Doctors are talking about using psychedelic drugs to treat alcoholics
Researchers find alcoholic mice display anxiety and depression behaviour after abstaining from drinking, and that ketamine reverses those effects
Treating an addiction to a mind-altering substance with another mind-altering substance might seem counterintuitive, but more and more, researchers are finding ways that psychedelic drugs like psilocybin mushrooms and party drugs like ketamine could actually help people get over alcohol and drug addictions.
Most recently, researchers published a study in the Nature journal Neuropsychopharmacology that they say offers very preliminary evidence that ketamine might be worth exploring as a way to help people with alcohol abuse disorders get over the depression and anxiety that they frequently feel after giving up booze.
That particular study was based on mice, which means that on its own, it would hardly be worth mentioning — alcoholic mice being very different from humans with drinking problems. But that's far from the only research showing that ketamine can help with depression or that psychedelics can help addicts.
For the study in Neuropsychopharmacology, researchers showed that alcohol dependent mice display anxiety and depressed behaviour after abstaining from drinking. Then, they were able to show that ketamine was able to reverse those effects, causing the mice to behave like mice who hadn't been consuming alcohol in the first place.
These findings fit into a growing body of research that shows ketamine can reverse depression in people in powerful ways.
We might think of ketamine as a quasi-psychedelic party drug (or an animal tranquiliser), but researchers have been investigating its therapeutic properties for the past 10 years.
