Researchers have found that a single dose of psilocybin rapidly reduces symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in patients who have not responded to standard treatments.
The effect appears within days and can last for months, pointing to a fundamentally different way of interrupting entrenched patterns of thought and behavior.
Within a controlled clinical setting, adults with long-standing, treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder received either psilocybin or an inactive comparison under close supervision.
At Yale University School of Medicine, Christopher Pittenger and colleagues documented sharp symptom reductions within 48 hours among those given psilocybin, while scores in the comparison group remained largely unchanged.
For many participants, this improvement held steady over the…