This Viewfinder episode is supported by UC Davis Health, where doctors, nurses, and researchers share a passion for advancing health.

Learn more about their latest medical innovations at health.ucdavis.edu There is a revolution of sorts emerging in modern medicine.

- Psychedelic means "mind manifesting."

- A possibility that many experts believe could be the answer to some of our greatest medical mysteries.

[Dr. Lubarsky] There hasn't been a new mechanism of action for a mental health treatment for almost 60 years.

- While many think of psychedelics as part of the 1960s counterculture, there's evidence dating back much earlier that psychedelics may have a unique ability to heal.

[Moana Meadow] We're just kind of reexamining what has been known about these medicines for a very long time through our contemporary lens.

- It's an urgent mission to address a contemporary epidemic.

One in five Americans suffers from a mental illness in any given year.

[Julie Auslander] It offers so much potential to give people profound healing experiences in a shorter period of time.

- But many obstacles stand in the way, including the stigma of drugs at a time when drug abuse is a crisis, as well as the current laws and regulations stemming from that abuse.

But at the same time, so many people are desperate to find relief.

[Dr. John Gray] There's a lot of worry that the excitement may lead to people taking psychedelics on their own in unsafe environments.

- For the first time in decades, doctors are hopeful, scientists are excited, and patients are eager for a breakthrough that could ease the mental health epidemic.

[Gisele Fernandes] I think we're really looking at a whole new era in the mental health and the psychiatry field.

[Dr. Lubarksy] We think it could be the future of psychiatric treatments that have eluded us for decades.

- Psychedelics and Healing.

♪♪ [Jesse Gould] When we go into the military, we go through all this training, we go through all these experiences to make us a soldier, to make us part of this group.

And there's not the same indoctrination to become a civilian.

- U.S. Army Ranger Jesse Gould served three combat tours in Afghanistan.

He became a noncommissioned officer leading a team of junior Rangers.

The military was a positive experience, a lesson in leadership, until he came home.

[Jesse] So, when I got out of the military, I thought I was going to hit the ground running.

I already had a degree in economics and had some experience in finance and, you know, found a good job post-military.

But that's when a lot of these mental health issues started really coming, uh, and affecting my life.

- On the outside, he looked healthy.

He had a job and a social life.

On the inside, there was turmoil.

[Jesse] It was just a lot of anxiety, um, getting to the end of the week, just extremely depressed, just not happy with... with life and couldn't really explain it.

Abusing alcohol because that was the only solution I could find that would get me to the end of the day.

- Jesse tried every non-medication option he could come up with and eventually went to the Department of Veterans Affairs for help.

He was given the diagnosis that millions of others have received: post-traumatic stress disorder.

[Jesse] We... we have one of the highest medicated veteran populations.

- He was among those who went on medication, tried talk therapy, but his mental health continued to spiral.

It's a story he was painfully familiar with, hearing it over and over again among veterans he had served with.

[Jesse] For many, it's just sort of masking it.

And they get to the spot where, for decades, they're on these medications, not really addressing the main- the baseline issues that they're going through.

- Jesse was determined to find a better way to deal with a diagnosis that many veterans struggle with their entire lives, and others lose their lives to.

[Jesse] At that point, I'd already had double digit people that I'd served with that had taken their own life.

- He wanted a solution that gave him hope for healing, not masking the problem or learning to live with it.

So, he kept looking for answers and discovered a practice steeped in thousands of years of tradition in South American cultures.

[Jesse] I heard about this psychedelic retreat.

Came in super skeptical, same as anybody else in that situation, like, "How is that going to help?"

- After some research, Jesse signed up for an ayahuasca retreat in Peru.

And the man who struggled from the scars of serving his country in war went to another country in search of a way to heal.

[Jesse] It was very challenging, possibly one of the most challenging things I've done.

By the end of the week, I felt like a- maybe not "new person," but I felt like a person that I had lost a long time ago, where my brain felt like it... it worked better, uh, the burden felt like it had been lifted of me.

- Ayahuasca has been used in South American ceremonial and shamanic spiritual medicine for millennia.

Brewed from a plant, it has hallucinogenic properties, not unlike another psychedelic that grows from the ground- Psilocybin, better known as "magic mushrooms."

Both have a long history of healing in other cultures, and both are the focus of new research into psychedelics, including others you may have heard of, like LSD and MDMA.

Some of these same psychedelics were actually studied decades ago.

And even at that time, researchers saw potential for use in medicine.

[Dr. John Gray] Therapists would do clinical trials with LSD in their- in- mixed with their psychotherapy back in the fifties and sixties, um, and there were over a thousand clinical trials published.

- But therapists weren't the only ones experimenting.

And for many, drug abuse became a crisis.

The government's response was the "war on drugs."

In 1970, the Federal Drug Administration reclassified psychedelics as Schedule One drugs, their most restrictive drug category, meaning they have no medical benefit.

These drugs were banned entirely, including in medical labs, where research was beginning to show that this category of drugs might be capable of so much more when applied medically.

[Dr. Gray] The research on psychedelics basically disappeared.

There was no federal funding, which funds most of the research enterprise in the United States.

- In recent years, the tide has started to turn.

Some universities have been able to get federal approval and a special license to do limited clinical studies with psychedelics.

At the same time, as acceptance of medical marijuana has grown, more people are open to the idea that currently illegal drugs could have medical benefits.

And with psychiatric illnesses and suicide rates skyrocketing, there's widespread agreement on the need for new and better options.

[Dr. Gray] A lot of our... our treatments are just not good enough for most people, and there's a huge population of people that just don't benefit from them at all.

[Dr. Helen Kales] We need better treatments.

It takes too long to get people better.

- As the chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences for UC Davis, Dr. Helen Kales understands the desperation that comes from hoping a medication will work.

[Dr. Kales] We're waiting.

We're waiting, and we're scared when we're waiting because we know difficult things can happen as we're waiting for medications to work.

And sometimes, they don't work.

- What researchers are seeing is that these drugs may offer not only a new kind of relief, but one that works in a very different way and may last longer and be far more effective than anything else that's currently available.

[Dr. David Lubarsky] What we've found is that the psychedelics have an entirely different way of treating what have been untreatable diseases, things like post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive behaviors, and substance use disorder, and that addiction mentality that drives people, uh, both into the street and to ruin.

- Research teams at top universities around the world are now conducting a variety of clinical trials on psychedelics.

Here at the University of California, Davis, the Institute for Psychedelics and Neuro Therapeutics launched in February of 2023.

Experts from across the country gathered here to discuss current research.

[Dr. Kales] I think for the first time in a long time, we have a lot of hope.

So, hope is great, however, we need the evidence to back it up.

[David Olson] We don't think these drugs are panaceas, but we do think that they might be targeting some common neurocircuitry shared by many of these disorders.

- David Olson is founding director of UC Davis' new institute.

He, along with co-director John Gray, gained recognition for a study published in Cell Reports in 2018, demonstrating for the first time how psychedelics promote neuroplasticity, or actual changes in the brain.

It sparked hope and excitement in the medical community, but they say there's so much more they need to learn.

[Dr. Gray] The brain is so complex that we... we have this vast knowledge of how the brain works, but we still don't know how it goes wrong in these disorders.

- Scientists do seem to agree on what was demonstrated in that Cell Report study, that psychedelics somehow increase brain plasticity, allowing people to physically rewire or remodel their brain in a more permanent way.

Think of a neuron like a tree, with many branches covered in leaves.

The leaves are the synapses or connections between the neurons.

It's believed that with many neuropsychiatric diseases, the tree branches atrophy or wither and leaves fall away, disrupting the connections between the neurons and different brain regions.

This may explain how people get stuck in negative patterns or ways of thinking.

But when psychedelics are introduced, it actually helps some of those neurons and synapses to regrow and heal some of the damage, physically changing the structure of the brain.

[Dr. Lubarsky] Those neurons get healthier and develop more connections within the brain, to allow people to get out of a loop of despair that we haven't been able to interrupt previously.

- The effects are almost immediate.

They're extremely rapid, um, you know, within days, um, and they persist after a single experience.

- In the John Gray lab, researchers are trying to figure out if it's possible to separate the molecules that produce the hallucinations when people take psychedelics from those that have therapeutic effects.

[Dr. Gray] If you can split that up, um, that might provide a much safer compound for people to take, um, that has the same benefit of rapid-acting antidepressant effects.

- And if they can do that, they may be able to create new drugs that have all the benefits of psychedelics without the risk.

But experts stress that the drug, alone, won't solve the problem entirely.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy isn't just about the drug.

It's also about the therapy.

- While they are powerful, they're not a magic bullet.

They are not able to, in and by itself, help somebody shift their psychology, their emotional patterns, their belief systems, and work through the traumatic experiences that they've had.

- Gisele Fernandes is director of psychedelic therapy at the University of San Francisco's Translational Psychedelic Research Program.

[Gisele] I do get to see profound transformations.

I see people gaining insights.

I see people, uh, reworking their belief systems and coming out of these sessions and this protocol with different narratives and different ways of looking at the world and looking at themselves.

You may look at a situation in your life in a way that you never thought about it in that way before, and that might- - This is what psychedelic therapy looks like today, during one of UCSF's many clinical studies involving psilocybin.

Therapists stress the importance of the setting to the overall experience.

Here, patients don't go into treatment rooms.

Instead, they're "dosing rooms," peaceful spaces with lighting, music and scenes from nature to help facilitate a better psychedelic experience.

[Gisele] The dosing days are usually a session where the person is in touch with the raw material in they- in that they get visions, they get, um, ideas, they feel emotional.

There's a lot of openness in many ways.

- The actual dosing day involves a single session that lasts as long as 7 hours.

The therapist is present the entire time to help guide the patient during the trip and make sure they're medically safe.

[Gisele] Some people stay quiet and have an internal focus for most of the session, accompanied by the music, and some people have emotional, psychological processes come up and they talk and they cry and they ask for help.

And some people need to move and get out of the couch.

- Then, the drug wears off.

The patient goes home and returns the following day for the next step- integration.

Doctors say that's where they're able to process the experience, the images and the feelings that came up with their psychotherapist.

- It's not just a drug, um, and that's- I think that's a really important thing for people to know.

It's not just given like, uh, an SSRI, an antidepressant.

It... it really is a therapy-drug combination.

- Dr. Josh Woolley is director of the Translational Psychedelic Research Program at UCSF.

While one session with psilocybin can result in long lasting change, he says part of that change, a very important part, comes from what a patient learns during therapy and integration.

[Dr. Woolley] There's actually a fair amount of psychotherapy.

So, typically, it works out to be about 20 hours of psychotherapy, if you include the dosing day.

- One of the first studies Woolley conducted at UCSF was on demoralization and complicated grief in long term AIDS survivors, people who were diagnosed with HIV before 1996.

[Dr. Woolley] For them, it was a death sentence, because there were no treatments for HIV at the time.

And, you know, many of their friends and loved ones died in front of them.

And so, they knew what was coming.

And it... and it wasn't just any death sentence, it was a... was a stigmatized death sentence.

[Tom Solis] I had- you know, knew people that got tired of going to funerals, you know, from people dying of AIDS.

You know?

- Tom Solis was a participant in that early clinical study.

He was diagnosed with HIV in 1991.

And as you might imagine, his life changed dramatically.

He lost his job as a well-known San Francisco baker.

He lost a lot of friends and felt a lot of shame.

And eventually, he became very sick.

[Tom] I mean, I was really preparing myself to die.

- Yet he was among a group of patients diagnosed early on who survived.

Medication came along just in time.

That medication saved his life.

His health improved.

But emotionally, Tom says he was more of a wreck than ever.

[Tom] I sort of internalized it, you know, my suffering.

And that's where this kind of demoralization really ate away at me.

I was hopeless.

I was absolutely hopeless.

- And then, he was admitted to the UCSF study.

He attended both group and private therapy sessions before his dosing day and still remembers that day more than five years ago very clearly, the way it changed the way he saw his whole life.

[Tom] It made everything just so much more brilliant, everything so much- like, you could see, like, everything... untarnished, everything is raw.

- He says his experience with psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy was life changing, allowing him to see all of the fear and anxiety that had created years of suffering, but in a way that made it make sense and be manageable for the first time ever.

[Tom] You could just see it right there.

You could see it clearly.

Well, that's just depression.

- Where antidepressants masked these feelings, he said psilocybin brought them to the surface in a way that allowed him, with guidance from his therapist, to acknowledge the feelings and change the story he had built around them.

It didn't erase his feelings, and it didn't cure his HIV, but it did give him the tools to handle them, even now, when issues come up.

[Tom] It helps me look at it in a more clear way and say, "Okay, well, you're going through a bout," you know, "and it's starting," and you know... you know, "and guess what?

You can figure it out now."

- But he, like doctors and therapists, says this is vastly different from recreational use of the same drug, which he had tried years before on his own.

The difference and the healing come from having someone to help process those very vivid images after they surfaced- images, many say, could be frightening for anyone who might try psychedelics without the therapy.

[Tom] What is that rawness that you're going to look at?

You know, some... some people can get really kind of freaked out, you know?

Like, really looking deep into your soul, you know?

[Moana Meadow] It could look like trauma that impacts our health, our wellness.

- Some might say that glimpse into the soul is an important part of the healing.

It's also part of the focus of a nine month, 200 hour certification program at UC Berkeley's Center for Psychedelic Research, or BCSP.

[Tina Trujillo] This is a program that blends contemporary scientific knowledge with, uh, various historical perspectives on the use of, uh, psychedelics for healing and other purposes.

[Moana Meadow] They're not just a prescription.

They're not just a medication.

They're... they're sacred medicines that have been used around the world for all of human history.

- Other training programs are popping up throughout the U.S. to meet an expected demand for facilitators, but the Berkeley certificate program is unique, with a strong focus on spirituality.

[Moana] So much of the research has been focused on the scientific and clinical aspects, uh, curing depression, anxiety, but they've noticed that as a side effect of these treatments, people are having some of the most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

Uh, we're suggesting that psychedelics can support healing, but what does that actually mean?

- Moana Meadow has served as a health care chaplain and interfaith minister.

She's now the program staff director here at BCSP.

She says those often unintentional spiritual experiences can be really transformative.

The Berkeley program trains participants for what to expect during a psychedelic session and how to guide patients through, whether they find it to be a terrifying experience or a spiritual one.

[Tina] It's our intention to prepare future facilitators who don't just have the skills and the know how, but who bring a certain set of values to the work.

- Program participants are all current professionals working as nurses, spiritual care facilitators, social workers and psychiatrists.

Like Martin Epson, many enrolled because they want a better option for their patients.

He says it's tough to watch them suffer for years, struggling with current options, like antidepressants, that aren't helping enough.

[Dr. Epson] So, I think we're obligated as clinicians and obligated as, um, people who are just trying to do better by our patients, to learn as much as possible about them.

[Julie Auslander] I had no idea that psychedelics could be used in a healing capacity.

I just really felt a calling to explore it and learn as much as I can about how to use these medicines, uh, to heal people.

- Julie Auslander, another participant here, says there's actually a lot of overlap between conventional talk therapy, which she's done with her patients for years, and psychedelic therapy.

