effect on alcohol use disorder. Senn, whose father died decades earlier after struggling with alcohol, entered the trial to address her own issues with drinking, said the treatment was “hands-down the most profound experience of my life” and that in the “months after taking psilocybin, she drank less, [and] then not at all.” Dr. Lorenzo Leggio, who works with the National Institutes of Health, told Reyes that psilocybin can help people like Senn battle substance use disorder by acting “on key areas of the brain that are important in addiction.”
3. Groundbreaking Psilocybin Treatment Research Continues:
A “single, moderate dose of psilocybin significantly reduces depressive symptoms” for at least two weeks for people with major depressive disorder, according to new research recently published in The Lancet. The results of the double-blind, randomized trial indicate that “psilocybin produces clinically significant antidepressant effects,” the researchers wrote. Major depressive disorder is the number-one cause of disability in the world, affecting more than 300 million people.
RELATED: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are recruiting participants in a pair of first-of-their-kind clinical trials studying “the use of psilocybin to aid in decreasing opioid and methamphetamine misuse” | Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco are studying how psilocybin could impact the inflammatory aspects of disorders such as Parkinson disease, bipolar disorder, and chronic pain.
