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The depression, fear and anxiety that come with dying are treated with opiates, antidepressants, and palliative sedation. But the use of psychedelics, specifically in the form of psilocybin, may be the better solution to easing psychological distress.
Currently, these end-of-life symptoms are
treated with opiates, antidepressants, and, sometimes, in extreme cases, palliative sedation. Palliative sedation is essentially putting a person into an induced coma through their death, which robs families of precious time they could have had with their loved one and patients of any kind of quality of life they should have been able to enjoy before the end. –Slate (“How Psychedelics Can
Transform End-of-Life Care”)
The Solution May Lie With Psilocybin
The solution, currently legalized for therapeutic use in only two states—Oregon and Colorado—may lie with psychedelics, specifically in the form of psilocybin.
Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic
compound found in over 200 species of fungi.
- There’s evidence to suggest that humans have been using psilocybin for thousands of years, long before recorded history.
- Across many clinical studies, a medically supervised treatment of psilocybin in terminally ill patients has been shown to produce rapid, robust, and enduring improvements in anxiety, depression and psychological distress.
- In clinical trials, terminally ill cancer patients who received psilocybin treatments showed dramatic decreases in depression and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, along with decreases in death anxiety. At a six-month follow-up, these changes were SUSTAINED!
- There is no pharmaceutical that comes close to this. The data to date show that psilocybin in a controlled therapeutic environment can do more to improve the quality of life in dying patients than almost any other treatment in use today.
