Overview
- St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne reported that therapist-guided psilocybin led to rapid reductions in depression and death-related anxiety in patients with advanced, life‑threatening illness, with benefits often noted within 24 hours and persisting for many months.
- The peer-reviewed results in General Hospital Psychiatry draw on a 35-person study using two supervised eight-hour dosing days (first randomized psilocybin vs placebo, second open-label psilocybin) integrated with nine psychotherapy sessions.
- Safety and completion were mixed, with one participant withdrawing due to dosing anxiety and 25 completing the protocol, underscoring both promise and limits in a small cohort.
- Access remains scarce and costly despite Australia’s 2023 rescheduling that allows authorized psychiatrists to prescribe: only a small number of prescribers operate, clinics can charge about A$27,000, and roughly 7,000 applied to the trial for 35 places.
- Regulatory rollout is uneven, with state-by-state differences and TGA warnings over unlawful promotion, while clinicians and professional bodies stress the evidence is early-stage, not universally effective, and in need of larger randomized trials.