Actualités

Trip curatif: comment les drogues psychédéliques peuvent aider à soigner la dépression

20 octobre 2014

Il est temps de mettre un terme au bannissement cinquantenaire des champignons magiques et du LSD et de permettre une exploration de leurs bénéfices potentiels en termes de santé. Pour en savoir plus, en anglais, veuillez lire les informations ci-dessous.

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Next year, if all goes to plan, a dozen patients with clinical depression will be invited to a UK laboratory and given psilocybin – the psychedelic ingredient found in magic mushrooms. Over the next four or five hours, many of these volunteers will experience dream-like euphoria as colours, smells and sounds become more intense, perception of time distorts and their sense of self dissolves. Some may feel a surge of electricity through their bodies, sudden clarity of thought or hilarity. Others may experience anxiety, confusion or paranoia. These hallucinogenic effects will be short-lived, but the impact of the drug on the volunteers could be long-lasting.

There is tentative evidence that psilocybin, along with other psychedelic drugs, can "reset" abnormal functioning of the brain if given in a safe, controlled way as part of therapy. For those raised on the post-1960s dogma that magic mushrooms and LSD unleash mental illness, trigger flashbacks and cause personality changes, the idea that they could actually cure disorders of the brain is mind-blowing.

The pilot study will involve patients who have failed to respond to conventional treatment and is the idea of Professor David Nutt and Dr Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College's Neuropsychopharmacology Centre in London. They argue that psychedelic drugs could prove beneficial to millions of people and that it is time to end the 50-year stigma surrounding their therapeutic use. Nutt and Carhart-Harris have already used MRI scanners to study changes in the brain while 15 volunteers took psilocybin. A similar study on 20 volunteers given LSD has just finished.

Click here to read the full article.

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