September 4, 2024 • 37 mins
Delve into the fascinating world of psychedelics with Dr. Harriet De Wit, a renowned expert in psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience. Discover what truly happens in the brain during psychedelic experiences, from the science behind microdosing to the potential of psychedelics as treatments for mood disorders and even PTSD. Dr. De Wit provides insights into the effects of MDMA and LSD, the history of these substances, and how societal perceptions are shifting. Plus, get a sneak peek into Reese’s 100th Book Club pick, "The Comfort of Crows" by Margaret Renkl, and how it beautifully intertwines memoir and nature writing.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello Sunshine, Hey besties.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Today on the bright Side, it is Wellness Wednesday, and
we're answering all the questions you're too nervous to ask
about psychedelics and their effect on the brain. What exactly
happens in the brain when you do psychedelics, what's microdosing,
and what are the benefits? And are psychedelics a viable
treatment for mood disorders or PTSD. Doctor Harriet DeWitt is
(00:27):
here to answer all these and more. She's a professor
of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago,
and she's bringing more than forty years of research on
this very topic to our conversation today. It's Wednesday, September fourth.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
I'm Simone Boyce, I'm Danielle Robe and this is the
bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show when we
come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten
your day. All right, Simone, it's a new month, which
means it's time for a new Reason book Club Pick,
(01:02):
and it is the one hundredth book Club pick. It's
so major. I don't know about you, but I get
so giddy for these releases.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I get so giddy too, and We've actually been sitting
on this little secret for a while, the August pick,
and I've been just staring at the cover because it's
so gorgeous. Would you tell us more about it, Danielle?
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yes, Okay, this month's Reese's Book Club pick is super special.
It's titled The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkel. And
here's what's so special about it. Besides the fact that
it's a great book, the author was Reese's English teacher.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
That's so incredible. I love this full circle moment.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
I know, and I know we mentioned it's the hundredth pick,
but can you believe it's the hundredth pick? Like I
remember when Reese's Book Club chose their very first book,
and now we're on the hundredth.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Pick, and lucky ass we get to have each one
of these authors on our show.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Well, this book is getting high praise. Another Reese's Book
Club author, Ann Patchett said that this book is a
howling love letter to the world.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Okay, so what's your understanding of what this book is about?
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Okay, So The Comfort of Crows is a little different
from most of the RBC picks. It's part memoir, part
nature writing, and it follows the plants and the creatures
and the critters in Margaret Wrenkel's backyard over the course
of an entire year, and in fifty two chapters, Margaret
documents the seasons and the changes that come with them,
and what's left is a portrait of both joy and grief.
(02:29):
And Margaret's brother, who's a collage artist, made an original
piece of art for every single chapter in the book.
So no doubt it's going to be an enjoyable read
and also a beautiful read.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
This is inspiring me to get out into nature and write.
I think this would be such a great exercise in mindfulness.
I mean, I can totally picture myself just curled up
with this book under a tree, perhaps in a lush,
verdant setting, you know, getting my photosynthesis on, listening to
the birds chirping.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
I would have bet my entire collection of sneakers and heels,
which are so beloved to me, that you would have
used the word verdant in this description.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So does that mean that I get some sneakers? What's
going on here?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I don't think we're the same size. Maybe I can
give them to your kids.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
That's probably probably inaccurate. Shoe size.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
But yes, I feel like reading this book in nature
would be really special.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
So nature does wonders for my mental health, and I'm
sure a lot of you feel the same. It's just
an instant stressbuster and moodlifter. And lately I've been hearing
about a lot of people turning to psychedelics for similar vibes.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Hmmmm.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
You know it's interesting you say that.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
I've you know, I go to like group dinners or
events sometimes, and I'm hearing more and more people discuss
plant medicine. It's becoming more popular. People are curious about it.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I think, Well, curiosity is one of our core values
here at the bright Side, and that's exactly what we're
leading with with today's episode. We're all about asking questions
and digging deeper to responsibly understand what all the hype
is about when it comes to psychedelics.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Okay, so you are our science girl, tell us what
we know.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Well, here's what we do know.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I mean, psychedelics have been used in many cultures for
thousands of years, so the way that people consume it
today might be new, but psychedelics themselves are not. In
nineteen thirty eight, LSD was first synthesized by a Swiss
chemist named Albert Hoffmann. And then in the nineteen fifties
we started to see this trend of prescribing LSD to
(04:33):
treat people with disorders like alcoholism. Then by the sixties,
it's estimated that up to forty thousand people were prescribed
LSD for various mental health conditions. But at that point,
that's when we started to see things turn and LSD
became popular as a recreational drug. Then in nineteen seventy,
the US government classified LSD as a Schedule one drug,
(04:56):
meaning it has the highest potential for abuse and apparently
no medicinal uses according to this government classification. So that
basically gets us up to now, which is why this
cultural shift that we're seeing around these drugs is such
a big deal.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It's really interesting to understand the history of it because
I think we're both really curious about where it's going.
Mike Rudo seeing psychedelics are on the rise in the US,
but what does the science say.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
That's a big question, And here to break it all
down for us is doctor Harriet DeWitt. She's a professor
of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago,
and doctor de Witt has actually been studying the effects
of drugs on the brain for decades, so I can't
think of anyone better to speak on this topic. And
she's currently researching the effects of MDMA and LSD on
(05:46):
mood and neural function, so let's.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Bring her in. Doctor Harriet DeWitt, Welcome to the bright Side.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Well, thank you, nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Your research focuses on the physiological, mood altering, and behavioral
effects of drugs, including studies on the effects of psychedelic
type drugs like MDMA and LSD. Why did you become
so interested in this area of research.
Speaker 5 (06:09):
I've been doing studies with psychoactive drugs more broadly for
many years, so I've done a lot of studies with
emphetamine and valuum, THHC, alcohol, caffeine, a whole range of
more kind of licit drugs in a sense. And then
it became clear that MDMA was being widely used, and
MDMA is very similar to emphetamine in many ways, but
(06:30):
it seems to have this kind of unique pro social effect,
and I thought we are in a really good position
to test that under experimental condition. So in the studies
that we do with healthy volunteers. We control people's expectancies
when people expect to get a certain drug, and then
that can influence how they respond to it. So we
give the drug under double blind conditions, which means that
(06:54):
neither the participant nor the person who's working with that
person during the session, they don't know what the is getting.
So that gives us a much more objective measure of
how the drug makes people feel and how it makes
them behave it leaves aside their expectancies. So usually when
people use MDMA or LSD, they have very strong expectations
(07:14):
that it's going to make them feel a certain way,
and we were able to look just at the pharmacological
effects holding those expectancies constant.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
So you got your PhD in the eighties, right, Yes,
I'm so curious why this became your area of focus.
Were you a hippie back in the day?
Speaker 1 (07:32):
What about this intrigued you so much?
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Because you're clearly like you could have gone into anything.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
I think drugs are really challenging and really interesting aspect
of psychology because they combine biological factors with psychological factors. Here,
we are giving a drug to people and we know
it acts on a brain and receptors in the brain,
and yet it has these profound psychological effects.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
My graduate work was actually in animal models of drug taking.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
It turns out that if you give a rat, you
put a catheter into its vein and you allow it
to press a lever to get drug, the animals will
take most of the same drugs that people will take.
If you make amphetament available, for example, they'll press a
lever to get the umfetament over extended periods of time.
So I originally started with animal models of drug taking,
(08:23):
and then when I came to hear at the University
of Chicago, I switched over to study humans, and so
a lot of what I do is kind of bridging
the two. So what happens what we know from animal
studies and applying what the drugs.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Do to humans.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I've personally anecdotally seen real societal shift when it comes
to people's views on psychedelics, particularly I know we live
in la but particularly in the last five years. Even
I'm curious how the societal shifts have impacted the work
that you're doing.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
Yeah, I think the use of psychedelic drugs can continued
at sort of an underground level for most of the
time that we were not able to test them in
under experimental conditions. And then there was a study I
think in two thousand and six and Johns Hopkins with
psilocybin that really turned things around and opened the door
to more mainstream scientific research. And this was it was
(09:20):
a very prestigious institution and a very prestigious researcher and
a very conservative researcher in any ways, so he was able,
this is Roland Griffiths. He was able to kind of
turn things around and open the door to more mainstream
psychiatric research. And from then on people have just been
taken off with it. Everybody's fascinated by these drugs and
(09:42):
what exactly do they do? Do they have potential in
psychiatric practice. So it's a fascinating area of an understudied
area of research.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Well, if you ever run out of subjects, you can
just throw a rock in Los Angeles and we can
find you so many subjects. Because I truly echo what
Danielle was saying, I feel like I hear about it
all the time. You know, whether you're standing in line
at Arawan or you're at the beach with some friends, offens.
Speaker 5 (10:09):
Everybody talks about their drug experiences. Absolutely, Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
And I'm curious how the changing perspectives around these drugs
impact consumers, because it seems like as the perception is shifting,
these drugs become more accessible as well.
Speaker 5 (10:26):
That's probably true, they are more accepted. So there used
to be a feeling that they were dangerous in some way.
I think that the fact that they were not legal
for a long time, and well they're still not legal
in a lot of places, but it gave the perception
that they're dangerous and now there's kind of a relief
from that that really they're not physically that dangerous, although
(10:48):
they can be used, misused in you know, by the
wrong people under the wrong circumstances. So yes, I think
there's been a big opening up of public attitudes towards
psychedelic drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
So please explain to us what exactly happens in the
brain when you do psychoactive drugs. And I'm sure the
reaction or the process is different depending on which drug
you take.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yes, each drug is quite different.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
So much of the work that I've done recently with
the sort of psychedelic type of drugs has been with MDMA,
and that we know. Actually what each of these drugs
has in common is that they act on the different
kind of receptors and the serotonin system. So MDMA, for example,
stimulates the serotonin receptors. So serotonin receptors, as everybody knows,
(11:34):
are also the target of antidepressant effects. So there's some
connection there that some of the possible therapeutic effects of
md maybe related to the fact that it acts on
serotonin system, which is also where the SSRI reuptate blockers
act regular antidepressants. The other thing about MDMA is that
(11:55):
it stimulates the release of oxytocin. So oxytocin is a
poor that's released in the body under circumstances to facilitate
pair bonding, so mother child interactions and even male female
courtship interactions, there's a release of oxytocin that makes people
feel more bonded to one another, or at least more
bonded to their in group, and so there's some speculation
(12:18):
that it's that ability of MDMA to release oxytocin that
makes people feel more connected with each other. It's still
an open question from research point of view whether it's
really the primarily the action on serotonin or the action
on the oxytocin that does this. So that's MDMA and
LSD different drug, and it acts again on a certain
subtype of serotonin receptor. It also acts on a number
(12:41):
of other receptors as well, like dopamine receptors as well.
So what's remarkable in the studies that I've done. The
studies I've done have been with microdosing. So we give
these very very small doses in the order of ten
to twenty micrograms, and actually the dose that you use
to trip is one hundred micrograms. They're tiny, tiny little doses,
(13:02):
and yet they have these profound effects, and that tells
us that the drug has very potent and very selective
actions on certain receptor subtypes.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
So how does it act on the brain.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
So I've told you a little bit about the receptors
that the drugs act on. There are other levels that
you can study how the drugs act on the brain.
There's these pictures you've probably seen of how different brain
areas are normally connected with each other when the people
are not under the influence, and then when you give
them a psychedelic like psilocybin, then suddenly all kinds of
parts that were not previously connected with each other become
(13:34):
connected with each other, so they talk about complexity or
sort of disorder or so you can also study how
the drugs act on the brain at that level.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I've heard you describe your research and your studies as unusual.
I'm thinking that's because your research really focuses on pharmacological
ways that drugs affect the brain in quote unquote healthy people,
as opposed to how they can be used as a
course of psychological treatment, which is what I hear about
more often. What is your goal? What are you looking
(14:07):
to accomplish in your studies?
Speaker 5 (14:09):
When you study the drugs at high doses and in
a therapeutic context, there are so many things going on
that we don't know what they're contributing. The subject has
a relationship with a therapist, they have preparation sessions, they
have a guide during the session, they have integration sessions afterwards,
and we don't know how those experiences or those other
(14:30):
behavioral components influence the response to the drug. And my
question is just simpler, is what does the drug itself
do to kind of psychological processes? So we can ask,
for example, does it change your ability to detect negative
emotions in other people.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
So MDMA.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
That's one of the things that we found with MDMA.
The drug makes you less able to detect negative expressions
in other people. And so that might be useful from
a therapeutic point of view. That if you're talking, if
you're talking to a therapists, and first of all, you
perceived that there frowning a little bit, and the drug
makes you not perceive that anymore, you might be more
willing to interact and disclose. And similarly, if you're at
(15:08):
a rave or at a party or something, if you
don't see or perceive negative perceptions and other people, that
might make it easier for you to interact socially. So
my job, as I see it, is to see what
kind of very basic behavioral constructs are affected by the drug.
We also do studies where people are rejected in a
(15:30):
kind of a game, computerized game. They're first they're accepted,
and then they're rejected, and then we ask them how
rejected do you feel? And the MBMA decreases their feeling
of being rejected when they're excluded from this game. So
we've done a whole series of studies trying to look
at what the units of behavior are that the drugs
act on.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So from all your research, what is the best way
for people to reap the benefits of these drugs in
a responsible, safe way?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Is it microdo saying what's your First.
Speaker 5 (16:04):
Of all, I don't think we know yet, And the
drugs are being tested in a lot of different settings. So,
for example, MDMA is being tested for post traumatic stress
disorder specifically for that, and it's not so much. And
psilocybin has been looked at for depression, and for alcohol
used disorder, and for end of life anxiety. So people
(16:25):
have designed studies around particular drugs and particular outcomes, and
we don't know how general or how specific those are
to particular drugs. So I think we'll have to wait
and see what all these studies yield. We also don't
know yet who might respond badly to the drugs. These
are powerful drugs, and in these controlled studies we very
(16:47):
carefully pre select who's going to be a participant or not.
Once the drug is used more broadly, then we're going
to get a wider range of people, and we don't
know who's going to be at risk for having bad
reactions to the drug. For example, we're I think at
the early stages, and I think people are studying each
drug individual drugs for individual what they call indications. So
(17:08):
that means like what you're targeting, and so it remains
to be seen how those studies work out.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
We need to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, doctor
Harriet DeWitt.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
And we're back with doctor Harriet DeWitt.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I have heard, and this is a myth or a
not a myth that I'd love for you to speak on,
but I've heard that every time you take MDMA, it
takes a piece of your brain, like it takes a
chunk out of your brain.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Is that true?
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I wish everyone could see doctor DeWitt's faith right now.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That's what people say, though. I think that's what they
told you in school together.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
I think, so, I think, so what do we mean
by a chunk?
Speaker 5 (18:06):
You know, if it means one neuron and there are
thirty billion neurons in your brain, so it's just it's
not a scientific statement.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Our producers are saying they heard that too. Okay, I'm
glad I'm not alone.
Speaker 5 (18:18):
Okay, Okay, there there was some evidence or belief maybe
thirty years ago now that MDMA had some what they
call neurotoxic effects, but that has not been very well
replicated or established at this point. So to best of
our knowledge, it doesn't have a if used under controlled
(18:38):
circumstances and not too often. I think any drug, if
you take it at high enough doses and often enough,
there's going to be some damage. But at the doses
that we're talking about, like the trial for PTSD, they
give it one two or three times separated by several weeks,
it's I don't think it has a serious toxic effect.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
One of the concerns for people, I think in the
last few years is that fentanyl is so widespread. Is
there a way to test the safety of these drugs
before ingesting them?
Speaker 5 (19:12):
Yeah, I think there are services, but you can't get
them at a moment's notice. You know, you could send
in samples and get them back in a couple of
weeks basically, but so and we also don't know from
sample to sample how stable the constituents are. So one
of the problems with fentanyl is that it's very potent,
(19:33):
so you only need a tiny little bit to have
a strong fight, just like LSD in fact in that way,
and it's cleared really quickly, so that once it's in
the system, the body clears it really quickly, so it's
difficult to detect. And so yeah, so's it's potent, so
you only need a little bit and then and then
you need a little bit more for it to be
lethal basically, So it's a very steep curve there.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Yeah, it feels like a pretty risky proposition.
Speaker 5 (19:59):
Yeah, I think that's one of the greatest risks of
using drugs non medically is that you cannot be sure
of the source, whether you're getting what you thought you
were getting, whether there are other constituents or other active
drugs or inactive drugs.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
So is the risky thing.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
One other question I'm curious about is safety or the
risk of taking drugs when you have underlying mental health disorders.
I've heard people say, for instance, people that have bipolar
disorder have to be incredibly careful with psychedelics. What does
(20:37):
the research say about that, You.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Know, it's not something that researchers go and study directly.
If we have some impression that bipolar patients would be
at risk, it's unlikely that we would get ethical approval
to test it. So these are things that are going
to emerge when the drugs are more broadly available and
bad things happening. So we don't know yet which psychiatric
(21:04):
disorders are really contraindicated, as I said, because we're selecting
very clean populations, very carefully defined populations right now.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
I'd love to get into some of the specific experiments
that you've run. There's one in twenty twenty that I
found really interesting. One of the participants was a leader
in the white nationalist movement. Can you take us through
what you did in that study and what you found.
Speaker 5 (21:30):
Yeah, most of our studies are done in a group
of participants, so we only look at the data for
the whole group. This person, though, was in a study
where we were testing maybe thirty people, and we were
actually testing the effects of MDMA on pleasantness of social touch.
So the point of the experiment is not that important.
(21:50):
But he received the drug in the lab. And when
they get the drug, they're in our lab here physically,
and they stay for four or five hours or something,
and then there's a research assistant goes in every once
in a while, measures their heart rate, blood pressure, and
gives them some questionnaires to fill out, and the researcher
went in there and the person the subject had filled
out on their form in capital letters, very large capital letters.
(22:14):
I know exactly what I have to do now. My
course is very clear, he said, look me up on
the internet. So the research assistant went and looked him
up on the internet and he was indeed the leader
of a white nationalist group. So then they came to
me and they said, well, what should we do. I
was really nervous. I thought that the epiphany that he
had was that he had to go and do something
(22:35):
with a machine gun or something like that. So, you know,
it really frightened me. If he's a white nationalist and
he says, I know what I have to do now.
So then we went and talked to him, and his
epiphany was, I see what I'm doing right now. I've
gone it all wrong. What's really important is luck this
guy he was getting drug under a circumstances. He didn't
(22:57):
know what he was getting. When we give people a
drug at a beginning with star at a study like that,
we tell him you might get a stimulant, you might
get a tranquilizer, you might get a placebo you might
get an antihistamine in this case, we said, also said
you might get the MDMA, But he had no idea
what drug he was getting, so there was no set there.
He wasn't though, he had no reason to expect that
this was going to be a love drug or anything.
(23:18):
So what he said then when I talked to him afterwards,
he said, it didn't really change his beliefs that much.
He still felt he accepted the white nationalist beliefs, but
he said it doesn't really matter. He said, that's not
what's important in my life. What's important in my life
is family and friends and caring for people and making
social connections with people.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
So I thought it gave It was.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Remarkable to me that the drug would produce this strong
subjective experience, even though he didn't know what he was getting,
So it was quite remarkable.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
So does this make you believe that perhaps MDMA and
other similar drugs could help us shape social chain.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
In theory, yes, but in practice it's not anything that
anybody would take on doing. I mean, that becomes a
really a political and an ethical issue, and who's to
say what direction of change, whether it's going to go
in a good direction or a bad direction. It might
make them more vulnerable to believing certain kinds of things.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
So I don't think.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
Researchers, psychiatric researchers are going to go to anything like
that or make any kind of claims like that.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
I do wonder if it could be helpful in a
recovery setting, like let's say somebody was electing for treatment
and they came in yes, seeking a perspective and behavioral shift,
and if it were administered in the controlled environment, I
bet that could be helpful.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
Absolutely.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
And that's where the therapist comes in to sort of
direct the kind of emotional experiences and put them into
a constructive kind of direction. They are MDMA and have
for a long time, and things like couple therapy, so
there's it seems to facilitate kind of difficult conversations with people.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
That's really interesting.
Speaker 5 (25:08):
And there's even an interesting undertaking in between the Israelis
and the Palestinians that they put people together in kind
of an ayahuasca group and try and get people with
very kind of long standing negative feelings about the other
group and putting them together and having them just be
with the other group.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
It's very interesting.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
How about a study that you published called Psychedelics in Medicine,
Can evidence keep up with enthusiasm? What does that title mean?
Speaker 5 (25:38):
Well, that people are going very quickly. Even though there's
a kind of a blossoming of the research. People are
have great expectations that the psychedelic drugs are going to
solve all kinds of problems. So they have great expectations
that it's going to that the drugs, that psychedelic drugs
are going to be useful for a lot of different things.
But in order to make that conclusion, we have to
(25:58):
do the research, We have to do the science part
of it.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
So the question is has the.
Speaker 5 (26:02):
Science kept up with the enthusiasm of what they might do.
So that particular article was an introduction to a special
issue where there were maybe six or so different papers
that reviewed different aspects of psychedelic drugs.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
What do you make of the increasingly mainstream popularity of
the drugs? Why do you think people are more interested now?
Speaker 5 (26:26):
I think they're becoming more socially acceptable, and there's also
a little bit more information about under what circumstances they're safe.
So I think the microdosing people perceive that as being safe,
and it probably is for the most part, although there
turns out there are some possible heart problems if you
use it over a long period of time. So I
think there's Yeah, they're being tested in mainstream psychiatry and disgusted,
(26:49):
so then that has a carryover effect. And it's in
every popular magazine that you come across, in New York
Times and New Yorker and the Economists. Everywhere you see
studies of the magic of what psychedelics might do.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
So I know that there's a study that your lab
did that is quote among the first to report that
low dose LSD may differentially affect people with depression. So
if someone is interested in using psychedelics for their mental health,
what does that mean in practice? What is the process like,
how does someone even begin to explore this as a
treatment option?
Speaker 4 (27:23):
You know, I don't think we're there yet.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
The drug is still Schedule one, so it's not available
for medical practice, not available to physicians to prescribe. But
I thought it was an interesting finding because we pre
selected people. We had healthy volunteers with low scores on
a depression scale, and then volunteers who scored high on depression,
and that this low dose of elicti seemed to produce
(27:47):
different effects in the depressed people that reported more positive mood,
and they also reported more psychedelic effects, So it suggests
that there was something different about their brains to begin
with that when they come into the study, that the
drug has a different effect on. So I think it's
very promising. So the evidence so far on microdosing has
been very mixed. There isn't very strong evidence that microdosing
(28:09):
does much. But most of the studies have also been
done with completely healthy volunteers, and it's possible that the
microdosing has some effect in people who have some initial problem.
So in this case it might be depression. You could
also look at it in people who are depressed or
in people who have some other major issue going some
kind of problem going on in their lives. So it
(28:31):
could be that the reason we haven't seen the marked
effects in the healthy volunteers is because we haven't been
looking at the right people. And so this is kind
of a promising new direction, and we probably will go
on and look at this now with more depressed people
and see was it just by chance or can we
replicate it basically in another sample, So we'll do that.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
You mentioned that MDMA may be close to being approved
as a potential PTSD treatment. Would you talk to us
more about the approvals process, like what lies ahead in
order for these drugs to become more viable options for
the public.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
Yeah, the approval process is very long and very expensive
and onerous. So an organization called LYCOS went to the
trouble and expense of doing three what they call phase
three trials, so trials with patients with PTSD, and they
had quite promising results and this summer they presented it
(29:27):
to the Food and Drug Administration for approval or to
an advisory committee. Unfortunately, the advisory committee had a lot
of questions about how the study had been done and
they didn't recommend that the FDA approve it, and in
the end, the FDA did not approve it. So this
was a real setback for the field, basically because it
was the first of these drugs that was put forward
(29:48):
to the FDA as a possible therapeutic medication and there
were very promising results, so it did really improve the
situation for a lot of patients with PTSD. In the end,
it was not approved, so they're going to have to
go back now and do more studies or figure out
what to do next.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Who would you recommend psychedelics for.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
I guess I have to think about the medical, scientific
part of me and also the human part of me.
I guess if you could participate in one of these
trials where everything is given under very closely monitored circumstances,
that would be a way to test it. But if
you were just somebody with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or
(30:30):
even PTSD and just take it for yourself, I would
caution against that, just because so much kind of psychological
support goes with On the other hand, with really careful
and cautious use in healthy people, I think that the
drugs can reveal other ways of being or other ways
of seeing the world if they're used in a responsible
(30:53):
ways and from a physical point of view, they're not
that harmful. That is not like cigarette smoking that's going
to give you cancer, orlcohol that's going to give you
liver disease. With the frequency of the doses that do take,
so people don't take LSD every day for a long
period of time. They take it once and maybe take
it again in a couple of months, and it's a
mixed experience. So under those circumstances, you know, it's not
(31:14):
there's no real physical hazard. There is some psychological hazard,
of course.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Doctor Jowett. What do you think is next for your research?
Speaker 5 (31:21):
Well, I would like to follow up this depression study.
I'd like to see whether the microdoses improve depression. And
you know, if there's a possibility of a therapeutic of
low doses of an LSD or low doses of a
psychedelic relieving symptoms of depression, that would be really big.
That would be great. So I'm interested in that. I'm
(31:41):
also interested in lots of other things. I'm interested in
how drugs interact with social settings. So how is it
that the it's not just the drug changing behavior, but
it's the drug combined with the person that they're talking to,
whether it's a therapist or a friend, and so how
do those interactions occur?
Speaker 4 (31:58):
And I'm interested in that rug. It turns out.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
Many of these drugs like MDMA and alcohol, even emphetam
and make people feel more connected with other people. So
somehow there's this social component that using the drug makes
you feel closer to other people. So I think that's
kind of an interesting thing that hasn't been studied very much.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Is that lasting or does it just make you feel
more connected in the moment.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
That's a good question.
Speaker 5 (32:21):
Well, all we do is ask the people how connected
they feel with their partner at the end of the session,
and then we ask them again two days later, and
they still feel connected with that person two days later. Now,
whether that's a memory of you know, that they felt
connected with that person and they're remembering it two days later,
or whether they still have a strong feeling of connection
at the moment the two days later, we don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Got it. This has been really I would say eye opening,
but I'm going to say brain expanding instead. I'm really
grateful for your time. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Well, you had good questions. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Talking to Thank you so much, doctor Douitt.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
I cannot wait to see what your research produces next.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Doctor Harriet DeWitt is the founder and primary investigator of
the Human Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory and a research professor at
the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
We have to take another short break, but we'll be
right back.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
We're back.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Before we go, we have a special message presented by
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Speaker 2 (33:28):
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And today we want to shine a light on something
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two of my friends, both under thirty five, were diagnosed
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(34:18):
aren't physical symptoms until it's in a late stage. That's
why screening is so crucial. Early detection can make all
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Speaker 2 (34:26):
But unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions out there
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Speaker 3 (34:40):
One common misconception is that if you eat a healthy
diet and exercise, you're at low risk for colon cancer.
That's actually not true. No one is at low risk
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you're still considered average risk.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Okay.
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Another misconception is that colon cancer has definitive symptoms. The
fact is that many patients with early stage colon cancer
actually have no symptoms and are diagnosed through screening.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
You might have also heard that you should start screening
for colon cancer at age fifty, but that's another misconception.
If you're at average risk, the recommended age to start
screening is at forty five years old. And if you
think that the only option for colon cancer screening is
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some good news. If you are forty five years or
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way to screen for colon cancer. If you're forty five
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about screening for colon cancer with the Colargard test. You
can also request a Colguard prescription today at coliguard dot com,
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The Colligard test is intended to screen adults forty five
and older at average risk for colorectal cancer. Do not
use a Colargard test if you have had adenomas, have
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or family history of colorectal cancer. The Colliguard test is
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(36:11):
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Start taking care of your health today. Ask your healthcare
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Speaker 3 (36:38):
That's it for today's episode. Tomorrow, we're talking Paralympics with
award winning disability advocate Sophie Morgan. She's covering the games
for NBC. Listen and follow the bright Side on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
I'm Simone Voice.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
You can find me at simone Voice on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's r O
b A.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Y See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.
Hello Sunshine, Hey besties.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Today on the bright Side, it is Wellness Wednesday, and
we're answering all the questions you're too nervous to ask
about psychedelics and their effect on the brain. What exactly
happens in the brain when you do psychedelics, what's microdosing,
and what are the benefits? And are psychedelics a viable
treatment for mood disorders or PTSD. Doctor Harriet DeWitt is
(00:27):
here to answer all these and more. She's a professor
of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago,
and she's bringing more than forty years of research on
this very topic to our conversation today. It's Wednesday, September fourth.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
I'm Simone Boyce, I'm Danielle Robe and this is the
bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show when we
come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten
your day. All right, Simone, it's a new month, which
means it's time for a new Reason book Club Pick,
(01:02):
and it is the one hundredth book Club pick. It's
so major. I don't know about you, but I get
so giddy for these releases.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I get so giddy too, and We've actually been sitting
on this little secret for a while, the August pick,
and I've been just staring at the cover because it's
so gorgeous. Would you tell us more about it, Danielle?
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yes, Okay, this month's Reese's Book Club pick is super special.
It's titled The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkel. And
here's what's so special about it. Besides the fact that
it's a great book, the author was Reese's English teacher.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
That's so incredible. I love this full circle moment.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
I know, and I know we mentioned it's the hundredth pick,
but can you believe it's the hundredth pick? Like I
remember when Reese's Book Club chose their very first book,
and now we're on the hundredth.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Pick, and lucky ass we get to have each one
of these authors on our show.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Well, this book is getting high praise. Another Reese's Book
Club author, Ann Patchett said that this book is a
howling love letter to the world.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Okay, so what's your understanding of what this book is about?
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Okay, So The Comfort of Crows is a little different
from most of the RBC picks. It's part memoir, part
nature writing, and it follows the plants and the creatures
and the critters in Margaret Wrenkel's backyard over the course
of an entire year, and in fifty two chapters, Margaret
documents the seasons and the changes that come with them,
and what's left is a portrait of both joy and grief.
(02:29):
And Margaret's brother, who's a collage artist, made an original
piece of art for every single chapter in the book.
So no doubt it's going to be an enjoyable read
and also a beautiful read.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
This is inspiring me to get out into nature and write.
I think this would be such a great exercise in mindfulness.
I mean, I can totally picture myself just curled up
with this book under a tree, perhaps in a lush,
verdant setting, you know, getting my photosynthesis on, listening to
the birds chirping.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
I would have bet my entire collection of sneakers and heels,
which are so beloved to me, that you would have
used the word verdant in this description.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So does that mean that I get some sneakers? What's
going on here?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I don't think we're the same size. Maybe I can
give them to your kids.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
That's probably probably inaccurate. Shoe size.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
But yes, I feel like reading this book in nature
would be really special.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
So nature does wonders for my mental health, and I'm
sure a lot of you feel the same. It's just
an instant stressbuster and moodlifter. And lately I've been hearing
about a lot of people turning to psychedelics for similar vibes.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Hmmmm.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
You know it's interesting you say that.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
I've you know, I go to like group dinners or
events sometimes, and I'm hearing more and more people discuss
plant medicine. It's becoming more popular. People are curious about it.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I think, Well, curiosity is one of our core values
here at the bright Side, and that's exactly what we're
leading with with today's episode. We're all about asking questions
and digging deeper to responsibly understand what all the hype
is about when it comes to psychedelics.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Okay, so you are our science girl, tell us what
we know.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Well, here's what we do know.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I mean, psychedelics have been used in many cultures for
thousands of years, so the way that people consume it
today might be new, but psychedelics themselves are not. In
nineteen thirty eight, LSD was first synthesized by a Swiss
chemist named Albert Hoffmann. And then in the nineteen fifties
we started to see this trend of prescribing LSD to
(04:33):
treat people with disorders like alcoholism. Then by the sixties,
it's estimated that up to forty thousand people were prescribed
LSD for various mental health conditions. But at that point,
that's when we started to see things turn and LSD
became popular as a recreational drug. Then in nineteen seventy,
the US government classified LSD as a Schedule one drug,
(04:56):
meaning it has the highest potential for abuse and apparently
no medicinal uses according to this government classification. So that
basically gets us up to now, which is why this
cultural shift that we're seeing around these drugs is such
a big deal.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It's really interesting to understand the history of it because
I think we're both really curious about where it's going.
Mike Rudo seeing psychedelics are on the rise in the US,
but what does the science say.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
That's a big question, And here to break it all
down for us is doctor Harriet DeWitt. She's a professor
of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago,
and doctor de Witt has actually been studying the effects
of drugs on the brain for decades, so I can't
think of anyone better to speak on this topic. And
she's currently researching the effects of MDMA and LSD on
(05:46):
mood and neural function, so let's.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Bring her in. Doctor Harriet DeWitt, Welcome to the bright Side.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Well, thank you, nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Your research focuses on the physiological, mood altering, and behavioral
effects of drugs, including studies on the effects of psychedelic
type drugs like MDMA and LSD. Why did you become
so interested in this area of research.
Speaker 5 (06:09):
I've been doing studies with psychoactive drugs more broadly for
many years, so I've done a lot of studies with
emphetamine and valuum, THHC, alcohol, caffeine, a whole range of
more kind of licit drugs in a sense. And then
it became clear that MDMA was being widely used, and
MDMA is very similar to emphetamine in many ways, but
(06:30):
it seems to have this kind of unique pro social effect,
and I thought we are in a really good position
to test that under experimental condition. So in the studies
that we do with healthy volunteers. We control people's expectancies
when people expect to get a certain drug, and then
that can influence how they respond to it. So we
give the drug under double blind conditions, which means that
(06:54):
neither the participant nor the person who's working with that
person during the session, they don't know what the is getting.
So that gives us a much more objective measure of
how the drug makes people feel and how it makes
them behave it leaves aside their expectancies. So usually when
people use MDMA or LSD, they have very strong expectations
(07:14):
that it's going to make them feel a certain way,
and we were able to look just at the pharmacological
effects holding those expectancies constant.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
So you got your PhD in the eighties, right, Yes,
I'm so curious why this became your area of focus.
Were you a hippie back in the day?
Speaker 1 (07:32):
What about this intrigued you so much?
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Because you're clearly like you could have gone into anything.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
I think drugs are really challenging and really interesting aspect
of psychology because they combine biological factors with psychological factors. Here,
we are giving a drug to people and we know
it acts on a brain and receptors in the brain,
and yet it has these profound psychological effects.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
My graduate work was actually in animal models of drug taking.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
It turns out that if you give a rat, you
put a catheter into its vein and you allow it
to press a lever to get drug, the animals will
take most of the same drugs that people will take.
If you make amphetament available, for example, they'll press a
lever to get the umfetament over extended periods of time.
So I originally started with animal models of drug taking,
(08:23):
and then when I came to hear at the University
of Chicago, I switched over to study humans, and so
a lot of what I do is kind of bridging
the two. So what happens what we know from animal
studies and applying what the drugs.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Do to humans.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I've personally anecdotally seen real societal shift when it comes
to people's views on psychedelics, particularly I know we live
in la but particularly in the last five years. Even
I'm curious how the societal shifts have impacted the work
that you're doing.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
Yeah, I think the use of psychedelic drugs can continued
at sort of an underground level for most of the
time that we were not able to test them in
under experimental conditions. And then there was a study I
think in two thousand and six and Johns Hopkins with
psilocybin that really turned things around and opened the door
to more mainstream scientific research. And this was it was
(09:20):
a very prestigious institution and a very prestigious researcher and
a very conservative researcher in any ways, so he was able,
this is Roland Griffiths. He was able to kind of
turn things around and open the door to more mainstream
psychiatric research. And from then on people have just been
taken off with it. Everybody's fascinated by these drugs and
(09:42):
what exactly do they do? Do they have potential in
psychiatric practice. So it's a fascinating area of an understudied
area of research.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Well, if you ever run out of subjects, you can
just throw a rock in Los Angeles and we can
find you so many subjects. Because I truly echo what
Danielle was saying, I feel like I hear about it
all the time. You know, whether you're standing in line
at Arawan or you're at the beach with some friends, offens.
Speaker 5 (10:09):
Everybody talks about their drug experiences. Absolutely, Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
And I'm curious how the changing perspectives around these drugs
impact consumers, because it seems like as the perception is shifting,
these drugs become more accessible as well.
Speaker 5 (10:26):
That's probably true, they are more accepted. So there used
to be a feeling that they were dangerous in some way.
I think that the fact that they were not legal
for a long time, and well they're still not legal
in a lot of places, but it gave the perception
that they're dangerous and now there's kind of a relief
from that that really they're not physically that dangerous, although
(10:48):
they can be used, misused in you know, by the
wrong people under the wrong circumstances. So yes, I think
there's been a big opening up of public attitudes towards
psychedelic drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
So please explain to us what exactly happens in the
brain when you do psychoactive drugs. And I'm sure the
reaction or the process is different depending on which drug
you take.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yes, each drug is quite different.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
So much of the work that I've done recently with
the sort of psychedelic type of drugs has been with MDMA,
and that we know. Actually what each of these drugs
has in common is that they act on the different
kind of receptors and the serotonin system. So MDMA, for example,
stimulates the serotonin receptors. So serotonin receptors, as everybody knows,
(11:34):
are also the target of antidepressant effects. So there's some
connection there that some of the possible therapeutic effects of
md maybe related to the fact that it acts on
serotonin system, which is also where the SSRI reuptate blockers
act regular antidepressants. The other thing about MDMA is that
(11:55):
it stimulates the release of oxytocin. So oxytocin is a
poor that's released in the body under circumstances to facilitate
pair bonding, so mother child interactions and even male female
courtship interactions, there's a release of oxytocin that makes people
feel more bonded to one another, or at least more
bonded to their in group, and so there's some speculation
(12:18):
that it's that ability of MDMA to release oxytocin that
makes people feel more connected with each other. It's still
an open question from research point of view whether it's
really the primarily the action on serotonin or the action
on the oxytocin that does this. So that's MDMA and
LSD different drug, and it acts again on a certain
subtype of serotonin receptor. It also acts on a number
(12:41):
of other receptors as well, like dopamine receptors as well.
So what's remarkable in the studies that I've done. The
studies I've done have been with microdosing. So we give
these very very small doses in the order of ten
to twenty micrograms, and actually the dose that you use
to trip is one hundred micrograms. They're tiny, tiny little doses,
(13:02):
and yet they have these profound effects, and that tells
us that the drug has very potent and very selective
actions on certain receptor subtypes.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
So how does it act on the brain.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
So I've told you a little bit about the receptors
that the drugs act on. There are other levels that
you can study how the drugs act on the brain.
There's these pictures you've probably seen of how different brain
areas are normally connected with each other when the people
are not under the influence, and then when you give
them a psychedelic like psilocybin, then suddenly all kinds of
parts that were not previously connected with each other become
(13:34):
connected with each other, so they talk about complexity or
sort of disorder or so you can also study how
the drugs act on the brain at that level.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I've heard you describe your research and your studies as unusual.
I'm thinking that's because your research really focuses on pharmacological
ways that drugs affect the brain in quote unquote healthy people,
as opposed to how they can be used as a
course of psychological treatment, which is what I hear about
more often. What is your goal? What are you looking
(14:07):
to accomplish in your studies?
Speaker 5 (14:09):
When you study the drugs at high doses and in
a therapeutic context, there are so many things going on
that we don't know what they're contributing. The subject has
a relationship with a therapist, they have preparation sessions, they
have a guide during the session, they have integration sessions afterwards,
and we don't know how those experiences or those other
(14:30):
behavioral components influence the response to the drug. And my
question is just simpler, is what does the drug itself
do to kind of psychological processes? So we can ask,
for example, does it change your ability to detect negative
emotions in other people.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
So MDMA.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
That's one of the things that we found with MDMA.
The drug makes you less able to detect negative expressions
in other people. And so that might be useful from
a therapeutic point of view. That if you're talking, if
you're talking to a therapists, and first of all, you
perceived that there frowning a little bit, and the drug
makes you not perceive that anymore, you might be more
willing to interact and disclose. And similarly, if you're at
(15:08):
a rave or at a party or something, if you
don't see or perceive negative perceptions and other people, that
might make it easier for you to interact socially. So
my job, as I see it, is to see what
kind of very basic behavioral constructs are affected by the drug.
We also do studies where people are rejected in a
(15:30):
kind of a game, computerized game. They're first they're accepted,
and then they're rejected, and then we ask them how
rejected do you feel? And the MBMA decreases their feeling
of being rejected when they're excluded from this game. So
we've done a whole series of studies trying to look
at what the units of behavior are that the drugs
act on.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So from all your research, what is the best way
for people to reap the benefits of these drugs in
a responsible, safe way?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Is it microdo saying what's your First.
Speaker 5 (16:04):
Of all, I don't think we know yet, And the
drugs are being tested in a lot of different settings. So,
for example, MDMA is being tested for post traumatic stress
disorder specifically for that, and it's not so much. And
psilocybin has been looked at for depression, and for alcohol
used disorder, and for end of life anxiety. So people
(16:25):
have designed studies around particular drugs and particular outcomes, and
we don't know how general or how specific those are
to particular drugs. So I think we'll have to wait
and see what all these studies yield. We also don't
know yet who might respond badly to the drugs. These
are powerful drugs, and in these controlled studies we very
(16:47):
carefully pre select who's going to be a participant or not.
Once the drug is used more broadly, then we're going
to get a wider range of people, and we don't
know who's going to be at risk for having bad
reactions to the drug. For example, we're I think at
the early stages, and I think people are studying each
drug individual drugs for individual what they call indications. So
(17:08):
that means like what you're targeting, and so it remains
to be seen how those studies work out.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
We need to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, doctor
Harriet DeWitt.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
And we're back with doctor Harriet DeWitt.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I have heard, and this is a myth or a
not a myth that I'd love for you to speak on,
but I've heard that every time you take MDMA, it
takes a piece of your brain, like it takes a
chunk out of your brain.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Is that true?
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I wish everyone could see doctor DeWitt's faith right now.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That's what people say, though. I think that's what they
told you in school together.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
I think, so, I think, so what do we mean
by a chunk?
Speaker 5 (18:06):
You know, if it means one neuron and there are
thirty billion neurons in your brain, so it's just it's
not a scientific statement.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Our producers are saying they heard that too. Okay, I'm
glad I'm not alone.
Speaker 5 (18:18):
Okay, Okay, there there was some evidence or belief maybe
thirty years ago now that MDMA had some what they
call neurotoxic effects, but that has not been very well
replicated or established at this point. So to best of
our knowledge, it doesn't have a if used under controlled
(18:38):
circumstances and not too often. I think any drug, if
you take it at high enough doses and often enough,
there's going to be some damage. But at the doses
that we're talking about, like the trial for PTSD, they
give it one two or three times separated by several weeks,
it's I don't think it has a serious toxic effect.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
One of the concerns for people, I think in the
last few years is that fentanyl is so widespread. Is
there a way to test the safety of these drugs
before ingesting them?
Speaker 5 (19:12):
Yeah, I think there are services, but you can't get
them at a moment's notice. You know, you could send
in samples and get them back in a couple of
weeks basically, but so and we also don't know from
sample to sample how stable the constituents are. So one
of the problems with fentanyl is that it's very potent,
(19:33):
so you only need a tiny little bit to have
a strong fight, just like LSD in fact in that way,
and it's cleared really quickly, so that once it's in
the system, the body clears it really quickly, so it's
difficult to detect. And so yeah, so's it's potent, so
you only need a little bit and then and then
you need a little bit more for it to be
lethal basically, So it's a very steep curve there.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Yeah, it feels like a pretty risky proposition.
Speaker 5 (19:59):
Yeah, I think that's one of the greatest risks of
using drugs non medically is that you cannot be sure
of the source, whether you're getting what you thought you
were getting, whether there are other constituents or other active
drugs or inactive drugs.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
So is the risky thing.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
One other question I'm curious about is safety or the
risk of taking drugs when you have underlying mental health disorders.
I've heard people say, for instance, people that have bipolar
disorder have to be incredibly careful with psychedelics. What does
(20:37):
the research say about that, You.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Know, it's not something that researchers go and study directly.
If we have some impression that bipolar patients would be
at risk, it's unlikely that we would get ethical approval
to test it. So these are things that are going
to emerge when the drugs are more broadly available and
bad things happening. So we don't know yet which psychiatric
(21:04):
disorders are really contraindicated, as I said, because we're selecting
very clean populations, very carefully defined populations right now.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
I'd love to get into some of the specific experiments
that you've run. There's one in twenty twenty that I
found really interesting. One of the participants was a leader
in the white nationalist movement. Can you take us through
what you did in that study and what you found.
Speaker 5 (21:30):
Yeah, most of our studies are done in a group
of participants, so we only look at the data for
the whole group. This person, though, was in a study
where we were testing maybe thirty people, and we were
actually testing the effects of MDMA on pleasantness of social touch.
So the point of the experiment is not that important.
(21:50):
But he received the drug in the lab. And when
they get the drug, they're in our lab here physically,
and they stay for four or five hours or something,
and then there's a research assistant goes in every once
in a while, measures their heart rate, blood pressure, and
gives them some questionnaires to fill out, and the researcher
went in there and the person the subject had filled
out on their form in capital letters, very large capital letters.
(22:14):
I know exactly what I have to do now. My
course is very clear, he said, look me up on
the internet. So the research assistant went and looked him
up on the internet and he was indeed the leader
of a white nationalist group. So then they came to
me and they said, well, what should we do. I
was really nervous. I thought that the epiphany that he
had was that he had to go and do something
(22:35):
with a machine gun or something like that. So, you know,
it really frightened me. If he's a white nationalist and
he says, I know what I have to do now.
So then we went and talked to him, and his
epiphany was, I see what I'm doing right now. I've
gone it all wrong. What's really important is luck this
guy he was getting drug under a circumstances. He didn't
(22:57):
know what he was getting. When we give people a
drug at a beginning with star at a study like that,
we tell him you might get a stimulant, you might
get a tranquilizer, you might get a placebo you might
get an antihistamine in this case, we said, also said
you might get the MDMA, But he had no idea
what drug he was getting, so there was no set there.
He wasn't though, he had no reason to expect that
this was going to be a love drug or anything.
(23:18):
So what he said then when I talked to him afterwards,
he said, it didn't really change his beliefs that much.
He still felt he accepted the white nationalist beliefs, but
he said it doesn't really matter. He said, that's not
what's important in my life. What's important in my life
is family and friends and caring for people and making
social connections with people.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
So I thought it gave It was.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Remarkable to me that the drug would produce this strong
subjective experience, even though he didn't know what he was getting,
So it was quite remarkable.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
So does this make you believe that perhaps MDMA and
other similar drugs could help us shape social chain.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
In theory, yes, but in practice it's not anything that
anybody would take on doing. I mean, that becomes a
really a political and an ethical issue, and who's to
say what direction of change, whether it's going to go
in a good direction or a bad direction. It might
make them more vulnerable to believing certain kinds of things.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
So I don't think.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
Researchers, psychiatric researchers are going to go to anything like
that or make any kind of claims like that.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
I do wonder if it could be helpful in a
recovery setting, like let's say somebody was electing for treatment
and they came in yes, seeking a perspective and behavioral shift,
and if it were administered in the controlled environment, I
bet that could be helpful.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
Absolutely.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
And that's where the therapist comes in to sort of
direct the kind of emotional experiences and put them into
a constructive kind of direction. They are MDMA and have
for a long time, and things like couple therapy, so
there's it seems to facilitate kind of difficult conversations with people.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
That's really interesting.
Speaker 5 (25:08):
And there's even an interesting undertaking in between the Israelis
and the Palestinians that they put people together in kind
of an ayahuasca group and try and get people with
very kind of long standing negative feelings about the other
group and putting them together and having them just be
with the other group.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
It's very interesting.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
How about a study that you published called Psychedelics in Medicine,
Can evidence keep up with enthusiasm? What does that title mean?
