Dr. Rosalind Watts
Founder, ACER Integration. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderscientistacademic@drrosalindwatts ↗LinkedIn ↗drrosalindwatts.com ↗
Dr. Rosalind Watts served as Clinical Lead for Imperial College London's psilocybin trials for depression, developing the ACE therapeutic model and Watts Connectedness Scale. She later founded ACER Integration, a nature-based framework and community supporting psychological connectedness and integration.
1shows
1appearances
31statements
16resolved
14supported
1contradicted
88%fully supported
Everything Dr. Rosalind Watts said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Watts: Antidepressant research is often short-term to serve drug manufacturers' interests
“The research into the effect of antidepressant drugs often is very short-term. It looks at them for a very short period of time without much follow-up. So because that serves the purposes of the people making these drugs.”
Watts: Psilocybin's antidepressant effects typically last two to three months
“It seems to, for most people last for about two or three months and then the depression starts to come back.”
Watts: Psilocybin therapy relies on the mind's internal homeostatic healing
“With psilocybin it's completely different because the expert is themselves. They are the expert because what's happening, the healing power of this is something in the unconscious mind, their own unconscious mind is writing itself. There's a homeostatic princi…”
Watts: David Nutt was fired after stating MDMA is safer than horseriding
“He was, he worked for the government he was the drug czar, so he informed them or advised them about the scientific harms of different drugs and how they should be scheduled or, you know, where they should be in the schedule of illegal drugs, and he was sacked…”
Watts: Psilocybin deactivates brain regions driving negative rumination loops
“And the key finding was that psilocybin seems to deactivate the part of your mind or brain that is responsible for ruminating, for negative thinking on a loop.”
Watts: Antidepressants are short-term fixes ignoring depression's root causes
“You know, as a short-term thing to get people through a crisis time, I think sometimes it can be really helpful, and for some people it works, but for a lot of people it's a short-term fix that doesn't really change the causes of the depression.”
Watts: Antidepressants blunt and essentially stop psilocybin from working
“Psilocybin is not nearly as effective if you're on antidepressants. It really takes the I mean, it takes the highs and the lows. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It stops it from working, essentially.”
Watts: Depression returned after three months without active post-psychedelic integration
“If you just give someone a psychedelic and you don't encourage them to make the most of the window of opportunity, then what we found with our participants is that the depression came back after three months or so.”
Watts: Psilocybin trial left 6 of 20 patients depression-free at six months
“So six of them, they were still well after six months. Three of them, it didn't work. And then for 11 of them, and this is, ah, yes, the majority of them, they were really well for three months, depression-free or very mild symptoms of depression. But then aft…”
Watts: Demographic therapist matching does not matter in psychedelic therapy
“Beyond that trust, I don't think the coupling, the matching matters because in the session, okay, say, say I've got issues with my mother. It might be that when I go and have talking therapy, I might want to go and see a woman maybe to work through that relati…”
Watts: Psychedelics produce psychoanalysis-level self-understanding rapidly rather than over a decade
“Psychedelics are a bit more like psychoanalysis and that it's learning to understand, understanding yourself much, much better in a very deep way and making changes. And whereas with psychoanalysis it might be a bit more gradual, that people might get to know …”
Watts: Psilocybin study participants made major job and relationship changes
“And in our sample of 20 people, people did make changes, new jobs, did things I'd been frightened of for a long time, changed relationships. People did make big life changes”
Watts: Psychedelics can break rigid patterns of thinking and living
“When people are stuck in a very fixed pattern of thinking or of living, psychedelics can break that pattern.”
Watts: Patients can resist 10mg psilocybin doses, but 25mg prevents resistance
“With 10 milligrams, it opens it a little bit. And so the things come out and you might be having a conversation with a dead parent, or you might be thinking about a relationship that ended and It's like a very intense turbocharged therapy session, but you can …”
Watts: Psychedelic ego death feels like oneness or physical dying
“When you die on a psychedelic experience, when you have an ego death, that can either feel like, oh, I'm at one with the planet, I am the plants and the trees, I am everything, or it can feel like I'm physically being killed, I'm dying.”
Watts: Psychedelic therapy acts as turbocharged mindfulness
“The whole concept of mindfulness and meditation is about allowing things in and just sitting with them rather than distracting or pushing them away or trying to always be kind of achieving or feeling good, but never feeling your feelings. And it's about that. …”
Watts: All 20 trial participants preferred psilocybin over previous depression treatments
“So of our 20 well, the first thing to say is that they all said that they would prefer it to any other treatment they tried.”
Watts: Psychedelic therapy guides act like midwives rather than conversational therapists
“You're a bit more like a midwife than a therapist. You know, there's kind of noises and sounds and you're reassuring, but you're not really in an intellectual conversation because getting into the mind is, we want to get out of the mind and into the heart and …”
Watts: Psychedelics quiet frontal ego networks to facilitate somatic emotional processing
“The brilliant thing about psychedelics is that they turn off that kind of ego, frontal parts, and you can go into the body, and into the heart”
Watts: Meditation and psychedelics similarly deactivate default mode network
“Meditation does that too. It quietens down that mental control. The monkey mind. It's quieting the monkey mind. That's all I would say really we're doing with psychedelics and with meditation.”
Watts: Imperial College conducted the UK's first psilocybin depression trial
“So they, this, the study that I have, was involved in was a clinical study looking at 20 people with treatment resistant depression, and it was the first study of its kind in the UK”
Watts: Thousands of promising psychedelic studies halted after drugs became illegal
“So in the sixties and seventies, there were, well, in the fifties, sixties and seventies, there were 100,000 of studies. And the findings were really very positive and it would all look great. And then it was, became illegal and then the research just dropped …”
Watts: Sourcing stable psilocybin is a major bottleneck in psychedelic trials
“A lot of the difficulty of doing this research isn't just the bureaucracy cutting through the red tape, getting the licenses, the lack of funding, because the governments obviously don't often want to fund this but it's also actually getting the psilocybin and…”
Watts: Brain imaging shows psychedelics connect normally non-communicating brain regions
“They can provide this state of, when you look at the images of brain communication pathways, they go from this kind of segmented lines to this full on explosion where things that, parts of the brain that don't talk to each other all talk to each other, and sud…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dr.'s full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Founder, ACER Integration | 1 | 31 | 88% 14/16 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |