Depression is incredibly common – the World Health Organization estimates that around 280 million people suffer from it globally. In the UK, Mind says three in 100 people have depression in any given week, with eight in 100 suffering from mixed anxiety and depression (the most common form of mental-health problem in my country).

But, although we now have a range of effective treatments, many people experience repeated episodes throughout their lifetime. Why? I would argue that the reason depression often comes back is because of its most common cause. One study found that 75 per cent of the chronically depressed patients involved reported histories of childhood trauma.

As I often explain in these posts and my teaching, childhood trauma is incredibly widespread and, very sadly, makes us vulnerable to a wide range of physical and mental-health problems as adults, including repeated episodes of depression.

As someone who has a lived experience of depression and is passionate about helping people recover from it, I am always seeking the newest and most effective treatments available. That’s why I have trained in CBT, schema therapy, internal family systems and other evidence-based, trauma-informed models. I want as many tools at my disposal as possible, so I can best help the people who come to see me, often in great distress.

The psychedelic revolution

All of this explains my fascination with the recent research into psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. In fact, calling it recent is not entirely accurate. In the 1950s and 60s there was a vast amount of research done on the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescaline for problems including alcoholism, before the US Government made this and other drugs illegal (it was President Nixon who, among his more famous errors of judgement, first launched the ill-informed and disastrous ‘war on drugs’).

Happily, this research began again in the 1990s and is now carried out at prestigious universities around the world. Australia recently became the first country to decriminalise MDMA and magic mushrooms for medicinal use – and an increasing number of US states, such as Oregon, have followed a similar path.

Why the renewed interest? Let’s take just one study as an example. In 2016, researchers from Imperial College London gave 12 people psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms. The people who took part had been depressed, on average, for 17.8 years. None of them had responded to standard antidepressant medication.

One week after taking the mushrooms, all patients experienced a marked improvement in their symptoms. Three months on, five patients were in complete remission. This is a truly remarkable result. These people, who had been suffering for well over a decade and had tried various medications, took a single dose of magic mushrooms and all of them felt better a week later – with almost half having no symptoms of depression three months after that.

Watch for yourself on Netflix

If you would like to know more, do watch Michael Pollan’s brilliant documentary series, How to Change Your Mind, on Netflix. Each episode explores a different drug – LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and mescaline – that is currently providing highly promising results for depression, as well as chronic anxiety, OCD, PTSD, addiction and more.

It’s important to be clear that I am not suggesting you just go and have a trip on LSD or magic mushrooms! That is definitely not a good idea – and could, potentially, make you feel a great deal worse.

We are talking about highly controlled medicinal use, where the drug is taken as part of a course of therapy, led by skilled mental-health professionals (when you take the drug skilled therapists stay with you throughout, guiding you through the experience and making sure you are OK). In this setting, though, the healing potential of these drugs is huge.

It’s not inconceivable that, in future, this may form part of every psychotherapy treatment. Some of my clients have already tried psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and all had powerful and positive experiences. I intend to both try and train in it myself, at some point.

I hope you found that interesting, helpful and especially hopeful – because hope is a crucial element of recovering from depression.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan