Imagine a large room with white walls. A bit like in the hospital. Except that you are lying on a large pouf or a mattress, with headphones on your ears that play music. No question here of lying on the couch and discussing with your shrink. It is, in general, the next day that it happens.
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The idea is to allow patients to remember sometimes traumatic or blocking events with much more pleasant hallucinations, not to make people forget the trauma but to show that life is not just about that. And it works, explains Dr Daniel Pires Martins, from the addictology department of the Hôpitaux de Genève: “The psychedelic treatment is really a kind of catalyst. It opens up something in relation to certain disorders, in particular anxiety-depressive disorders, but not only. OCD… We have had very good results with anorexia too. It’s like something is very condensed.”
“Many patients said: it’s as if I had done in a very short time, over a month, two months, one or two years of psychotherapy.”
Dr Daniel Pires Martins, psychiatrist in Genevaat franceinfo
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, treatment with psychedelics is much lighter than treatment with antidepressants, which have many more side effects. And the results are also much faster with LSD. Although the substance remains prohibited and dangerous, Switzerland is one of the pioneers in its use in psychotherapy. After all, it was a Swiss researcher who synthesized the substance in the 1930s. But each treatment requires authorization from the Ministry of Health. LSD and other psychotropic drugs used such as psilocybin, the main psychoactive substance in hallucinogenic mushrooms, come from specialized laboratories. Nothing to do with what you find on the black market.
Patients are only allowed three doses, three sessions spaced out, usually several months apart. But the head of the addictology department at the Geneva Hospitals, Daniele Zullino assures us: there is no risk of addiction to LSD unlike tobacco or alcohol. The risk is rather that of trivializing psychotherapy under psychedelics, which must remain a last resort solution for patients faced with a therapeutic impasse. And who must remain supervised by doctors: “To expect too much from these substances, to use them as pharmacotherapy for any indication is a risk. We can make money with itemphasizes Professor Zullino. We can imagine the development of a business that can be problematic.”
Last thing, not everyone can benefit from this form of psychotherapy. Pregnant women, people with heart disease or with psychotic tendencies, as well as suicidal thoughts are immediately excluded from the program. So far in Geneva, a hundred patients have been able to benefit from it.