This week, we've heard from researchers trying to untangle the effects of the "trip" that often comes with psychedelics and ketamine from the ways these drugs might change the human brain. For part three of our series on psychedelic drug research, we get a glimpse into why some researchers are taking the "trip" out of these drugs altogether. You don't need to have heard the previous two episodes to understand this episode on what could be next for psychedelic medicine.Catch the rest of this series on psychedelics and related drugs this week by following us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. They're the previous two episodes in our podcast feed.Have other questions about psychedelics and the brain? Let us know by emailing [email protected]! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
What are the key issues with traditional psychedelics?
Yeah. And David says that when researchers eventually started studying the effects of ketamine on depression in animals, they saw that it seemed to help do this. And it worked much faster than the kinds of antidepressants we'd been using since the 1980s. So that's like Prozac, Zoloft, things like that.
Oh, OK. So this could be like a different kind of treatment, maybe for people who don't respond to those medications.
Yeah. David told me that he and lots of other researchers started looking for other compounds that could also do something like this, quickly help regrow these mental forests, these sites of connection in the brain. He coined a term for drugs like this. He called them psychoplastogens. Okay. And that includes psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. A.K.A.
magic mushrooms.
Yeah. And just to be clear, Gina, a lot of this research is happening in animals. So scientists think that something similar is happening in humans, but but they don't know enough yet about how these drugs work to say for sure. Still, David says that it got researchers thinking, what if people didn't have to take a drug every single day?
moving us more towards a healing-based approach, where if you take a drug once or a few times, that could lead to long-lasting therapeutic benefit. So now you're not thinking about taking a drug every single day for the rest of your life. You can take the drug, have this healing effect, and then not have to take it continually.
There is a version of ketamine that the FDA approved in 2019 to treat depression that didn't respond to our current treatments like SSRIs. It's a nose spray called Spravato. But even that requires patients to go to a clinic. They have to stay there for at least a couple of hours while they get the treatment. And they need someone else to drive them home because ketamine can make people dissociate.
Oh. So researchers like David are trying to figure out, are there drugs that have similar effects on the brain without all the trippy side effects?
Right, and we've already talked about how a lot of people can't take psychedelics, so that's part of the motivation here too, right?
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