Compassionate Imagery Practices Priming for Psilocybin Ceremonies: A Large Scale Field Study

CARLA PALLAVICINI; LORENA LLOBENES; CAVANNA, FEDERICO; NATALI GUMIY; MARIA COSTA; NICOLAS BRUNO; MULLER, STEPHANIE; DE LA FUENTE, LAURA ALETHIA; PAUL GILBERT; ENZO TAGLIAZUCCHI

Phoenix

Congreso; ACNP Annual Meeting 2022; 2022

Relevance Psilocybin is now being promoted as a potential cure for depression and anxiety and is said to improve well being markers in general for a healthy population. This work focuses on the latter, presenting a very ambitious experimental design, where the combination of compassionate imagery practices and the ceremony is studied. We find self-reported improvements in well being in participants undergoing the full therapeutic combination, showing that the correct priming can result in a more effective psychedelic therapy.BackgroundClassical psychedelics like psilocybin, N-N dimethyltryptamine (DMT), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and mescaline  are known to induce profound, transient alterations in consciousness. Psychedelic research has shed light on the neurophysiology of these altered states of consciousness, as well as on their potential for the treatment of several mental health disorders, and for the promotion of a sustained state of well-being. On the other hand, the increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience resulted in a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles, which was validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Compassionate imagery is a form of guided meditation focusing on building a compassionate image of oneself and others to work with and develop. This practice has been linked to psychological benefits and general increases in well being markers; one of our main objectives was to understand whether these benefits can be facilitated by the sense of contentedness catalyzed by psilocybin mushrooms.MethodsAfter thorough screening, specially focused on participant safety, 105 healthy volunteers were measured in this experiment. We designed an ambitious setup in order to cover as many dimensions of the experience and its effects as possible. Participants were divided into 4 groups: low vs. high dose of psilocybin and compassion vs. control meditation. Physiological and activity data was acquired 1 week before and after the day of the ceremony using Fitbits. Also, fMRI scans, blood and saliva extractions were performed 1-3 of days before and after as well. Participants responded an extensive selection of scales and questionnaires, respecting personality traits, well being, anxiety,  among others one week before the ceremony. These measures are repeated a week, 1, 3 and 6 months after the ceremony. Starting the day of the ceremony we perform individual interviews, psychometric scales responses and EEG registers. After this, volunteers received the meditative practice corresponding to their group, followed by an individual interview and proceed to their ceremony with a facilitator. We did not interact with participants during their experience. After the ceremony, participants responded a set of questionnaires designed to assess their experience, and we finished by taking EEG registers, saliva samples, individual interviews and group sharing sessions. Follow-up measures consisted of the scales and questionnaires mentioned above and a blood and saliva extraction performed 2 months after the ceremony.ResultsPreliminary results, show that participants in the compassion groups scored significantly higher on interoceptive constructs such as listening to body and confidence as reported by the MAIA scale (p<0,05), and also reported to have a subjective experience with a larger influence of elementary imagery (p<0.05). Only for the compassion group, there was a difference in the subjective construct of changed meaning between high and low dose. Reported incidents of anxiety and difficult experiences only occurred in the high dose groups and were of low incidence (<5% of participants). Interviews presented differences in verbosity amongst high and low dose groups and EEG data also tend towads differences amongst these groups.Follow-up measures are still in progress but we expect the differences to accentuate over time and to find new indications on how this combination of practices reflects on subjective well being markers.ConclusionsWe were able to perform a very large amount of measures on a large amount of participants in a combined psychedelic and meditation study. This experiment is ground breaking for this kind of research in Latin America. We found that these ceremonies were safe for participants and the combination with meditative practices contributed to the low amount of difficult experiences observed. The ceremonial use of Psilocybin can have a positive effect in self-reported measures of  psychological well-being, mood, prosocial behavior, emotional regulation and cognitive capacities. Psychological priming with a compassionate imagery practices could be a useful tool to increment the positive impact of the subjective experience, our results show a trend in that direction.