Speaker 5 (25:38):
Well, that people are going very quickly. Even though there's
a kind of a blossoming of the research. People are
have great expectations that the psychedelic drugs are going to
solve all kinds of problems. So they have great expectations
that it's going to that the drugs, that psychedelic drugs
are going to be useful for a lot of different things.
But in order to make that conclusion, we have to
(25:58):
do the research, We have to do the science part
of it.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
So the question is has the.
Speaker 5 (26:02):
Science kept up with the enthusiasm of what they might do.
So that particular article was an introduction to a special
issue where there were maybe six or so different papers
that reviewed different aspects of psychedelic drugs.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
What do you make of the increasingly mainstream popularity of
the drugs? Why do you think people are more interested now?
Speaker 5 (26:26):
I think they're becoming more socially acceptable, and there's also
a little bit more information about under what circumstances they're safe.
So I think the microdosing people perceive that as being safe,
and it probably is for the most part, although there
turns out there are some possible heart problems if you
use it over a long period of time. So I
think there's Yeah, they're being tested in mainstream psychiatry and disgusted,
(26:49):
so then that has a carryover effect. And it's in
every popular magazine that you come across, in New York
Times and New Yorker and the Economists. Everywhere you see
studies of the magic of what psychedelics might do.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
So I know that there's a study that your lab
did that is quote among the first to report that
low dose LSD may differentially affect people with depression. So
if someone is interested in using psychedelics for their mental health,
what does that mean in practice? What is the process like,
how does someone even begin to explore this as a
treatment option?
Speaker 4 (27:23):
You know, I don't think we're there yet.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
The drug is still Schedule one, so it's not available
for medical practice, not available to physicians to prescribe. But
I thought it was an interesting finding because we pre
selected people. We had healthy volunteers with low scores on
a depression scale, and then volunteers who scored high on depression,
and that this low dose of elicti seemed to produce
(27:47):
different effects in the depressed people that reported more positive mood,
and they also reported more psychedelic effects, So it suggests
that there was something different about their brains to begin
with that when they come into the study, that the
drug has a different effect on. So I think it's
very promising. So the evidence so far on microdosing has
been very mixed. There isn't very strong evidence that microdosing
(28:09):
does much. But most of the studies have also been
done with completely healthy volunteers, and it's possible that the
microdosing has some effect in people who have some initial problem.
So in this case it might be depression. You could
also look at it in people who are depressed or
in people who have some other major issue going some
kind of problem going on in their lives. So it
(28:31):
could be that the reason we haven't seen the marked
effects in the healthy volunteers is because we haven't been
looking at the right people. And so this is kind
of a promising new direction, and we probably will go
on and look at this now with more depressed people
and see was it just by chance or can we
replicate it basically in another sample, So we'll do that.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
You mentioned that MDMA may be close to being approved
as a potential PTSD treatment. Would you talk to us
more about the approvals process, like what lies ahead in
order for these drugs to become more viable options for
the public.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
Yeah, the approval process is very long and very expensive
and onerous. So an organization called LYCOS went to the
trouble and expense of doing three what they call phase
three trials, so trials with patients with PTSD, and they
had quite promising results and this summer they presented it
(29:27):
to the Food and Drug Administration for approval or to
an advisory committee. Unfortunately, the advisory committee had a lot
of questions about how the study had been done and
they didn't recommend that the FDA approve it, and in
the end, the FDA did not approve it. So this
was a real setback for the field, basically because it
was the first of these drugs that was put forward
(29:48):
to the FDA as a possible therapeutic medication and there
were very promising results, so it did really improve the
situation for a lot of patients with PTSD. In the end,
it was not approved, so they're going to have to
go back now and do more studies or figure out
what to do next.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Who would you recommend psychedelics for.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
I guess I have to think about the medical, scientific
part of me and also the human part of me.
I guess if you could participate in one of these
trials where everything is given under very closely monitored circumstances,
that would be a way to test it. But if
you were just somebody with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or
(30:30):
even PTSD and just take it for yourself, I would
caution against that, just because so much kind of psychological
support goes with On the other hand, with really careful
and cautious use in healthy people, I think that the
drugs can reveal other ways of being or other ways
of seeing the world if they're used in a responsible
(30:53):
ways and from a physical point of view, they're not
that harmful. That is not like cigarette smoking that's going
to give you cancer, orlcohol that's going to give you
liver disease. With the frequency of the doses that do take,
so people don't take LSD every day for a long
period of time. They take it once and maybe take
it again in a couple of months, and it's a
mixed experience. So under those circumstances, you know, it's not
(31:14):
there's no real physical hazard. There is some psychological hazard,
of course.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Doctor Jowett. What do you think is next for your research?
Speaker 5 (31:21):
Well, I would like to follow up this depression study.
I'd like to see whether the microdoses improve depression. And
you know, if there's a possibility of a therapeutic of
low doses of an LSD or low doses of a
psychedelic relieving symptoms of depression, that would be really big.
That would be great. So I'm interested in that. I'm
(31:41):
also interested in lots of other things. I'm interested in
how drugs interact with social settings. So how is it
that the it's not just the drug changing behavior, but
it's the drug combined with the person that they're talking to,
whether it's a therapist or a friend, and so how
do those interactions occur?
Speaker 4 (31:58):
And I'm interested in that rug. It turns out.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
Many of these drugs like MDMA and alcohol, even emphetam
and make people feel more connected with other people. So
somehow there's this social component that using the drug makes
you feel closer to other people. So I think that's
kind of an interesting thing that hasn't been studied very much.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Is that lasting or does it just make you feel
more connected in the moment.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
That's a good question.
Speaker 5 (32:21):
Well, all we do is ask the people how connected
they feel with their partner at the end of the session,
and then we ask them again two days later, and
they still feel connected with that person two days later. Now,
whether that's a memory of you know, that they felt
connected with that person and they're remembering it two days later,
or whether they still have a strong feeling of connection
at the moment the two days later, we don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Got it. This has been really I would say eye opening,
but I'm going to say brain expanding instead. I'm really
grateful for your time. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Well, you had good questions. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Talking to Thank you so much, doctor Douitt.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
I cannot wait to see what your research produces next.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Doctor Harriet DeWitt is the founder and primary investigator of
the Human Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory and a research professor at
the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
We have to take another short break, but we'll be
right back.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
We're back.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Before we go, we have a special message presented by
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Speaker 2 (33:28):
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(33:57):
two of my friends, both under thirty five, were diagnosed
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(34:18):
aren't physical symptoms until it's in a late stage. That's
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But unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions out there
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Speaker 3 (34:40):
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Speaker 1 (34:55):
Okay.
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You might have also heard that you should start screening
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(35:28):
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(36:11):
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Speaker 3 (36:38):
That's it for today's episode. Tomorrow, we're talking Paralympics with
award winning disability advocate Sophie Morgan. She's covering the games
for NBC. Listen and follow the bright Side on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
I'm Simone Voice.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
You can find me at simone Voice on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's r O
b A.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Y See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.
Host
Simone Boyce
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