Could psychedelic drugs improve the mental health of autistic people?

This Science journal article starts: "Profound feelings of unity, transcendence, ineffability, and awe - as well as improved mental health. Those were among the testimonials in a recent survey of 233 people about their experiences with psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin. Such accounts aren’t exceptional, but the survey participants were: All were autistic. The results, reported in October in Psychopharmacology, hint that psychedelics could benefit a group typically overlooked in studies of these substances. About one in 36 people in the United States qualifies for an autism diagnosis, which comes with higher odds of mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder. In nonautistic people, some studies have suggested psychedelics may help with such conditions, although no psychedelic treatment has yet been approved in the U.S. But in autistic people only a single, small pilot study has been done. Now, multiple small-scale studies are getting underway to test the drugs’ promise and risks in this group. The single recent trial, published in 2018, included 12 autistic adults with severe social anxiety who received talk therapy paired with either MDMA or a placebo. MDMA recipients experienced a “rapid and durable improvement” in symptoms that lasted at least 6 months, the authors reported. But more and bigger studies are necessary, says Hsiang-Yuan Lin, a psychiatrist and clinician-scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, because “we cannot just say … the treatment response in a neurotypical brain will be the same as in an autistic brain.” He adds that responses to psychedelics might vary dramatically among people with an autism diagnosis. “Individual differences are everywhere, but they’re even wider in autistic people,” he says."

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