Gared Hansen cuts psilocybin mushrooms in his Uptown Fungus lab to prepare for distribution in Springfield, Ore., Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Craig Mitchelldyer)
More commonly referred to as magic mushrooms, psilocybin is being studied for its effects on depression, anxiety, chronic pain and other issues.
Could psilocybin be a solution to Hoosiers’ mental health problems?
Now the Senate Health and Provider Services Committee has discussed Senate Bill 139, which would establish a research fund within the Indiana Department of Health to dole out to Indiana research institutions to “study the use of psilocybin to treat mental health and other medical conditions.”
The FDA has designated psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy, bill author Sen. Ed Charbonneau, R-Valparaiso, said in a committee meeting last week. He made it clear when introducing the bill that it in no way legalizes anything that isn’t already legal but seeks to elevate the conversation around psilocybin.
First to testify was a researcher from Johns Hopkins University.
“The current evidence based for the safety and effectiveness of psilocybin therapy is compelling enough for me to strongly recommend more research supporting psilocybin therapy,” said Dr. Brandon Weiss, a clinical psychologist and faculty member at Johns Hopkins University within the Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.
Weiss said psilocybin can increase brain connectivity and desegregate parts of the brain, making it “globally connected” and helping patients with issues like depression think in new ways.
“Greater global connectivity under psilocybin could point to new perspectives on oneself in the world or to lessen entrenched negative thoughts about life’s possibilities,” Weiss said.
Because psilocybin can create more neural plasticity and create more connections between neurons, “many scientists believe that this can support new learning, making people more susceptible to positive life changes, even in adulthood,” said Weiss.
Psilocybin has many uses, according to Weiss: It has so far shown “positive effects on cancer-related anxiety and major depression, treatment-resistant depression, bipolar two, alcohol-use disorder and anorexia nervosa.”
One testifier came with firsthand experience of psilocybin therapy.
After a traumatic brain injury in 2018, doctors diagnosed Ken Maxwell, a veteran from North Carolina, with cluster headaches. About 0.1% of the population are affected, according to the American Migraine Foundation.
Dubbed “suicide headaches” for their extreme pain, cluster headaches are “characterized by a unilateral pain in or behind the eye. A hot, stabbing, piercing pain. Heavy, tearing, drooping eyelid and extreme restlessness and agitation,” Maxwell said. Cluster headaches usually last one to three hours, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Maxwell said his attacks have been so severe in the past that he has broken three crowns clenching his teeth from pain and has had as many as nine attacks in a day.
In an online group of people with cluster headaches, some shared their experiences self-treating with psilocybin. Although he was desperate for relief, Maxwell said he was apprehensive because he had never used what he considered “recreational drugs.”
But in 2020, when the group shared that a Yale study would examine the effects of psilocybin, he applied and was accepted, starting his first dose in October of that year.
“The first trial provided modest benefits, but the second round of three treatments of psilocybin broke a 415-consecutive-day streak of those attacks. During that time, I had 1,650 attacks, that’s 3.5 a day,” Maxwell said.
He said the treatment took place in a controlled and fully staffed hospital and the experience “was as safe as I could possibly hope for.”
After further rounds of treatment, his attacks went down 43% to 591 attacks a year, and the most severe attacks went down from 72 to just 13 a year.
“Although I am not in remission, it was psilocybin that has made this disease manageable and has given me my life back,” he said.
“Psilocybin has allowed me to return to a more productive and vital life as a father, husband, and business and community leader … I would not be here today to share my story without that medical trail and psilocybin,” he said.
“This is in no way fringe science,” Dr. Richard Feldman, a family physician and member of the Interim Study Committee on Public Health, Behavioral Health and Human Services, said after listing the various organizations, colleges and universities that have studied psilocybin, including Harvard and New York University.
Feldman says psilocybin is considered a safe medication that has a virtually unobtainable lethal dose and is non-addictive.
“Side effects are transient, and it is safer than many other psychoactive medications,” he said.
Passed by the committee, the bill now heads to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Arianna Hunt is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
