Key points from today’s guests:

Dr. Tyler Kjorvestad, editor-in-chief, The Journal of Psychedelic Psychiatry; psychiatrist and director, Comprehensive Depression Assessment and Treatment Center, The University of Kansas Health System

• There is a stigma with psychedelic drugs. They can be abused. If they're taken in the wrong environment, people will do things that they wouldn't typically do and that might result in harm or destruction of property or life-threatening events that they might encounter themselves.
• Widescale public use of psychedelic drugs during the 1970s caused a severe backlash and that basically shut down all research on drugs from basically 1971 until about 1985.
• Right now ketamine is the only psychedelic drug that's legally approved for treatment resistant depression.
• What psychedelics do is basically like taking a road grader and smoothing out those ruts or habits in the brain. This turns on other neuronal areas of the brain and basically allow you to navigate through your neural pathways in a different route than you were taking before -- like building new roads.
• There is a semi-structured environment for integration therapy -- it's all about how the patient experience was during that trip.
• When we talk about psychedelic drugs, we talk about the mindset -- how the patient is thinking when they come into the treatment -- and then we talk about the physical setting.
• The physical setting is as important as the mindset. If I was doing this in a hospital room with a hospital bed and bright white lights, people are going to have a much more kind of intense or anxious written trip. And so we try to make it as comfortable as possible, so we do turn the lights down and we have comfortable chairs.
• Studies on psilocybin are pretty vast. So the most advanced studies on treating resistant depression will be coming in the next couple of years. Psilocybin has been studied for smoking cessation. It's two to three times more effective than our current smoking cessation treatments. It's also being studied for OCD. The probably the most promising study that I'm hopeful for is anorexia because we don't have an actual treatment for that.
• There's a lot of education that goes on with psychedelic drugs. And so we basically want to make sure that patients are aware that we're going to take the utmost precaution in tapering you off any of your regular antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications that might counteract or negatively interact with the psychedelic drugs.
• There are better treatments coming down the line. And so if you think that we could be of help, you can always reach out to us.

Wednesday, Mar. 27 at 8 a.m. is the next Open Mics with Dr. Stites. Nanotechnology implanted in the brain and spine is letting paralyzed patients walk again. Meet the researchers teaching AI to decode your thoughts so your body can perform the way it should.

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