Magic mushrooms can reset the brains of people with untreatable depression, raising hopes of a future treatment, scans suggest.
Half of patients ceased to be depressed and experienced changes in their brain activity which lasted at least five weeks.
So, the team at Imperial College London says people should not self-medicate.
There has been a series of small studies suggesting psilocybin could have a role in depression by acting as a lubricant for the mind which allows people to escape a cycle of depressive symptoms. But it was not known the precise impact it might be having on brain activity .
The team at Imperial performed MRI brain scans before treatment with psilocybin and then the day after.
In the journal Scientific Reports, showed psilocybin affected two key areas of the brain, the amygdala which is heavily involved in how we process emotions such as fear and anxiety. The greater the improvement in reported symptoms, and the default mode network a collaboration of different brain regions are became more stable after taking psilocybin.
Patients were very ready to use this analogy and without saying, I have been reset, reborn, rebooted' and one patient said that his brain had cleaned up.
As a result, there's no doubt new approaches to the treatment which is desperately needed.
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