Psychedelics and Mental Health

This New Yorker article is a long and fascinating exploration of recent experiments in the use of psychedelics to treat various mental illnesses and conditions, including addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and even existential dread and despair. It raises more questions than it answers (your psychiatrist or doctor isn’t likely to be prescribing you a psilocybin trip anytime soon) but it reinforces the idea that the human mind is astonishingly complex and our understanding of how it works remarkably thin. What we don’t know dwarfs what we do know, and that includes how to treat mental disorders. For me, the key message of this article is this: Psychedelics may not become a standard treatment tool anytime soon, but in the struggle to reduce human suffering, we shouldn’t rule anything out.