Ayahuasca

I still regularly receive emails from people who have read my article on ayahuasca and are interested in trying it themselves. Most of these messages come from folks who have exhausted all the so-called solutions of Western medicine (anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, pain-killers, etc.) and are ready for something that really works. They usually ask me the same thing: Is my depression still cured?

Yes. It’s been over four years since I had that ceremony in Peru, and the depression has never returned. I also found a serious project that distributes Ayahuasca worldwide, so I can continue taking it once a month. It actually takes an effort now for me to remember what that dark, depressive state felt like. It’s as if it all happened to someone else. The slate was “wiped clean,” and life has been unbelievably wonderful since that old cloud was taken away. Miraculous? As someone who suffered from severe depression her whole life, I would say, yes. Absolutely miraculous.

For my article, I became acquainted with Dr. Charles Grob, M.D., Director of Child and Adolescent Psychology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s School of Medicine. He was one of a handful of Western scientists who had studied ayahuasca and scientifically proven its benefits. Dr. Grob on ayahuasca and depression (from my article):

In 1993 Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a church, the União do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotonin—one of the mood-regulating chemical produced by the body—by increasing the number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.

Unlike most common anti-depressants, which Grob says can create such high levels of serotonin that cells may actually compensate by losing many of their serotonin receptors, the Hoasca Project showed that ayahuasca strongly enhances the body’s ability to absorb the serotonin that’s naturally there. “Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs],” Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is “a rather crude way” of doing it. Ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.