Study: Magic Mushroom Compound Could Help with Depression

by Paul Fassa
Natural Society
Jan 3, 2014

Photograph by Martin Godwin.

At least three different formal psychiatric studies on the effects of psilocybin, extracted from “magic mushrooms”, were performed on voluntary subjects who had never experienced psychedelics before. All had similar positive results. The motive for these studies was investigating the potential for treating depression and other psychiatric maladies with psilocybin.

Two of the studies (done in the UK) were conducted by Professor David Nutt, who was considered nutty by superiors when he was chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). He was fired from the ACMD by Home Secretary Alan Johnson for resisting the decision to toughen laws on cannabis and publicly stating that alcohol was more harmful than cannabis and the magic mushroom compound, psilocybin.

The other study was performed by Johns Hopkins University Medical School, an institution that is never considered nutty. All three studies were conducted circa 2011 – 2012. All of them did follow up surveys 14 months after the subjects’ psilocybin experiences. The compound was often administered while participants were in MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) machines that were scanning their brain activity.

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