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Magic Mushrooms for Depression: Brain Scans Show What’s Happening

A new study has shed light on what’s going on in the brain as psilocybin treats depression

Imagine a house share of several people. The house, technically, functions fine. One housemate sorts out the food. One earns the money. One cleans. One does laundry. Except they don’t help each other, don’t collaborate, and don’t listen to each other. They don’t even talk to each other.

Sounds pretty miserable in there, right? In a very simplified way, that’s what a new study has found is going on in the mind of depressed people, with different parts of the mind working isolated from the others.

Psilocybin, the substance responsible for the magic in magic mushrooms, has been under study for some time now and showing very promising results to help with depression. But on a physical level, no one, until now, knew why. Now, scientists have had a glimpse with the help of brain scan machines.

Let’s go back to that miserable house share. Now, the housemate in charge of the food has prepared a new soup for the housemates, and it contains magic mushrooms. What happens next? They all start talking to each other. And suddenly, overnight, the place gets happier. The even better news is that the next day, after the mushrooms have worn off, the walls have stopped moving and the pattern on the sofa has stopped being so incredibly funny, the housemates are still talking to each other. The living experience in the house has been transformed. It’s no longer a miserable place to be. No longer so… depressing.

So it is, according to the new brain scan study, with psilocybin and the depressed brain. Parts of the brain that struggled to interact and remained entrenched in their neural patterns became more fluid and communicated more with other parts of the brain.

One important element of these findings is they show how psilocybin works differently to antidepressants. As study author David Nutt says;

“These findings are important because for the first time we find that psilocybin works differently from conventional antidepressants — making the brain more flexible and fluid, and less entrenched in the negative thinking patterns associated with depression. This confirms psilocybin could be a real alternative approach to depression treatments.” — Nutt

For sufferers of depression who haven’t been responsive to antidepressants, this is very promising indeed. Especially when compared with a traditional antidepressant, psilocybin appears to work faster and with longer-lasting effects.

How effective was the psilocybin in this study?

Participants in the study had taken psilocybin twice over three weeks, as part of previous studies on psilocybin therapy. The results can be compared to people who take an antidepressant pill daily:

Psilocybin: After three weeks and two psilocybin experiences, participants averaged a drop in depression scores of 64%. Low depression scores were maintained for at least six months.

Antidepressant pills (Lexapro): After six weeks of daily pills, the depression score dropped by 37%, with the improvements not expected to continue after stopping the course.

So, on paper, that’s a win for the mushrooms.

While the pills target serotonin levels to help with the feelings of depression, the psilocybin gets parts of the brain talking, so the negative feelings are less entrenched. The brain can find new ways of doing things by talking to itself in a way a depressed brain can’t.

So, magic mushrooms are better than antidepressants then?

That’s not necessarily the case, though it’s easy and tempting to jump to that conclusion. It’s complicated and what works for one won’t work for another.

There’s a very common fallacy that you can spot in the thoughts of the psychedelic community, especially in users of mushrooms and Ayahuasca. That common thought is this: ‘Of course mushrooms are better than antidepressants… pills are synthetic chemicals, mushrooms are natural.’

This is called the appeal to nature fallacy, where our minds like to simplify things to nature is good, unnatural is bad. This is not good thinking. If you pick the wrong mushroom, you will die horribly, however natural it was. Deadly nightshade berries are called that for a reason. We can’t let our brains fall for the ‘nature is better’ trick.

This is why we rely on science. If we’re making personal decisions on how to treat ourselves, even if self-medicating, we need to be able to think clearly to make our decisions and not fall for common thinking errors.

Internal communication for mental health has a precedent

There’s a fascinating branch of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS), where the idea is to get parts of the mind to talk to each other and come to agreements and work together. The system uses talk and imagination.

In early research, the method has been showing positive results for treating depression, even in cases where medication and the more common cognitive behavioural therapy haven’t helped.

In the houseshare analogy, IFS would be like having a therapist show up, sit the housemates down, and get them talking and coming to agreements.

The two methods of creating in-brain communication both seem to be very effective. But we can’t assume they’re doing the same thing.

Psilocybin is shown through scans to improve communication in different parts of the brain. IFS encourages communication in different parts of the mind. These parts of the mind don’t necessarily live in different parts of the physical brain.

The two methods support each other in certain important aspects though: depression can be helped by getting whatever is in our heads to communicate better with itself. They do that in using very different ways.

In a nutshell, the study says psilocybin may work like this;

“…psilocybin’s antidepressant action may depend on a global increase in brain network integration.” — study authors

Internal Family Systems, like this;

“Just as our bodies are made of many parts that form a dynamic, interwoven system that works together, so it is with our psyches.” — Ralph de la Rosa

There’s one more little bit of psychology that we can possibly infer that our wellbeing is related to internal communication of different parts, be that of the mind or the brain: how we refer to ourselves in our inner voice affects our wellbeing.

People who talk to themselves as “You” generally have better wellbeing than those using “I”. There’s no inter-mind communication using I. The part of us that I refers to is itself. When you comes into it, that’s a part of us separate from the bit that uses I. People who use “We” also tend to feel better than those who use I. This again could be related to in-mind communication. This is all inferred and would need proper study.

But what if this inter-mind/brain communication could be done with extra love and compassion for the parts that communicate? Could that help?

Enter MDMA.

MDMA therapy and in-brain communication

MDMA, also under much study to help with various psychological disorders, works, in a super-simplified explanation, by adding compassion to proceedings. In the case of PTSD, for example, it’s by adding compassion to the memories that underly the trauma.

So would adding MDMA to IFS therapy add compassion to how we view and communicate with ourselves, and aid our mental health? The link is in early stages, but it seems so. That’s like entering our miserable houseshare and passing around ecstasy pills — and getting the housemates to talk to and feel very fond of each other in a way the compassion will last even after the drug has worn off. That’s a healthy state for a brain to live in.

Back to the psilocybin study, and brain communication. Would adding MDMA to mushrooms be useful in the same way? Possibly. Research into such an idea has begun, though first with LSD rather than psilocybin. Underground, adding MDMA to mushroom therapy has been used to aid the experience, and to take the edge off a bad psychedelic experience. If inter-brain communication really is the key to aiding depression with psychedelics, adding some extra compassion to the mix may be an effective idea.

Talk to yourself

It seems that one possibility is that helping depression may come down to good, old-fashioned communication. It may just mean doing it on the level of neural pathways with the assistance of psychedelics such as psilocybin.

Don’t rush out and buy or pick yourself a bag of mushrooms though. The study authors stress not to self-medicate based on these results, and psychedelics can have dangers for some people. Taking psychedelics for any reason is a big decision and should be considered thoroughly, with risks in mind as well as benefits.

The new study is another in the growing list in support of using psychedelics to help with mental health, and one of the first to give a clue of how they work physically in our brains. Plenty more research is to come.

By Alexander M. Combstrong (Medium). Image: Pixabay at Pexels.

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