Watts: Imperial College conducted the UK's first psilocybin depression trial
Dr. Rosalind Watts · Researching Psilocybin's Effects on Depression - Dr. Rosalind Watts · Y Combinator · Mar 15, 2018 · at 2:42
Dr. Rosalind Watts discusses the scope and novelty of the clinical psilocybin study she co-led at Imperial College London.
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“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”
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More from Dr. Rosalind Watts
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.”