How Seeing God Might Be The Secret To The Most Cutting-Edge Mental Health Treatments – Forbes

Beautiful sunset in Menorca Island, Spain with the sunraysrays of the sun coming through the clouds and falling towards the sea

During Seth Wilsons last ketamine treatment, he set an intention to see his late mother. Wilson, a 41-year-old sommelier who owns a wine shop in Chicago, has been dealing with depression and anxiety since he was 13 years old and sought psychedelic-assisted therapy to get better. Coincidentally, this session happened to be on what wouldve been his mothers 77th birthday. He put on eyeshades, headphones and sat back in a leather recliner as he was injected with 110 milligrams of the dissociative anesthetic ketamine.

Within seconds, he was blasted into the cosmos and felt her presence. His mother took him to experience her birth and showed him the afterlife.

I can remember being part of this liquid world and as we're in this space together, she said, your birth is my birth, and we are the same, Wilson recounts.

He says the experience helped him deal with the trauma of his mothers death and helped him manage his anxiety and depression by showing him there is more to life than the physical world.

This is the answer; this is what it feels like to be beyond Earth, his mother said to him. It was an incredibly profound and moving experience.

Humans have used psychedelics in cultural and religious rituals for thousands of years. Over the last 80 years, these powerful substances have been adopted for self-help, mental health, and recreational purposes. At the same time, Americans are becoming less religious. In 1999, 70% of Americans said they were a member of a church, synagogue or mosque but that number fell to 47% in 2020. The number of people affiliated with any religion has plummeted: 29% of Americans identified as agnostic or atheist in 2021, up from 18% in 2011, according to thePew Research Center.Now that the psychedelic renaissance is underway and companies and nonprofits are racing to get these molecules approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as medicines when combined with therapy to treat depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, one question seems important: Is it the drugs, or is it divine experiences thats making people feel better?

In our apostate culture, could the secret be that we just all need some spirituality, and these molecules are helping?

For Wilson, he says the divine experience, coupled with multiple sessions of therapy over three weeks, gave him the breakthrough that decades of anti-depressants and traditional talk therapy couldnt.

Were all searching for the ineffable and its so deeply personal, he says. I think the word God can be triggering for people, but its about this trust and faith that there is something bigger and grander than ourselves. And that this physical world doesnt matter, and all our problems dont matterthere is something greater.

Alex Belser, the chief clinical officer of Cybin, a Toronto-based psychedelic therapeutics startup, has been studying psychedelics for two decades and has conducted clinical trials of psilocybin and MDMA as potential treatments for depression, substance use, post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Belser says eliciting mystical-type experiences is one of the prevailing theories about why psychedelic-assisted therapy reduces symptoms in patients with depression, anxiety, and other conditions. During many clinical trials, patients are given the Mystical Experience Questionnaire,a 30-question self-report that is used to measure the effects of hallucinogens. The questions a patient answers are rather woo-woodid you have a profound sense of unity, a strong sense of awe, a feeling of interconnectedness with other people and all things, a sense of ineffability, a sense of timelessness? but he says for many studies there has been a correlation between high mystical scores and greater reduction in a patients symptoms.

This is a strong predictor of effectiveness in psychedelic medicines, says Belser, who is a licensed psychologist and a psychedelic researcher at Yale University.

Belser says definitive conclusions cannot be drawn yet as the mechanism of action for psychedelic drugs is still a black box and too much weight should not be given to divine experiences.

Florian Brand, the CEO and cofounder of Atai Life Sciences, a publicly traded German biosciences company focused on psychedelics and mental health, says its still speculation but the mystical experience does seem to have some significance in patient outcomes.

There might be benefits [from the mystical experience], Brand says. I think there are multiple factors that could contribute to the efficacy, yet it's still early days to say that it's the divine experience.

I do think for many people the connection to spirituality and the divine often plays a very powerful, interesting role in the healing.

Atai is the largest investor in Compass Pathways, a U.K.-based clinical stage company that is developinga patented form of psilocybinthe active compound in magic mushroomsto be used in conjunction with therapy to treat depression. Having undergone a psychedelic-assisted therapy session with psilocybin, Brand says the mystical experience he had helped him.

