ANU to run its first trials into psychedelic-assisted therapy for mental health concerns

The first study will see single doses of MDMA and psilocybin administered to up to 100 psychedelic therapists in training during trials conducted in Sydney and Melbourne. By hooking the therapists up to an electroencephalogram, the researchers will measure the effect a single dose of either drug has on a healthy brain.

During the study, researchers will gradually increase the number of participants in the room to test the viability of psychedelic-assisted group therapy.

Professor Fitzgerald said the group therapy investigations are being undertaken as a way of counteracting the excessive cost patients currently incur for psychedelic-assisted therapy, which is typically one-on-one treatment over several hours.

A second study aims to investigate the effectiveness of MDMA and psilocybin to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, research not thought to have been conducted anywhere in Australia.

The smaller study is looking to recruit 30 patients, 15 of whom will receive MDMA and 15 of whom will receive psilocybin.

Patients will have up to three sessions with one or the other medication and a form of psychotherapy, tailored to the expected effects of the drug.

Professor Fitzgerald said there had been very little work into using psychedelics to treat obsessive compulsive disorder so far.

"OCD is an extraordinarily important and under researched mental health condition, not something that affects one to two per cent of the population - it's very common," he said.

"Treatments for OCD are very frequently ineffective and there's an extraordinary lack of new treatments in development - the pharmaceutical industry is not doing anything in this space."

Both studies are expected to get up and running in coming months and a third study into using psilocybin to treat depression is expected to follow, pending regulatory approval.

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In February, the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved the use of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and the use of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression from July.

The studies lead by Professor Fitzgerald have received funding from Mind Medicine Australia, an organisation founded by former opera singer Tania de Jong and her husband, former investment banker Peter Hunt.

The organisations has received criticism from academics conducting research in this space for the role it played in lobbying the Therapeutic Goods Administration to reschedule the drugs, and for advertising training using psychedelics ahead of rescheduling coming into effect in July.

Trials using psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat mental health concerns have been undertaken at several universities in Australia in recent years, however, they've often been relatively small in scale.

Professor Fitzgerald will work alongside an experienced team from Monash University, where he has previously undertaken a range of clinical trials.

He said there were some problems with the existing literature regarding the effectiveness of psychedelic treatments and more data was required for both MDMA and psilocybin.

"We need larger clinical trials and we need clinical trials with improved placebo conditions," Professor Fitzgerald said.

"I've come into the area of psychedelic therapy not necessarily as a psychedelic true believer.

"I've spent most of my clinical career working with patients who have treatment-resistant depression and I've seen a lot of patients also with treatment-resistant OCD.

"The suffering that these conditions produces for both the individuals and their families is beyond what most people really appreciate.

"I think we're obliged to be willing to think, quite laterally around what treatments we develop, because the standard pharmaceutical model has really failed.

"We had a wave of new drugs developed safe for depression in the 1990s and there's really not been anything fundamentally new since that time."

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