[Julie] The difference in psychedelic therapy is it really is kind of like a rocket ship, where it... it just unlocks the potential in a much faster way, um, and a much more powerful way.

- But the politics don't move at that same interstellar speed.

Oregon became the first state in the nation to legalize psilocybin.

That law took effect in 2023.

It allows for the drug to be administered to adults in a supervised setting with a facilitator present who is licensed by the state of Oregon.

The Berkeley Certificate Program trains people to earn that license.

[Moana] The biggest challenge right now is, um, we're so limited by the laws and it's so hard to work in- under the limitations that we have.

- While the federal government has slowly approved studies into psychedelics, researchers say the regulations need to keep up with the science.

[Dr. Woolley] For this to be prescribable by people like me, outside of a clinical trial, the drugs need to be rescheduled.

The FDA needs to say, "Yes, there is an acceptable medical use, and this is what it is and here's how you prescribe it."

- And thats what Jesse Gould is now fighting for.

After his life changing experience with ayahuasca, Jesse became a strong advocate and an influential voice for legalizing psychedelics and making them more readily available to veterans suffering from PTSD.

He's been featured in major publications, including The New York Times, The Economist and Men's Health.

In 2017, he founded the nonprofit Heroic Hearts Project, aimed at connecting military veterans with psychedelic-based therapy to help them overcome trauma.

[Jesse] We're working as fast as we can to bring that, uh, to the U.S. through policy changes, through, uh, working on the community level, so we can increase the access, increase the... the scalability, so that people don't have to go to Peru to access this.

- His program has helped hundreds of veterans already and currently has a waitlist in the thousands.

[Jesse] We have a lot of people that come to our retreats.

They're able to get off their medication.

They never have to go on medication again.

We have a lot of people that had histories of suicide, and they come to some of these retreats and it never even crosses their mind again.

And that's the power of this work.

- For Jesse, these are urgent issues, both developing these new drugs and adopting rules to make them available to veterans who need them.

[Jesse] This is part of the cost of war.

The... the veterans that are needing help right now, we cannot just abandon them.

We cannot just leave them essentially in this war dynamic where they're still suffering, they're still struggling.

- While scientists are reluctant to suggest that psychedelics may provide a cure of any type, they do hope this therapy introduces new options to a field of medicine that hasn't seen much change in decades.

[Dr. Woolley] There are a lot of limitations.

And basically, there isn't any psychiatric illness that I can think of where we've said, like, "Oh, we cured that," which is actually kind of wild, if you think about it.

Um, in other branches of medicine, we have cured things.

- They also caution it's important to remain realistic.

[Moana] There's no medicine, I think, that can turn off the human experience of suffering.

That is part of what we encounter.

- Moana Meadows says psychedelics are not a miracle cure, they're another type of medication that may be right for some, but not for everyone.

While some patients see improvement after one treatment, for others, getting to the core of their trauma may be more like peeling an onion- each treatment gets them one layer closer.

[Moana] It's not, you know, guaranteed that someone will have one experience and their depression that they've had for 25 years is just going to disappear and they'll be fine from then on.

Life isn't that way, right?

- Despite the concerns and the legal roadblocks, there's still hope and optimism among those who are closest to the research, who are keenly aware of its potential.

[Dr. Woolley] If it really is true that psychedelics can reopen a critical period and we figure out exactly how to do that safely and effectively, that is a real game changer, that we could allow people to, you know, become unstuck in all sorts of ways.

- It's that promise, that potential that's driving research and training in labs and universities across our country.

If the pioneers in this research can develop safe and effective ways to use psychedelics, it may bring relief to millions of people.

And a mind-altering drug that's been around for millennia just may hold the key to forever altering our view of mental illness.

This Viewfinder episode is supported by UC Davis Health, where doctors, nurses and researchers share a passion for advancing health.

Learn more about their latest medical innovations at health.ucdavis.edu.