Perhaps it's not the week for thinking about the final exit, but the Grim Reaper doesn't take holidays, as evidenced by Christmas being peak heart attack season and the fact that tsunamis wait for no man. Interestingly, the Washington Post reports the FDA is getting behind the testing of certain illegal street drugs to help the terminally ill cope with facing the end.
"When taken under adverse circumstances by ill-prepared individuals, there are substantial psychological risks," said Charles Grob, a psychiatrist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. "But when taken in the context of carefully structured and approved research protocols and facilitated by individuals with expertise, adverse effects can be contained to a minimum."
Grob is leading an FDA-approved study in which terminally ill cancer patients are being given psilocybin to see whether it can help them sort through emotional and spiritual issues. He said the patients take a "modest" dose of synthetic psilocybin, equivalent to two or three illicit mushrooms. They spend the next six hours or so in a comfortable setting with a psychiatrist -- talking, thinking and sometimes listening to music with headphones.
"So far they have had very impressive results in terms of amelioration of anxiety, improvement of mood, improved rapport with close family and friends and, interestingly, significant and lasting reductions in pain," Grob said of the first few patients to enroll. "These are extraordinary compounds that seem to have an uncanny ability to reliably induce spiritual or religious experiences when taken in the right conditions."
This isn't the first time someone's tried this. Before LSD was made illegal it was used by some psychiatrists and various experiments were done. I've heard it said that Cary Grant was the recipient of treatment that sounds a lot like that described here.
I happen to have tried said mushrooms and they can be a great experience if you manage not to get sick to your stomach. I stay away from psychoactive substances (traditionally construed) these days, but they were by far my favorite once upon a time. I'm sure they'd be more useful for something like this than awful LSD could ever have been. Oh boy, I'll have to write a few short stories about my bad trips one of these days.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 27, 2004 02:45 PMCary Grant's LSD treatment seems to be well documented. I have this nugget, which my wife claims is from his autobiography, where he describes the important lesson he learned: "In life there is no end to getting well. Perhaps death itself is the end to getting well. Or, if you prefer to think as I do, the beginning of being well."
This idea of our earthly existence being a disease from which we are cured only by death just clashes with my -what?- western sensibility.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at December 28, 2004 07:53 AMIf you wanted to be really cynical about it, which I often do, you could make a case that it's a self-serving assumption of psychotherapeutic systems which have no empirically verifiable efficacy. Build the expectation of failure into the system and call it progress. It's a tactic common to, I'd imagine, any thought system which is designed primarily for self-perpetuation.
But, on the other hand, this goes at least as far back as Catholicism, doesn't it? I mean in a spiritual sense?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 28, 2004 12:05 PMI guess you're right about Catholicism: this body is just a rag bundled around a spirit. What did Malcolm Lowry write? - What is a man but a corpse holding up a soul. Or something like that. So my western sensibility isn't very western at all.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at December 28, 2004 12:26 PM