11/28/2025
In an attempt to treat depression, researchers from Imperial College, London gave 12 patients psilocybin. The 12 patients who were chosen had been clinically depressed for an average of about 18 years, and the results were actually quite remarkable. The results from the psilocybin treatment actually surpassed the typical pharmaceuticals that are prescribed to treat depression, like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and electroconvlusive therapy.
Just 1 week after taking the magic mushrooms, all 12 patients from the study reported feeling better, and checking in 3 months later, 5 of them were in complete remission. Quite impressive from only one dose.
“That is pretty remarkable in the context of currently available treatments,” says Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College, London and first author of the latest study, which is published in The Lancet Psychiatry.
Nature News stated: “The study’s authors are not suggesting that psilocybin should be a treatment of last resort for depressed patients. ‘Our conclusion is more sober than that — we are simply saying that this is doable,’ says Carhart-Harris. ‘We can give psilocybin to depressed patients, they can tolerate it, and it is safe. This gives us an initial impression of the effectiveness of the treatment.'”
Treatments like this are still illegal in most places; meanwhile, problematic pharmaceuticals that cause accidental poisoning and increased chances of committing su***de are widely accepted and prescribed with little hesitation. We're not saying everything should be legalized, but laws should have been lifted long ago to study these compounds as legitimate treatments in low doses could have been developed decades ago.
Many of these plants are still considered Schedule 1 drugs, so researchers have a hard time obtaining permits and even supplies to test out their therapeutic properties.
“This was unprecedented,” says neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt at Imperial, who is senior author of the study.
“It took 32 months between having the grant awarded and dosing the first patient,” says Nutt. By comparison, it took six months “to get through the machinations” for his team’s previous studies using the equally illegal drugs L*D and M**A.
“Every interaction — applying for licenses, waiting for licenses, receiving the licenses, applying for contracts for drug manufacture, on and on — involved a delay of up to two months. It was enormously frustrating, and most of it was unnecessary,” says Nutt. “The study result isn’t the remarkable part — it’s the fact that we did it at all.”
