Moving beyond the 1960s counterculture, psychedelics, including psilocybin and MDMA, have emerged as promising novel treatments for depression and other psychiatric disorders. Research indicates that these psychedelic compounds may promote neuroplasticity, creating a unique opportunity to change patterns in brain activity, and in turn, improve symptoms, behavior and functioning.
We really want to understand what is happening in the brain, from molecular to cellular to network and beyond. What happens that allows people to improve and recover?
Last year the Mass General launched a new program, the Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics. This is a collaborative endeavor including researchers from the Department of Psychiatry, the Chemical Neurobiology Laboratory, and the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. The Center seeks to understand how psychedelics enhance the brain’s capacity for change, to optimize current treatments and to create new treatments for mental illness, and to make the term “treatment resistant” obsolete.
In an interview with Harvard Medicine, members of the Center, including Jerry Rosenbaum, MD, Sharmin Ghaznavi, MD PhD, Stephen Haggarty, PhD, and Franklin King IV, MD, discuss our changing perceptions of psychedelics, emphasizing the importance of well-designed research studies to better understand how this unique class of medications affects brain functioning.
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Altering Perceptions on Psychedelics (Harvard Medicine)
