The Use of Hallucinogens in Pharmacotherapy

Abstract

Today in the United States, one in twenty-five people are forced to live with bipolar disorder, depression, and other detrimental mental illnesses (Center for Disease Control, 2018). Many mental illnesses arise due to different types of trauma and early life experiences (Center for Disease Control, 2018). As discussed in the research paper “In Their Own Words: Resilience among Haitian Survivors of the 2010 Earthquake”, trauma refers to “either physical or psychological, life-threatening injury resulting from catastrophic personal, familial, or disaster experiences, from which the individual or community cannot escape, but to which the reaction is one of terror, helplessness, and a sense of being overwhelmed” (Rahill et al., 2016, p. 581). Unfortunately, many mental illnesses and disorders do not have sustainable pharmaceutical treatments. Many current medications have various proposed limitations, such as not being fully productive or having an array of negative side effects. However, new research has uncovered that hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin may be viable options. The National Library of Medicine refers to The Journal of Neuroscience, vocalizing that new research has shown evidence regarding the therapeutic properties of hallucinogens, specifically LSD and psilocybin (De Gregorio et al., 2021). On the contrary, professor Robin Lester Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London explains that psilocybin can drastically decrease brain blood flow and resumes in a second research paper testifying that LSD can lead to “decreased alpha power, predicting the magnitude of visual hallucinations; and decreased DMN integrity, PH-RSC RSFC, and delta and alpha power” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016, p. 4856). Succinctly, an analysis of different scientific perspectives demonstrates that utilizing hallucinogens in pharmacotherapy may be a potential treatment for mental illnesses and disorders stemming from trauma.