Just how safe is it to take psychedelic drugs during therapy like Prince Harry? trends now

Never before, or since, have I been so petrified. Pure evil was stalking me across our living room. I backed away rapidly, but became trapped against a sofa by the sinister force.

Racked with terror, I screamed so hard that my ribs broke. Chunks of bone began to tumble from my mouth.

As a young philosophy student in the early 1980s, I had already taken the psychedelic drug LSD several times. Dabbling with hallucinogens seemed a normal part of university life.

My LSD experiences had ranged from deeply reflective to hilariously exhilarating.

But the abruptly traumatic acid trip I endured that night rattled me to my mental foundations. At the time, I quelled my terror by sitting for hours in the dark in front of a comforting gas fire. But for the following three months, I felt profoundly disturbed.

Somehow I’d acquired a subliminal notion that the malevolent power had inhabited me. Rationally, I knew this to be nonsense. Nonetheless, the idea haunted me that summer.

Mercifully, my strange psychological symptoms faded within a few months until they were almost forgotten. But not so completely forgotten that I ever took LSD again.

How things have changed. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms, ketamine and ecstasy (or MDMA) are now being touted by some British psychiatrists as a respectable new therapeutic answer for mental illnesses such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance abuse or addiction.

And now Prince Harry has admitted using psychedelics — magic mushrooms, psilocybin (the active component of magic mushrooms) and ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic from the leaves of a shrub — in an attempt to help him heal the ‘grief’ and ‘trauma’ he felt after the death of his mother.

‘I would never recommend people to do this recreationally,’ he said during an interview on U.S. TV on Sunday night. ‘But doing it with the right people if you are suffering from a huge amount of loss, grief or trauma, then these things have a way of working as a medicine.

‘For me, they cleared the windscreen . . . the misery of loss. They cleared away this idea that I had in my head that . . . I needed to cry to prove to my mother that I missed her. When, in fact, all she wanted was for me to be happy.’

British therapists are investigating the use of hallucinogenic drugs to treat mental illnesses.

For example, psychiatrists at the Maudsley Hospital in London are conducting a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded trial into the use of magic mushrooms for treatment-resistant depression.

And psychiatrists at King’s College London are carrying out trials of MDMA on former servicemen suffering with PTSD to see if it will alleviate their symptoms. Meanwhile, private company Awakn Life Sciences, which has clinics in Bristol and London, is developing therapies using ketamine to treat addictions and eating and anxiety disorders.

Ketamine is used clinically as an anaesthetic, sedative and painkiller. It is also taken as an illegal psychedelic drug (according to a press report, when he was 17 Harry admitted he’d tried this drug).

In all these studies, the drugs are used alongside psychotherapy. Scientists claim hallucinatory experiences induced by the drugs can alter people’s habitual thinking patterns, serving as a catalyst for making psychotherapy work.

Rick Doblin, founder of California-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, previously told Good Health: ‘It’s not the drug doing the therapeutic work, it’s the psychotherapy. The drug makes therapy more effective, reducing patients’ fear-based responses to traumatic memories. It gives them a ense of safety.’

Enthusiasts also claim that brain scans demonstrate that people undergoing psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy show less activity afterwards in areas of their brains associated with depression.

There are, however, concerns that the brain scans used for these studies — functional MRI — produce unreliable results.

And the bigger question is whether psychologically vulnerable people should be exposed to the risk of psychotic hallucinations so profoundly terrifying that they render them even more traumatised than before — and possibly leave them permanently harmed?

LSD has been notoriously blamed for the tragic psychosis that dogged Syd Barrett, the founding genius behind the British rock group Pink Floyd.

He split from his bandmates in 1968 after experiencing a psychedelically induced psychotic breakdown. Afterwards, he lived as a mentally frail recluse until his death 38 years later, aged 60.

According to the UK drug information charity Frank: ‘LSD may have serious, longer-term implications for someone who has a history of mental health problems. It may also be responsible for setting off a mental health problem that had previously gone unnoticed.’

Supporters of psychedelic therapy, however, argue that bad trips are rare, and even when they do occur they often provide challenging personal insights that fuel healthy psychological growth.

David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, is a leading exponent of psychedelic therapies. He told Good Health: ‘Our research studies covering several hundred people who took hallucinogens have not resulted in any bad trips, except for a patient on LSD who had one when they were inside an MRI machine having their brain monitored.’

Proponents also point to the presence of a therapist in the trials, during the entire time the patient is under the influence of hallucinatory drugs.

In February 2022, Professor Nutt co-authored a review of research, in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, which said that bad trips (or ‘challenging experiences’, as he refers to them) are ‘often positive . . . and the risks of psychotic episodes or overdose are rare’.

The research paper claimed that psychedelic drugs have an unwarrantedly bad reputation and argued ‘many — albeit not all — of the persistent negative perceptions of psychological risks are unsupported by the currently available scientific evidence’.

Professor Nutt has a controversial history regarding psychedelics, stemming from when he was the Government’s top drugs adviser. He was sacked as chair of the Advisory Council on

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