Go Retire Psychiatrist

Sena alerted me to an interesting news item about psilocybin which a case report describes the agent improving a Japanese American woman’s dementia. It was a whopping dose of 5 grams, which I guess is much larger than usual. She also received a second 3-gram dose:

Lago M, Cerveira M and Simonet JX (2026) Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin-containing mushroom administration: a case report. Front. Neurosci. 20:1813281. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2026.1813281

By the way, that reminds me Governor Reynolds did not sign into law the 2026 bill HF 978, which would have allowed psilocybin to be used on clinical environments with psychiatric support. If it had been approved, it would have been regulated through the state through the Medial Cannabidiol Advisory Board to be used for treating PTSD.

And this is perhaps a better place to quote psychiatrist Dr. Henry Nasrallah’s opinion about psilocybin than where I originally posted it (the post was “Maybe We Need a Dose of Humor”):

“That reminds me of an opinion piece published in the September issue of Current Psychiatry, by the journal’s editor, Henry A. Nasrallah, MD (From neuroplasticity to psychoplasticity: Psilocybin may reverse personality disorders and political fanaticism. Current Psychiatry. 2022 September, 21(9): 4-6 | doi: 10.12788/cp.0283).

I was a little surprised at Dr. Nasrallah’s enthusiastic endorsement of psilocybin for treatment of personality disorders and political extremism. He acknowledges the lack of any studies on the issue. In the last paragraph of his essay is a sweeping endorsement:

In the current political zeitgeist, could psychedelics such as psilocybin reduce or even eliminate political extremism and visceral hatred on all sides? It would be remarkable research to carry out to heal a politically divided populace. The dogma of untreatable personality disorders or hopelessly entrenched political extremism is on the chopping block, and psychedelics offer hope to splinter those beliefs by concurrently remodeling brain tissue (neuroplasticity) and rectifying the mindset (psychoplasticity).

While I’m not so sure about how effective psilocybin would be for this, I’m all for trying something to reduce the “visceral hatred on all sides.” I think it would take a dose a lot higher than 5 grams.

Another interesting facet of this topic is that I found a paper about psilocybin which listed over 300 references, one of which listed a couple of co-authors whose names I recognized because they used to work for the Dept of Psychiatry at University of Iowa Health Care. The main article is:

Haniff ZR, Bocharova M, Mantingh T, Rucker JJ, Velayudhan L, Taylor DM, Young AH, Aarsland D, Vernon AC, Thuret S. Psilocybin for dementia prevention? The potential role of psilocybin to alter mechanisms associated with major depression and neurodegenerative diseases. Pharmacol Ther. 2024 Jun;258:108641. doi: 10.1016/j.pharmthera.2024.108641. Epub 2024 Apr 6. PMID: 38583670; PMCID: PMC11847495.

The co-authors of the paper Haniff ZR et al cited were Dr. Chadi Calarge, MD and Lillian Dindo, PhD psychologist:

Gandy K, Kim S, Sharp C, Dindo L, Maletic-Savatic M, Calarge C. Pattern Separation: A Potential Marker of Impaired Hippocampal Adult Neurogenesis in Major Depressive Disorder. Front Neurosci. 2017 Oct 26;11:571. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2017.00571. PMID: 29123464; PMCID: PMC5662616.

How’s that for a coincidence? Anyway, the older I get the more intriguing the idea of psilocybin for dementia gets. In fact, the longer I live, the older I want to get.