Psilocybin therapy may ease fear and depression in cancer patients

Instead of using psychedelics as party drugs or for “wild trips,” researchers are testing them as serious tools for people facing mortality and not finding relief in standard treatments.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and New York University have begun a major clinical trial to test psilocybin. The hope is to help people with advanced cancer who are coping with anxiety, depression, and fear of death.

The trial builds on decades of small but striking studies showing that a single guided psilocybin session can reduce existential distress in people with life-threatening illnesses.

This time, the question is being asked in a larger, more controlled way, with carefully trained therapists, standardized dosing, and long follow-ups.

Patients need more than medication

The study is led by Dr. Stacy Fischer, a geriatric and palliative care specialist at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, along with psychologist Jim Grigsby at CU Denver and psychiatrist Dr. Steven Ross at NYU.

Dr. Fischer noted that many of her patients with advanced cancer don’t get enough relief from the usual options.

“Antidepressant medications, like SSRIs, often have no benefit or very little benefit for these patients,” she said. “There are real limits to our current pharmacological treatments.”

Talk therapy can help, but “it’s often a longer process, and especially when people aren’t feeling well, it can be really hard to make the gains we’re looking for,” she added.

Exercise, another good tool against depression, is often off the table. “They are facing physical challenges. When your body can no longer do the exercise, that’s another thing to grieve.”

Psilocybin offers something different: one or two intensive sessions framed by therapy that may shift how cancer patients relate to their illness, their fears, even death itself.

Inside the psilocybin cancer trial

Patients in the trial have three preparatory therapy sessions first. Then they receive either 25 milligrams of synthetic psilocybin or a placebo during an eight-hour dosing day.

The setting is intentionally calming: a quiet room, eye shades, headphones with a curated music playlist, and two therapists in the room the whole time. If needed, the team can give an anti-anxiety medicine, but Fischer noted that is “highly unlikely.”

The crucial piece comes afterward. “We call it ‘integration’ because it is an opportunity for patients to integrate the experience of the dosing session into the larger context of their lives,” she said.

The same therapists meet with patients several times to help them make sense of what came up – grief, trauma, love, fear, even spiritual imagery.

To make sure people are guided well, the Center for Psychedelic Research at CU runs a 16-week facilitator-training program, the first in Colorado approved under the state’s Natural Medicine Health Act. Grigsby says that support is not an add-on; it’s the point.

What psilocybin feels like

Fischer can’t say who in the current trial got psychedelics versus placebo. But she and her colleagues are building on Ross’s 2016 trial.

That study found patients quickly had less depression, decreased cancer-related existential distress, increased spiritual well-being and quality of life, and improved attitudes toward death. Many of those improvements “potentially” lasted up to eight months.

Some also had powerful, hard-to-describe experiences. “People often describe this experience as ‘ineffable,’ or beyond words,” Fischer said.

“It’s the idea that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are all connected – and that this isn’t a subjective belief, but an objective reality.”

Effects of the psychedelic experience

According to Grigsby, these reports sound very much like age-old spiritual experiences from many cultures.

Still, he cautions that not everyone has a mystical trip. “There is something about the nature of the psychedelic experience itself that has therapeutic effects,” Grigsby said.

Psilocybin seems to loosen rigid thought patterns, light up communication between brain networks, and create a window of neuroplasticity – time when the brain is unusually open to new perspectives.

As Fischer put it, the old “This is your brain on drugs” slogan got it wrong. “Actually, when you look at functional MRIs of what’s happening when people have taken a psychedelic, it’s like their whole brain is lit up with connections.”

Psychedelics return to science

This trial isn’t springing out of nowhere. Grigsby points out that in the 1950s and ’60s, researchers in Canada and the U.S. ran hundreds of psychedelic studies on alcoholism, anxiety, and end-of-life distress – until the work was shut down for political reasons.

Interest crept back in the 1990s, and landmark studies at Johns Hopkins and NYU in the 2000s and 2010s showed it was possible to give psilocybin safely and produce lasting psychological benefits.

What’s different now is the rigor and the safeguards. “A lot of times, psychiatrists doing research, in particular with LSD, would just give people the drug and then leave the room,” Grigsby said.

Today, patients are screened, prepared, supported, and followed – because what comes up can be life-changing.

Psilocybin beyond cancer care

The Colorado team is already spinning up other trials. Some use psilocybin for treatment-resistant major depression and anhedonia.

Others employ psilocybin-assisted therapy for people in remission from breast or ovarian cancer but terrified of recurrence. There is even a proposed study on psychedelics for chronic pain in older adults.

The idea is to move from “this might help” to precision psychedelic medicine – matching the right person, the right condition, and the right protocol.

Fischer knows the path will be slow. Stigma, federal scheduling, and uneven state laws are all real obstacles. But she’s optimistic.

“We have compelling preliminary evidence to suggest it works,” she said. “I think over time, these stigmas will fall away, especially if we conduct high-quality, rigorous science.”

Grigsby, who’s watched one psychedelic wave crash before, is more cautious – but hopeful. “I was optimistic in the ‘70s,” he said. “But based on what we know so far, and a lot of associated research, I think it’s going to be a very important approach to treatment.”

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. 

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–