Persistent depressive disorder (PDD) is a continuous type of depression in which a person’s moods are regularly low .
For people with chronic depression, the ability to pick up on, recognize and respond to emotional cues, such as facial expression, can be altered, causing the brain to become oversensitive to negative stimuli.
Psychotherapy, along with the intake of antidepressants , has been the most common treatment carried out by specialists. However, even though these substances help combat the symptoms of depression, it has been shown that they can also reduce the way our brain processes strong emotions (effectively reducing hypersensitivity to negative emotions, but also attenuating the positive mood) .
The Imperial College of London has carried out a study in which it suggests that psychedelics , such as magic mushrooms or also known as hallucinogens, could be the key to combat some of these effects, reviving brain activity and reconnecting patients with their emotions . This claim is because some previous research has shown that the active compound found in these mushrooms, psilocybin , can help relieve symptoms in patients with persistent depression by restoring , in a sense, brain activity .
The team of scientists focused on the drug’s potential to change brain activity in key areas involved in emotional processing . They found that after psilocybin treatment, depressed patients who did not respond to conventional treatments had improvements in their mood and symptoms. However, a response with increased brain activity was also seen in an area called the amygdala , the almond-shaped region of the brain involved in processing emotions and playing a role in depression.
According to the researchers, the findings suggest that this could be an alternative way to address the changes seen in the depressed brain , potentially avoiding some of the side effects seen with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac. ‘, one of the most prescribed antidepressants.
Modifying brain activity
For the trial, a total of 20 volunteers with depression were recruited and asked not to take any antidepressant medication in the two weeks leading up to the trial. Later, they received two oral doses of psilocybin (the first a low dose and the last much more potent a week later) along with psychiatric support .
To study the changes in mental activity in these people, they were followed by functional magnetic resonance imaging before and after treatment . To do this, they were shown a series of images in which faces with different facial expressions appeared: happy, scared or neutral, and they captured their responses.
Patients reported feeling emotionally reconnected , and one patient described the experience as an “emotional purge.” The results of the scans revealed that patients had a stronger response to emotional faces (happy and scared) after psilocybin treatment .
The authors note that while the findings are interesting, follow-up studies are needed to confirm that the effects are directly related to the drug , rather than other factors, such as the psychological support provided during the trial or discontinuation of their SSRIs.
Citation: Leor Roseman, Lysia Demetriou, Matthew B. Wall, David J. Nutt, and Robin L. Carhart-Harris. “Increased amygdala responses to emotional faces after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.” Science Direct. DOI: 10.1016 / j.neuropharm.2017.12.041
