There is growing interest in psychedelic therapies as a way to treat addiction disorders and depression. At the University of Melbourne, Daniel Perkins has been leading an international team’s first studies looking at ayahuasca and mental health. So far, they have had some interesting results.
Ayahuasca is a drink brewed from plants, traditionally used by Amazonian tribes for spiritual and religious purposes. Increasingly, the strongly flavoured hallucinogenic brew is being used by people on a journey of self-discovery, personal growth or healing. Ayahuasca tourists travel to such places as Costa Rica for luxury retreats where they can be both pampered and guided through a ritual using the tea, which contains a hallucinogen known as DMT.
Perkins started researching with psychedelics back in 2015. “There were a lot of anecdotal reports and I wanted to understand whether ayahuasca really was this miracle cure, as it was being described, or whether it was a lot of hype, with a placebo effect from having these intense experiences with a group of people in the middle of the Amazon jungle.”
Perkins and colleagues from five countries ran the Global Ayahuasca Survey, which asked nearly 11,000 people from more than 50 nations about their experiences of drinking the tea and how it affected them.
Most did not have a particularly pleasant time. Vomiting and nausea were experienced by 62 per cent of participants, headaches by 17.8 per cent and abdominal pain by 12.8 per cent. Many also reported adverse mental-health effects – most commonly hearing and seeing things, but also feeling disconnected or alone, having nightmares and disturbing thoughts.
But although the experience was challenging, 87.6 per cent of respondents believed it was all part of a beneficial growth process. “The vomiting and purging are seen as a key part of the healing, and often people reported that moment was a cathartic release of a lot of emotion, pain and trauma,” says Perkins. “Some even had long-lasting benefits that they trace back to these moments.”
It has been claimed that one cup of ayahuasca is like 10 years of therapy and Perkins did find a high level of positive mental-health benefits, with 78 per cent of those suffering from depression reporting that it was improved or resolved, and 70 per cent of those with anxiety being very much improved or no longer experiencing it at all. Drinking ayahuasca was also associated with lower consumption of alcohol and other drugs.
People do need to be prepared for an intense experience, warns Perkins. “There can be moments of strong spiritual connection and bliss, but you can also revisit childhood traumas and face aspects of yourself you might usually avoid thinking about. It’s very different to antidepressants, which are trying to smooth over the symptoms. Ayahuasca is going deeply into it, throwing it all up and trying to process it in a very accelerated way.”
Perkins doesn’t see a risk of this hallucinogen being attractive to recreational drug users. “The experience itself doesn’t really lend itself to recreational use. It’s emotionally confronting, you can be vomiting, have diarrhoea, and are usually lying on the ground with your eyes closed in the dark.”
There have been reports of deaths among ayahuasca tourists, including New Zealander Matthew Dawson-Clarke, who died in 2015 aged 24 after drinking a tobacco tea in preparation for the ceremony. About 2.3 per cent of participants in the Global Ayahuasca Survey reported being so acutely ill that they needed medical attention. Researchers identified those most at risk as being older, having a physical health condition or substance-use disorder, or taking ayahuasca in a non-supervised context.
Whether ayahuasca will ever have a place in mainstream medicine remains debatable. “It seems to work very well for some people who have tried other psychological therapeutic approaches and not received the benefit they want,” says Perkins. “But it needs controlled studies to understand whether it is a medicine that can be used in a Western clinical context, like the studies that are under way for MDMA and psilocybin [a hallucinogenic compound found in some fungi].”
In 2023, Perkins will begin a trial using an ayahuasca product for treatment-resistant depression and alcoholism. The research team continues to drill down into the data supplied by the survey, encouraged by the Australian government’s willingness to fund research into the potential of psychedelic medicines for the relief of mental illness despite the continuing illegality of their active ingredients. “There’s still some sensitivity around the use of these compounds, but the stigma is fading away,” says Perkins.
