#64 - Researching Psilocybin's Effects on Depression - Dr. Rosalind Watts

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Dr. Rosalind Watts. She's a clinical psychologist at the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London.
And the Psychedelic Research Group focuses on two main areas. First, the action of psychedelic drugs in the brain, and second, their clinical utility. So in this episode, Rosalind and I talk about their study of how psilocybin, aka mushrooms, can affect depression.
And if you want to learn more about their research, I will link it up in the description and on the blog. All right, here we go. How did this particular research project get started?

**Dr. Rosalind Watts** (0:41)
This particular research started after various other studies looking into the effects of psilocybin on the brain and LSD on the brain. And this was the work of Robin Carhart-Harris, who his interest came out of his own psychoanalytic studies and his also work as a neuroscientist. And he was very interested in how we can explore the unconscious mind, because so much of our behaviour is controlled by the unconscious mind.
And, yeah, it's very difficult to study scientifically and psychoanalysis is very, it's almost seen as more of an art than a science. So he wanted to find ways in of looking at the brain, the unconscious mind. And he started studying psychedelics with David Nutz. So David Nutz is a quite well known professor in this country for his activism in legalizing drugs. He was, he worked for the government.
He was the drug czar. He informed them or advised them about the scientific harms of different drugs and how they should be scheduled or where they should be in the schedule of illegal drugs. And he was sacked very famously because his scientific report stated that MDMA was less dangerous than horse riding.
So he was sacked for that. And he has gone on to be a real innovator in drugs policy and drugs research. Just recognizing that lots of the drugs that are illegal might hold potential for healing, whereas alcohol and cigarettes that are legal really don't. So it's time for a more free thinking approach. So it was David and Robin together that started this research. And it was very difficult for them because there's so much red tape around this. Because since it was made illegal in the early 70s, it's been very hard to get a license from the home office to do this research.
But once they'd gone through the process, it became easier for them to then do another study and another study. So they've really been on a roll. They did some studies looking at the effects of psilocybin in LSD on the brain, and then they realized that the findings that they had indicated to them that it was time to start looking at psilocybin with the clinical population. And the key finding was that psilocybin seems to deactivate the part of your mind, your brain that is responsible for ruminating, for negative thinking on a loop. So they realized that for people with depression, this could be really, really powerful. So the study that I was involved in was a clinical study looking at 20 people with treatment resistant depression. And it was the first study of its kind in the UK. And there have been some studies in the US looking at psilocybin with people with depression and anxiety secondary to a diagnosis of a terminal illness.

**Craig Cannon** (3:41)
So are these the studies that were happening in the 60s and 70s or are there more recent work?

**Dr. Rosalind Watts** (3:46)
So in the 60s and 70s, there were, well, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, there were hundreds and thousands of studies.
And the findings were really very positive and it would all look great. And then it was became illegal. And then the research just dropped away. But then it started again in the early 2000s, I think maybe 2006, around that time, maybe slightly earlier than that.
And some of the people that had been involved in psychedelic research in the 60s started to say, oh, we really, you know, we really need these tools, they were really working, we need to get them back again. And I think, so Bill Richards, who's a psychologist, had been working in one of the clinics in the US, at the Maryland Psychiatrics Center, had this clinic there, there are some good YouTube videos showing people having LSD sessions, so you can see the kind of psychiatrist sitting there with a woman who is on her LSD trip. And they, yeah, they basically realized that it was time to go again, so they kind of galvanized their team, got a new group together, and started up again.