Group therapy holds promise for psychedelic-based treatments

This article in Lucid News comment: "In September 2020, three women and a man, all of them cancer patients suffering from depression, gathered at a cancer treatment center in Rockville, Md, to take a high dose of psilocybin. They prepared for the experience as a group, took the medicine at the same time and returned the following day to talk about it.  They were the first of 30 participants in a clinical trial that explored the safety, tolerability and efficacy of psilocybin-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder in patients with malignant cancers. Sunstone Therapies, a startup company that ran the trial, says it was the first time in the modern era of psychedelic research that patients were provided with group therapy, individual counseling and a psychedelic compound.  Two-and-a-half years later, with the trial now completed, participants still meet as a group for 90 minutes every month on Zoom. The meetings are led by Bill Richards, a co-founder of Sunstone and the company’s director of therapy, and Betsy Jenkins, a therapist and pastoral counselor.  Richards, who has been involved with psychedelics research since the 1960s, says he loves seeing the cancer patients form deep connections with one another. “Those meetings are beautiful,” he says. “They’ve given me a real appreciation of how empowering it is for a cancer patient to help other cancer patients.”

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