A few clinical studies aimed at experimenting the curative use of psychedelic substances in humans. One of them compared the prolonged administration of antidepressants to that of psilocybin (the active component of magic mushrooms) for two days. Both protocols had the same effectiveness, which also proved to be durable over time.
In 2015, Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a research professor of psychopharmacology in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, found that in low doses, LSD acts on serotonin, a neurotransmitter that is involved in anxiety and depression. More recently, with her team from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center, she studied the effect of this hallucinogenic drug on anxiety and she discovered that LSD had the same mechanism of action as common antidepressants drugs used to treat depression and generalized anxiety, such as Prozac, Zoloft, Cipralex, to induce its anxiolytic effect.
So would these hallucinogenic substances have an advantage over antidepressants? Gabriella Gobbi presents her results and recommendations in an article in Le Devoir.
