Dr. Matthew Johnson: Psychedelic Medicine | Episode 38

I have a file folder that grows larger every year of these cases, either in the medical literature or from the news, of people that freak out on a psychedelic, and they get hurt or they die. They run into traffic; they fall from a height, whether they thought they could fly or they just fell, like you can do when you're drunk or you're intoxicated on any substance.

All of the so-called psychedelics across these distinct classes... they all have the ability to profoundly alter one's sense of reality. And that can mean many things; part of that is profoundly altering the sense of self.

It may be that MDMA, for a broader number of people, is better for trauma because the chances of having an extremely challenging experience, what I call 'the bad trip', like really freaking out, is much lower with MDMA. People can have bad trips, but they're of a different nature.

Someone could be, you know, having a very strong psilocybin experience, and they're trying to navigate their way in Manhattan, crossing the street. And they might be staring into their hand; their hand is the most amazing miracle, like the entire universe has essentially conspired to come to this one point to make this absolutely breathtaking.

My understanding is that MDMA leads to very robust increases in both dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, which, from a neural networks perspective, is a very unusual situation.

I think people sometimes forget that... the major source of traumatic head injury is not football; it's not hockey; it's not boxing, it's not any of that stuff; its construction workers.