Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases

By Peter Gasser, Dominique H Holstein, Y. Michel, R. Doblin, B. Yazar-Klosinski, T. Passie, R. Brenneisen. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2014

618 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract A double-blind, randomized, active placebo-controlled pilot study was conducted to examine safety and efficacy of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)-assisted psychotherapy in 12 patients with anxiety associated with life-threatening diseases. Treatment included drug-free psychotherapy sessions supplemented by two LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions 2 to 3 weeks apart. The participants received either 200 &mgr;g of LSD (n = 8) or 20 &mgr;g of LSD with an open-label crossover to 200 &mgr;g of LSD after the initial blinded treatment was unmasked (n = 4). At the 2-month follow-up, positive trends were found via the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) in reductions in trait anxiety (p = 0.033) with an effect size of 1.1, and state anxiety was significantly reduced (p = 0.021) with an effect size of 1.2, with no acute or chronic adverse effects persisting beyond 1 day after treatment or treatment-related serious adverse events. STAI reductions were sustained for 12 months. These results indicate that when administered safely in a methodologically rigorous medically supervised psychotherapeutic setting, LSD can reduce anxiety, suggesting that larger controlled studies are warranted.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bfffbe1a81074f8c093c5f943a2900fc5871694

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Clinical Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Psilocybin with psychological support for treatment-resistant depression: six-month follow-up (2017, result): “…support have found similarly promising outcomes: Sustained reductions in end-of-life anxiety were observed after LSD-assisted psychotherapy (Gasser et al. 2014), and reduced depressive symptoms were seen after ayahuasca in patients with ‘recurrent depression’ (Osorio Fde et al. 2015;…”
Developing Guidelines and Competencies for the Training of Psychedelic Therapists (2017, neutral): “Alternatively, high-dose applications were used and limited to a handful of significantly longer sessions followed by psychotherapeutic integration work (Gasser et al., 2014; Osmond, 1957).”
Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging (2016, neutral): “Psychopharmacology (Berl) 7(6):453–460.”
The Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Drugs: Past, Present, and Future (2017, background): “Used most notably as aids to psychotherapy for the treatment of mood disorders and alcohol dependence, drugs such as LSD showed initial therapeutic promise before prohibitive legislature in the mid-1960s effectively ended all major psychedelic research programs.”
REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics (2019, background): “…that the neurobiological evidence base for the entropic brain hypothesis be supplemented by concomitant measures of subjective and behavioral complexity/entropy — as have been applied in the context of development and ageing (Gauvrit et al., 2017) and natural language (Hoffman et al., 2013).”
Serotonin and brain function: a tale of two receptors (2017, background): “Moreover, an increasing number of studies are reporting enduring positive mental health outcomes (Bogenschutz et al., 2015; Bouso et al., 2012; Gasser et al., 2014; Grob et al., 2011; Hendricks et al., 2015b; Osorio Fde et al., 2015) and psychological well-being (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016c;…”
Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial (2016, background): “Two recent double-blind, placebo-controlled studies with the classic hallucinogens psilocybin (Grob et al., 2011) and LSD (Gasser et al., 2014) examined effects in 12 patients with life-threatening illness, including cancer.”
Patients’ Accounts of Increased “Connectedness” and “Acceptance” After Psilocybin for Treatment-Resistant Depression (2017, neutral): “…by eight independent research teams on the clinical utility of psychedelics (Bogenschutz et al., 2015; Carhart-Harris, Bolstridge, et al., 2016; Gasser et al., 2014; Griffiths et al., 2016; Grob et al., 2011; Johnson, Garcia-Romeu, & Griffiths, 2016; Moreno et al., 2006; Osorio Fde et al.,…”
Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial (2016, background): “…psilocybin in patients with advanced-stage cancer conducted at Harbor-UCLA (Grob et al., 2011) and the other using LSD in patients with a variety of life-threatening illnesses including but not limited to cancer diagnoses (Gasser et al., 2014), suggested acute and sustained treatment benefits.”
Psychedelics (2016, methodology): “Similarly, Gasser et al. (2014) employed LSD-assisted therapy in 12 patients with anxiety related to a diagnosis of life-threatening diseases. Patients received either 200 mg LSD (free base) or a 20 mg “active placebo” dose of LSD with an open-label crossover to 200 mg LSD after unblinding. There we”