- I've been like, trying to figure out
what was wrong with me for a long time.
I just honestly thought everybody's brain worked
the same as mine. I was just kind of a you know, a wimp,
you know, was kind of a wuss.
I have obsessive thought and the compulsive stuff,
the physical compulsions like for example
taking my dog to the park
and he goes number two and I'm like,
oh I don't wanna touch that but I, I got to
so I pick it up and like the rest of the way
and throw it away then like the rest I'm like,
oh I gotta get it, I gotta get it, I gotta get home,
I gotta get home wash my hands,
I gotta get home wash my hands and like,
like I was just kind of getting worse and worse
and I was getting more obsessive,
more confused, more stressed out, more anxious,
more depressed at different times and just like,
a million of other people I listen to Joe Rogan's podcast
and he always talks about psychedelics.
- High on 20 grams of mushrooms, hugging a tree.
- I stop stuttering in one day
- Wow
- And this speaks to now what was been medically proven
is that we can reset the neurology of the human brain
- And I was like wow okay, maybe there's some sense to this.
Maybe it makes some more sense,
maybe I gotta be a little more open-minded to other thing
because I've been taken for like anxiety and depression
and taking a lot of other medications and
non of them really did anything for OCD.
So I went to a clinicaltrial.gov
and typed in psilocybin.
Misspelled it like seven times but I finally got it right,
then one to one popped up in Tucson and it was like,
potentially recruiting people in like a few months and then
you know, I kept it on my computer for literally a year
and I'd refreshed it every Monday and it,
and then one Monday I went into work and I refreshed it
and it's like now looking for recruits actively
but I emailed them I said hey, I'm interested.
I had like a phone screening,
ultimately went down there once
for like a three hour pre-screening and I was in.
I was in, I was a scoring pretty high on the,
the OCD scale so.
- So one of the problems that all of us face
is knowing did we do something right
or conversely did we do something wrong?
And if something we do doesn't match up with our expectation
we get a signal that says you made an error.
One of the troubles in OCD
is that this signals a little too strong.
So, we think about there being kind of a hyperactive
error monitoring signal in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
So, this task is a very simple task
that's designed to make people make errors
and what we see in patients with OCD
is this error signal is stronger.
- During the early 1990s I had a patient in our clinic
who was having trouble with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
He was able to relate to us
that during a period of time
when this person was using drugs of different kinds
he noticed that when using freeze-dry psilocybin mushrooms
his obsessive compulsive disorder got dramatically better
and so based on that we decided to go ahead and pursue
a study of psilocybin.
At the time there hadn't been any other studies
of psilocybin or LSD in a clinical setting in
close to three decades.
- Dr. Marina was a pioneer
in being able to do this kind of research when he ran the,
the first study over a decade ago.
There's been the promise of psychedelics for
changing people's symptoms for a very long time.
The drugs got stigmatized,
they were seen as having no medical value.
- [Television Informer] There is a medical risk
to the brain and body.
Perhaps the biggest risk is the placing of the psyche
in peril.
- I'm like not exaggerating at all.
I never did drugs.
I like never drank, I grew up like real religious.
Like, really you know, in conservative type household.
I'd like watch them youtube videos and stuff
like people explaining it and this is what might happen,
you gotta be ready. This is why you might see.
- What is this alien technology
and how do I use these human hands again.
It was very complicated
and it was like every five seconds I'd forget where I was.
- Psychedelic drugs are very powerful substances.
For millennia, indigenous cultures have used them
in the context of traditional, spiritual practices.
Psilocybin is just one of them.
- The way it's setup is there's eight visits.
Four of them are placebos,
two of them are low dose and two of them are high dose
and so the first week I get a pill and I'm sitting there
and I'm like, waiting I'm waiting for the good stuff
and then like, 30-45 minutes, an hour goes by
and I'm sitting there as if I had just taken a Tylenol.
So I have to sit there for literally like, 12 hours.
So the next week I go back week two.
Week two, nothing happens.
Same thing and then week three I go in there,
nothing again, I'm like three weeks in a row
and at some, I'm kind of getting pissed at this point
and so weak four, nothing again
and I'm getting more stress and getting more anxious.
I feel like my OCD is like spiraling out of control like,
and then so week five he gives me a pill
and I'm laying there like 15, 20 minutes go by and like,
30 min, also like my spine just starts tingling.
My brain starts tingling.
It's like on Star Wars when they hit lights beam,
like all the lights just start flying by and I was like,
oh my god.
- The rationale for introducing imaging is so
we can actually see what's going on in the brain
before the time starts, midway through the trial
and the end of the trial.
This is a technique called diffusion tensor imaging.
It actually looks at the white matter tracks in the brain.
So it tells you how different parts of the brains
are connected to each other.
- So, this is what normal state of consciousness looks like
after someone was given a placebo or a sugar pill.
This is what the brain looks like
under the acute influence of psilocybin or magic mushrooms.
The brain sort of is shaken up and sort of rewired right
so a lot of these regions that
before weren't talking to one another
are now talking at access and so,
you can kind of think about this as
adding a lot of flexibility to your brain
and resetting your brain.
- There's like a river and a rainbow of just like,
a gazillion colors that you can't explain
and it was like flowing over me and I just felt amazing
and you're a different dimension I guess, more or less.
Whatever that means and so like one, like my dad is is 84.
He's got dementia real bad right now and so,
he's at a point where he's, he's starting to shut down
like he's, having a hard time talking.
A lot of things.
So I had this experience where my dad came to me like,
totally like coherent and I'm like,
it's like super corny.
I wanna be like, emotional like,
but my dad came to me
and he just like, gave me a hug and he's like,
hey how's it going? And I was like, hey Dad
and we just like had a conversation like we did like,
20 years ago and he's like, like I'm proud of ya
and I was like.
So then he kinda just like walked off and it was like I.
It's kind of like I got to say goodbye to him.
So yeah, I don't know, I know how it works like
if that's something you know, I wanted or something that
existed in some other realm.
That was the first experience.
- And put quite simply it helps people get unstuck.
You know, I think you know people don't get into these,
these situations that are so distressing overnight, right,
but once they're there these can kind of
take on a life of their own and self-perpetuate
and I think the drug offers a moment to step back
and step out of that and see things differently.
- The obsessive thinking,
which was the biggest problem I had.
It went from like 100 you know, a scale of one to 100
I was like 99.
It went down there probably like 20.
It felt like, you could like physically see
whatever the compulsive portion
and it kind of like,
you like almost would see like this come,
like this obsessive thing like dissipate.
- If you just think about the impact
for the amount of time invested,
what else could possibly be this strong?
- You don't often see something in psychiatry
that will pretty immediately
change an individual's symptoms
that haven't been changed for years.
- I'm hopeful that it, that it gets mainstreamed because,
you know, if somebody can get the same experience I had,
the same help the same benefit, yeah, that would,
that would be awesome I mean,
who doesn't want people to be happier?