Acid Test – study finds psychedelic can help people with anxiety

This week's blog is a bit of a departure from the usual content - it's about the psychedelic drug LSD. It's something that can conjure up images of tie-dye and people dancing in a field. But, mounting research suggests that there's more to it, and psychedelics in general, than that.

Back in 2019, I gave a keynote at a conference at the NEC in Birmingham and then had a fireside chat with Cathy Newman, then a presenter with Channel 4 News. At one point, I was asked about mental health specifically, and I offered a range of potential approaches, including chemical agents known as 'psychedelics'. Cathy Newman looked at me as though I had taken leave of my senses and, if I recall, verbally baulked at the idea.

At the time, that reaction was perhaps understandable. Psychedelics carried decades of cultural baggage. Timothy Leary's 'turn on, tune in, drop out' became a defining cry of America's countercultural movement in the 1960s, and blanket prohibition of psychedelics made meaningful clinical research all but impossible for a generation.

However, this area has seen a significant shift in the last couple of decades, with respected research establishments including Johns Hopkins in the US and the UK's Imperial College entering the fray. Small but rigorous trials had already shown that psilocybin (from 'magic mushrooms') could ease treatment-resistant depression and that MDMA ('ecstasy') could help people process trauma that had resisted years of conventional treatment. Today, both are used clinically for severe cases of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in countries including Australia and Switzerland.

Now a new study has tested Timothy Leary's psychedelic of choice — LSD — for anxiety.

I learned about the study via an article in this week's edition of New Scientist. The trial, run by the biopharmaceutical company Definium Therapeutics, involved more than two hundred adults across the US with moderate-to-severe 'generalised anxiety disorder', all of whom had already tried standard treatments without adequate relief.

After being tapered off their existing medication, participants were randomly assigned to a single 100-microgram dose of LSD, a 50-microgram 'active placebo' dose, or an inactive placebo. The 'active placebo' element is an effort to control for the fact that people can usually tell whether they've taken a psychedelic, even at a low dose.

According to the report, three months after that single dose, the 100-microgram group showed a 9.8-point reduction on a standard 56-point anxiety scale, compared with 4.7 points for placebo, with no severe or lasting side effects reported.

Greg Cooper, a PhD researcher in University College London's psychedelic research unit who was not involved in the study, described the findings as "a milestone", adding: "It looks fairly likely that approval from the [US Food and Drug Administration] will happen in the next year or two, which would set a precedent for approval elsewhere, such as the UK and Europe."

Conventional anxiety medication typically means daily dosing, often for months or years, with side effects that accumulate and a withdrawal process that can be an ordeal in itself. The psychedelic studies that have unfolded over the past decade — in depression, in trauma, and now in anxiety — generally have a similar pattern: meaningful, durable improvement after just one or two carefully supervised administrations.

For me, this is not a minor detail. It represents a genuinely different model of treatment, built around a small number of intensive, structured experiences rather than an open-ended prescription or years of 'talk therapy'.

As with everything in life, psychedelics are not without risk, and I'm not advocating here for self-administration outside a clinical context.

But the direction of travel is clear. What earned me a look of horror on a stage in 2019 is increasingly backed by exactly the kind of evidence that medicine demands. Psychedelics are shedding their past connotations and proving to be one of the most significant developments in mental health treatment in decades.

Those interested in learning more about this burgeoning field might like to read Michael Pollan's book titled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. I found it to be a great primer and beautifully written.