Healthy VolunteersPsilocybin

Psilocybin-Induced Mystical-Type Experiences are Related to Persisting Positive Effects: A Quantitative and Qualitative Report

In healthy volunteers given medium–high doses of psilocybin, greater acute mystical-type experiences (MEQ total score)—notably the Positive Mood and Mysticality subscales—were associated with persisting positive psychological effects at three months, whereas Transcendence of Time and Space and Ineffability were not. The paper also provides the first qualitative descriptions of complete mystical experiences after oral psilocybin, emphasising themes of cosmic connection, familial love and profound beauty.

Authors

  • Gitte Knudsen
  • Patrick Fisher
  • Dea Stenbæk

Published

Frontiers in Pharmacology
individual Study

Abstract

Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin have shown substantial promise for the treatment of several psychiatric conditions including mood and addictive disorders. They also have the remarkable property of producing persisting positive psychological changes in healthy volunteers for at least several months. In this study (NCT03289949), 35 medium-high doses of psilocybin were administered to 28 healthy volunteers (12 females). By the end of the dosing day, participants reported the intensity of their acute experience using the 30-item Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) and an open-form qualitative report from home. Persisting psychological effects attributed to the psilocybin experience were measured using the Persisting Effects Questionnaire (PEQ) 3-months after administration. Using a linear latent-variable model we show that the MEQ total score is positively associated with the later emergence of positive PEQ effects (p = 3 × 10−5). Moreover, the MEQ subscales “Positive Mood” (pcorr = 4.1 × 10−4) and “Mysticality” (pcorr = 2.0 × 10−4) are associated with positive PEQ whereas the subscales “Transcendence of Time and Space” (pcorr = 0.38) and “Ineffability” (pcorr = 0.45) are not. Using natural language pre-processing, we provide the first qualitative descriptions of the “Complete Mystical Experience” induced by orally administered psilocybin in healthy volunteers, revealing themes such as a sense of connection with the Universe, familial love, and the experience of profound beauty. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this paper expands understanding of the acute psilocybin induced experience in healthy volunteers and suggests an importance of the type of experience in predicting lasting positive effects.

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Research Summary of 'Psilocybin-Induced Mystical-Type Experiences are Related to Persisting Positive Effects: A Quantitative and Qualitative Report'

Introduction

Psilocybin, a prodrug of the 5-HT2A agonist psilocin, produces transient alterations in perception, emotion and self-experience and has shown promise as a treatment for affective and addictive disorders. Previous studies report that medium–high oral doses can produce lasting positive psychological changes in both patients and healthy volunteers, and that so-called "mystical-type" or "peak" experiences—sometimes operationalised as a "Complete Mystical Experience" (CME)—have been correlated with improved outcomes. However, most prior work has focused on quantitative characterisation of acute effects, and the relation between the qualitative character of the acute psychedelic experience and later persisting changes remains incompletely described in healthy volunteers. No prior study had reported systematic qualitative descriptions of orally administered psilocybin experiences in healthy subjects within modern research settings. Drummond and colleagues set out to examine whether the self-reported intensity and character of mystical-type experiences measured acutely (using the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, MEQ) predict persisting positive changes attributed to the psilocybin session at approximately 3 months (measured by the Persisting Effects Questionnaire, PEQ). The study also applied natural language processing (tf-idf on lemmatised Danish reports) to open-ended, same-day experience reports to identify linguistic themes that distinguish CME from non-CME reports and to provide curated qualitative exemplars and mandala drawings illustrating characteristic themes. The primary hypothesis was that greater mystical-type experience intensity would be positively associated with persisting positive effects at follow-up.

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References (61)

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