The Guardian, March 13, 2021
This week sees the opening of the UK's first private clinic providing psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Could drugs like psilocybin be the future of mental health treatments?
In the summer of 1981, when he was 13, Grant crashed a motorcycle into the wall of his parents' house. He'd been hiding it in a shed, "but it was too exciting for me, and the very first time I started it up in the backyard I ran into a wall". His mother found the scrawny teenager lying next to the bike. "I got into a lot of trouble."
Grant had never given much thought to this childhood memory, but one hot August day in 2019 it dawned on him so clearly that, at the age of 53, with two children of his own, he suddenly realized the key to his unhealthy relationship with alcohol.
The day before, a team of specialists from the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital had given him an injection of ketamine, a drug with hallucinogenic properties, used as an anesthetic since the 1970s, and more recently included in a group of psychedelic drugs considered revolutionary in the treatment of mental health.
So far, more than a hundred patients with illnesses such as depression, post-traumatic stress or addiction have been treated at different research centers in the UK with an innovative intervention that combines these psychedelic drugs with psychotherapy. What was once just a line of research is becoming the basis for a new paradigm in mental health, a treatment that, for the first time in the history of modern psychiatry, proposes not just to improve but to cure these illnesses.
