Could psychedelic drugs revolutionise mental health care in the UK? | ITV News
and then we come in through here to the first of our therapy treatment rooms this is the uk’s first psychedelic assisted therapy clinic of its kind we will be providing psychedelic therapies for people with a wide range of severe mental health problems awaken life sciences plans to transform mental health care and believe combining psychedelics with psychotherapy is the next evolution in psychiatry we tend to treat psychiatric problems with maintenance therapy you take an antidepressant every day day in day out for weeks months years decades to mask your symptoms now the way we use psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is very different you take the drug only one two or three times alongside psychotherapy in order to get better and then not need to take daily drugs so what are psychedelics psychedelics are a loosely grouped class of drugs that are able to induce altered thoughts and sensory perceptions some can induce hallucinations the initial treatment offered when this clinic opens later this year will be ketamine assisted psychotherapy for depression anxiety eating disorders addiction and ptsd ketamine is a class a drug so it’s illegal for recreational use but it’s approved for medical use and has been shown in several clinical trials to offer a brief rapid antidepressant effect the patient will enter a nine-week course of ketamine assisted psychotherapy which involves 11 visits to the clinic on four of those occasions they will take ketamine assisted by their therapist and the other sessions are non-drug sessions although dr sessa hopes that one day their services will be available on the nhs the initial nine-week course will be for private patients costing 6 000 pounds but it’s not the only psychedelic medicine that they hope to one day offer they believe in the next couple of years mdma and silas simon known to many as magic mushrooms will be approved for medical use imperial college london launched the first psychedelic research centre in the world looking at the use of psychedelics in mental health care and have recently conducted trials into comparing psilocybin therapy with a conventional antidepressant drug the results were quite consistent showing that the psilocybin therapy was really quite quite markedly better at reducing depressive symptoms and actually more than that it was also able to improve quality of life more generally the way psalocybin works in the brain like other psychedelic drugs is it works on a part of the brain or a system in the brain called the serotonin system and serotonin and the particular aspect of it that psychedelics work on is involved in something that we call plasticity psilocybin increases plasticity which increases the potential for the brain to change allowing for new communication pathways scientists also believe you can use mdma to access a brain state where brain plasticity increases new connections are formed which allows for trauma-focused psychotherapy in a way that a patient may never have experienced before earlier this year the first published study of an advanced clinical trial using mdma was found to be highly effective in treating ptsd after three mdma sessions two-thirds of participants no longer qualified for ptsd diagnosis which is why uk charities supporting wounded veterans backed by the head of the uk armed forces is calling for a uk trial there have been no new treatments in mental health now for 30 years we see so many desperate veterans coming to us for help and they’ve tried every other treatment there is to do to get better and most of them have been in treatment for about 10 years and not with great success the charity has been fundraising but a gap of around 725 000 pounds means that british veterans suffering from ptsd could face years of delays in receiving mdma-assisted therapy because regulatory approval is not possible without uk research and for veteran martin wade who came back from his tour in afghanistan with ptsd trials can’t come soon enough my body’s in a state of tension so i suffer with chronic pain i am hyper vigilant you know i jump at uh even modest unexpected sounds um i still have intuitive thoughts and nightmares and i just find daily living a struggle martin has had over a thousand hours of therapy and has tried almost every method but nothing has provided him with much alleviation of his symptoms so a treatment with a high success rate is what he’s looking for i would love to have a greater sense of of inner well-being so when i when i smile on the outside i can feel it in the inside mdma and psilocybin became class a drugs under the misuse of drugs act 1971 halting all research into them although this didn’t stop people from taking them it did create a stigma around them that they were only party drugs it was only 15 years ago that psychedelic research was able to resume but the substances do come with possible adverse effects some psychedelics could cause extreme disassociation from reality panic attacks and nausea the uk’s advisory council on the misuse of drugs are currently considering barriers to legitimate research with controlled drugs but told itv news that there are no plans to reschedule mdma under the misuse of drugs regulations 2001. however this hasn’t stopped investment in the area new startups are developing psychedelic initiatives and clinics all over the world the psychedelics market is estimated to be about 5 billion by 2027 so when do scientists believe that psychedelics will offer a real alternative to conventional medicine my prediction would be that this might be achieved in something like 2024 maybe 2025. mdma is now in phase three which is the final phase psilocybin is just about to go into phase three so we’re looking at mdma being licensed by 2023 and hopefully psilocybin a couple of years after that at the moment psychedelics remain an experimental treatment more research is needed in the area before they stand a chance of becoming a mainstream mental health treatment in the uk
The UK’s first psychedelic assisted therapy clinic of its kind plans to open its doors to the public this autumn.
The clinic wants to combine psychedelic drugs – including ketamine, magic mushrooms and MDMA – with psychotherapy to treat patients with a wide range of mental health problems.
Dr Ben Sessa, consultant psychiatrist at Awakn Life Sciences in Bristol, believes psychedelic assisted psychotherapy will turn on its head the way traditional pharmacology is used in psychiatry.
Natalia Jorquera reports.
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