When Thomas Hartle devoted himself to a psilocybin treatment session, end-of-life anxiety, distraction, and noise associated with his terminal colon cancer disappeared.
“Before treatment, it’s like sitting in your car. It’s summer. You’ve lowered your windows, you’re stuck in rush hour traffic. It’s noisy. It’s unpleasant,” said Hartle, who lives in Saskatchewan.
“Your favorite song is on the radio, but you can’t really appreciate any of it because all the other distractions keep you from even noticing that the radio is on. After treatment with psilocybin, [it’s like] you are still in the car, in a traffic jam, but you have the windows up, the air conditioning is on and it is quiet. It’s just you and the music. “
Hartle, 54, is one of the few Canadians to have received legal psychedelic mental health psychotherapy because Health Canada facilitated health workers’ access to psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound found in some mushrooms, in January.
In Montreal, meanwhile, a pioneering clinic in the emerging field of psychedelic psychotherapy is set to become the first health facility in Quebec to legally treat depression with psilocybin.
“It is a privilege to be able to accompany people in the study of their psychological stress and to offer something other than conventional treatment as antidepressants,” said Dr Andrew Bui-Nguyen of the Mindspace by Numinus Clinic in a recent interview.
Bui-Nguyen said his clinic received Health Canada approval on May 5 to care for a patient who had suffered several failed treatments for depression.
“There is a strict screening procedure,” Bui-Nguyen said, adding that Quebec’s health insurance plan does not cover treatment. “We’re looking at the diagnosis, the medical history, whether there’s a risk of addiction, what treatments have already been tried. There must have been a lot of treatments before, so the application is solid.”
On January 5, Health Canada revived its Special Access Program – abolished under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2013 – allowing health professionals to request access to restricted drugs that are not yet authorized for sale in the country.
Prior to January, people could only access psychedelic psychotherapy through clinical trials or medical exceptions. Licensed experts can now apply on behalf of patients with mental illness such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, but for whom conventional treatment has failed.
Health Canada says it has received 15 applications for psilocybin or MDMA, a psychedelic drug with stimulant properties, since the program resumed.
In April, a clinic called Roots To Thrive in Nanaimo, British Columbia, became the first health center in Canada to offer a legal psilocybin group therapy program in which Hartle participated.
“The therapeutic part is mainly T in this whole process,” Hartle said. “It’s not just taking psychedelics. It’s just a tool in the process; therapy is crucial to achieving a good result.”
Psychedelic treatment, Bui-Nguyen explained, requires multiple therapy sessions before and after patients try the drug. Patients will consume psilocybin while under the supervision of two psychotherapists and will remain in a clinically protected environment for up to six hours.
“It’s not a miracle,” Bui-Nguyen said. “You don’t take psilocybin, and that’s psychedelic travel, and once the depression is cured, no!” The patient has a lot of work to do. But this opens up prospects; creates new pathways in the brain that we are not used to accepting. The patient then explores new avenues to get out of depression. “
In the world’s largest study of the effects of psychedelics on the brain, published in March in the journal Science Advances, lead author Danilo Bzdok said psychedelic drugs may be just the next big thing in improving clinical care for basic mental health conditions.
“There’s something like a renaissance, a resurgence of psychedelics,” Bzdok, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University, said in a recent interview.
He said the benefits based on evidence are very promising. Patients, he said, say they have experienced lasting effects for up to six months after a psychedelic therapy session. They have also experienced a reduction in symptoms associated with mental health conditions, Bzdok said, adding that there are fewer side effects than antidepressants.
Mindspace’s Numinus CEO Peyton Nikuvest said psychedelics have the potential to become a widespread treatment. As Health Canada continues to approve more applications, he hopes the recognition will make treatment much more affordable.
“We haven’t seen significant innovation in mental health care in more than 40 years,” Nikuvest said in a recent interview.
“We are in a time when new and better mental health treatments are needed now more than ever. Whatever you look at, depression, anxiety and suicide … these are all levels that continue to rise without a clear line on how we are going to deal with these huge societal problems. Psychedelics are an opportunity to make a significant impact. “
Hartle’s own experience reflects these hopes. “Improving my mental health is so night and day that it would be difficult to say all the things he does for me,” he said.
“I still have cancer. I’m still having trouble doing what I’m doing physically, but there are days when I don’t even think about it. What would you do to have a day when you just feel normal?”
This story was created with the financial support of the Meta-Canadian Press News Fellowship, which is not involved in the editorial process.
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