Shrooms can heal the psychological scars caused by racism, study finds

Could magic mushrooms heal South Africans with racial trauma? Based on a new study in North America, the answer could be yes.

A single positive experience on a psychedelic drug such as psilocybin (mushrooms), LSD or MDMA (ecstasy) lowered stress, depression and anxiety in black people who had experienced racial trauma, according to findings published in the journal Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy.

“Their experience with psychedelic drugs was so powerful that they could recall and report on changes in symptoms from racial trauma that they had experienced in their lives, and they remembered it having a significant reduction in their mental health problems afterward,” said joint lead author Alan Davis, of Ohio State University.

The more intensely spiritual and insightful the psychedelic experience was, the more significant the decreases in trauma-related symptoms.

Davis, who led the research with Monnica Williams, from the University of Ottawa, said there is a growing body of research which suggests psychedelics have a role in therapy, especially when administered in a controlled setting.

But until now, there has not been any focus treatment that could specifically address the trauma of black people’s chronic exposure to racism.

Williams said: “There are no empirically supported treatments specifically for racial trauma. This study shows that psychedelics can be an important avenue for healing.”

The researchers questioned 313 people who believed a psychedelic drug had contributed to “relief from the challenging effects of racial discrimination”. The group of adults described themselves as Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American/Indigenous Canadian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.

They were asked to recall a memorable psychedelic experience and its short-term and enduring effects. Those experiences had occurred between a few months and 10 years earlier.

Discrimination the respondents had encountered included unfair treatment by neighbours, teachers and employers, false accusations of wrongdoing and physical violence.

“The most highly endorsed discrimination experiences were being ‘really angry about something racist that was done’ and wanting ‘to tell someone off for being racist towards you, but [you] didn’t say anything’,” the researchers said.

They asked the participants about the severity of their anxiety, depression and stress symptoms in the 30 days before and 30 days after the psychedelic experience.

Because being subjected to racism is usually a lifelong problem rather than a single event, the researchers also assessed symptoms characteristic of people suffering from discrimination-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Davis, who is also associated with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, said: “Not everybody experiences every form of racial trauma, but certainly people of colour are experiencing a lot of these different types of discrimination on a regular basis.

“So in addition to depression and anxiety, we were asking whether participants had symptoms of race-based PTSD.”

Participants were asked about the intensity of three common experiences people have after taking psychedelics drugs, categorised as:

• Mystical (a spiritual connection to the divine). Questions explored “loss of your usual sense of time” or “experience of amazement”;
• Insightful (an increase in awareness and understanding about themselves). Respondents were asked to score statements such as “I realised how current feelings or perceptions are related to events from my past” on a scale of 0 to 5; and
• Challenging (emotional and physical reactions such as anxiety or difficulty breathing). Participants scored statements such as “I felt like crying” or “I felt shaky inside”.

All participants recalled their anxiety, depression and stress symptoms after the memorable psychedelic experience were lower than they had been before the drug use. The magnitude of the positive effects of the psychedelics influenced their reduction in symptoms.

“What this analysis showed is that a more intense mystical experience and insightful experience, and a less intense challenging experience, is what was related to mental health benefits,” Davis said.

The researchers said the findings were based on the participants’ memory and it could not be assumed psychedelics would help all black people suffering racial trauma.