Healing the mind

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Psychedelic therapy could provide a major breakthrough in the treatment of mental health disorders like depression, and now it's caught the attention of start-ups and venture capitalists.

Laurence Knight hears from one man whose life was transformed by a single dose of the drug psilocybin - the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms - after he volunteered for a research project exploring whether it could cure depression. He also visits the research team at King's College London, who have just wrapped up the latest trials of the drug.

The trials are being sponsored by the healthcare start-up Compass Pathways, and its founder and chief executive George Goldsmith explains why he hopes to use them to bring this therapy to the general public. Plus Amanda Eilian of venture capitalists Able Partners describes how quickly attitudes in the investor community are changing.

(Picture credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Lawrence Knight and welcome to Business Daily. Today, our psychedelic drugs about to deliver a major breakthrough in the treatment of mental health disorders.
0:11.4	25% of the patients, they had only this single experience. In 12 weeks later, they've no longer had symptoms of depression. This is astounding in terms of the benefit.
0:23.6	There's been a mushrooming of research using these hallucinogenic drugs to treat everything from
0:27.9	depression to drug addiction. And now investors and startup companies are pouring in money too.
0:33.6	The space has really seen in a short period of time, an incredible explosion and interest.
0:38.7	And every week I get pitched a handful of new companies in the psychedelic space.
0:42.7	But does the hype risk doing more harm than good?
0:46.0	That's here on Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
0:52.4	So the depression was mainly around the death of my mother, who had a terminal illness.
0:59.0	We knew that she was going to pass away and she knew too.
1:03.0	And I expected to be kind of okay about it or prepared, but instead it hit me like a ton of bricks and I kind of
1:13.2	got stuck in the grief. Kirk Rutter was in his early 40s when his mother died in 2011. To compound
1:21.0	things, he had neighbours from hell living directly above his head. Who were alcoholics and fighting and causing problems.
1:31.1	So the police would kind of attend at 3 o'clock in the morning after there'd been issues upstairs.
1:36.8	That deprived Kirk of sleep and kept him stressed and anxious.
1:40.8	It also prevented him from processing his grief, and he was diagnosed with depression.
1:46.4	He tried therapy.
1:47.6	But when it came to talking about the grief, I found the pain of that coming up, and I changed subjects.
1:57.5	He also tried antidepressants, but they made him groggy, so he gave them up too.
2:02.6	Nothing seemed to work, and for years, Kirk was stuck in an emotional rut.
2:07.8	Then one day he came across an entirely new treatment being trialled right here in the UK.
2:13.7	Yeah, so I actually saw something on the news, and I applied, gave them access to my medical notes, had a screening and then was accepted.
	...

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