From a spiritual perspective, I personally can say that I wasn't religious or spiritual at all before undergoing my very first psilocybin-assisted therapy session, says Brand. Coming out of it, I definitely have a different access to spirituality compared to going into the session.

Lars Christian Wilde, the president, chief business officer, and cofounder of Compass Pathways, says patients have different ways to describe a mystical experience but no matter the description an intense experience correlates to a positive therapeutic outcome.

Some people say, Wow, I met God, while others say, Wow, I understood that my ego is an illusion, says Wilde. Depending on what your cultural anchor you have a different way to describe that experience, but indeed, it seems to be critically important for the therapeutic effect of not only psilocybin, but probably many of the serotonergic substances.

In November, Compass Pathways published data from its much-anticipated phase 2b clinical trialon psilocybin-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant depression. The study found that patients who took a single psychedelic dose of psilocybin, 25mg, in conjunction with therapy reported almost immediate and significant reduction in depressive symptoms that lasted weeks compared with patients who were given a placebo dose.

Wilde says more research needs to be done but it seems that when a person has an intense psychedelic experience, they have a bigger reset effect on the brain.

The reason psychedelic drugs have been found to alleviate symptoms of depression and PTSD in clinical trials, it is thought, is due the signaling of the 5-HT-2A receptor, which sparks whats called neuroplasticity.Neuroplasticity helps the brain form new neural connections, which is believed to generate rapid and sustained positive mood effects. In a slate of studies, psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy and MDMA-assisted therapy have provided almost immediate reductions in symptoms of depression and PTSD after a single high dose. The effects last months in some patients.

Prescription sales for depression is estimated to be $50 billion a year globally, while the mental health market is worth about $100 billion in annual sales. Biotech analysts say that FDA-approved psychedelic-assisted therapy could seize billions in annual sales if approved by the FDA.

Natalie Ginsberg, the global impact officer of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, says there is a great history of the intersection between psychoactive drugs, religion, and healing. From medicine healers in indigenous cultures to the role of cannabis in Judaismthe drug is mentioned in the Torah and was found at an altar outside of Jerusalem from 800 B.C.

I do think for many people the connection to spirituality and the divine often plays a very powerful, interesting role in the healing, says Ginsberg.

Psychedelic research pioneer Rick Doblin, who founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in 1986,has dedicated his lifes work to psychedelic drugs. MAPS is currently trying to bring MDMA-assisted therapy to market as an FDA-approved treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. In May, his organization released data from its phase three trial on MDMA-assisted therapy with shockingly positive results. The double-blind, placebo-controlledstudyfound that 67% of participants who received MDMA combined with psychotherapy no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis, compared with 32% in the placebo group. Doblin is hopeful that FDA approval is within the next couple of years.

But Doblin says at least for patients with PTSD undergoing MDMA-assisted therapy, there is no connection between mystical experiences and better therapeutic outcomes. It doesn't seem to show up and be important to reduce PTSD symptoms, says Doblin.

Master of Molly: Rick Doblin, the founder of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS is likely to become the first company to gain FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy to treat PTSD.

Doblin says the mystical experience does seem to have some benefits, especially for people with depression, but he is cautious to give these types of experiences too much credit.

There are people that get better without having a mystical experience and there are people that have a mystical experience without getting better, says Doblin. Correlation is not the same as causation.

Doblin says it is important to realize that the drugs are not the therapy, but that the drugs enhance therapy. The risk of pinning too much on achieving a mystical experience, Doblin explains, is that you can avoid dealing with and working through the problems that brought you to therapy in the first place. The point is to deal with your problems, not avoid them.

You [dont want to] just talk about, how, Oh, I'm all one with the universe, but then you come back down and yell at your wife, Doblin explains.

The best way to look at it is like the spectrum of the rainbow, Doblin continues. There's all these different colors, and these are all layers of consciousness, and you need all of them together. If you focus on just biography, like Freud did, and you ignore spirituality, it's incomplete. But if you focus only on the spiritual and not on the biographical, it's similarly incomplete.

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How Seeing God Might Be The Secret To The Most Cutting-Edge Mental Health Treatments - Forbes