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Megan Nugent, a licensed mental health counselor offering trauma-informed therapy, has found ketamine to be a helpful tool for her patients to release burdens, find inner peace and live more harmonious lives.

“Pharmaceutical drugs tend to be more like you’re a passive participant … whereas (ketamine-assisted therapy) is very active … It’s much more intentional, where you’re taking it and you have an intention around it, hopefully,” Nugent said. “So it’s helping you to kind of open up and get to the core of what’s causing the stuff.”

While clinical trials and scientific research on psychedelic therapy, as well as pushes to legalize psychedelic drugs, proliferate across the world, accessible treatments have emerged in Syracuse. Nugent is one of Syracuse’s first to offer ketamine-assisted psychotherapy — a practice she began in 2022.

Psychedelics are listed as Schedule I substances by the Drug Enforcement Administration with “no currently accepted medical use.” There are potential dangers, according to The New York Times, as frequent psychedelic use may lead to seizures, hemorrhages or overdependence.

But research shows that psychedelics are useful in treating depression, anxiety, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and more. In 2023, psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms,” was legalized in Oregon and Colorado. Australia became the first country in the world to legalize psychedelic drugs to treat mental health conditions. Psychedelics — besides ketamine — are illegal in New York.

Research has increased “drastically” in recent years, said Louis Plourde, who authored a Jan. 22 study on Canada’s social acceptability of psilocybin-assisted therapy. He said Johns Hopkins “propelled” this renaissance in psychedelic research with Roland R. Griffiths’ 2006 study on psilocybin.

“The U.S. is really well-funded. We have a big footprint in the world in terms of mass media consumption,” said Brandon Weiss, a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. “We talk about the Psychedelic Renaissance starting with (Griffiths’) paper, but scientists like Franz Vollenweider from Switzerland had been doing work with psychedelics from the 1980s.”

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Weiss is currently part of the leadership team on a trial examining the effect of psilocybin therapy for PTSD. He said more research is happening in 2024 as opposed to 10 or 20 years ago because “the results have been so compelling,” and the subject has recently been “highly publicized” and “invited into the pages of the highest-tier medical journals,” such as Nature Medicine.

“During the psychedelic experience, all these rigidified structures in the brain are lifted for a while. People have a very direct experience of what they are, how they feel, how they relate to the world,” Plourde said. “It’s a very revelatory state of consciousness where you may have lots of ‘eurekas’ and many new perceptions. It’s like a reset in the brain.”

85% of Canadians believe the public health system should cover the costs of these therapies, Plourde said, because they can become expensive with two therapists and “preparation” and “integration” sessions — which Weiss, Plourde and Nugent all said are necessary.

With 20% of Canadians having a favorable view of legalization of psilocybin for non-medical use, Plourde said his study shows that “people have a positive view of this, but still when it’s within the confines of medical practice.”

Weiss was previously a postdoctoral neuropsychopharmacology fellow at Imperial College London, which he said is “a big research hub for psychedelic study.” He now works in David Yaden’s lab and is involved with a professorship Yaden oversees, which is funded to examine the study of secular spirituality through a scientific lens. Weiss uses psychedelics as a tool to study that, he said.

Johns Hopkins is also starting a clinic that “may very well be the first to administer MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD,” Weiss said. Because Nugent specializes in complex trauma, she said she wants to administer MDMA to clients but can’t because it’s illegal.

Nugent said she knows that anyone who has had a psychedelic experience knows how powerful these “tools” can be. She considers ketamine a psychedelic, though she said this fact is up for debate because it — unlike psilocybin and LSD — is not plant-based or natural.

“The word psychedelic means soul or mind-manifesting. So really, I think really good therapy could be psychedelic,” Nugent said. “Anything that helps you to get to a different level of consciousness or open your awareness. Psychedelic is an adjective, not a noun.”

Published on February 22, 2024 at 12:12 am

Contact Ahna: arflemin@syr.edu