Psilocybin for Treatment of OCD-2

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) affects millions of Americans at some point during their lifetime, representing a great deal of individual suffering, social, and fiscal cost. Despite this, currently available medications fail to help as many as 40% of OCD patients, and those who respond to treatment often experience troublesome residual symptoms 4. Psilocybin holds promise as a novel approach in the treatment of OCD, supported by preliminary evidence that it achieves response and remission rates exceeding conventional interventions . The broad long-term objectives of this research are to improve our available treatment options for OCD and advance the specific knowledge of neural mechanism explaining treatment response. Building on the investigative team's decades long work with synthetic psilocybin, data obtained during this proposed early phase clinical study may help improve the life of people affected with OCD and minimize society's burden. The investigators propose a randomized, controlled trial of four sessions of psilocybin assigned to either low dose (10mg) or high dose (30 mg) in double masked fashion to 20 (10 per group) symptomatic and medication-free OCD patients. The study will evaluate the tolerability, safety, subjective experience, and efficacy of psilocybin for improving OCD, obtain the preliminary data needed as a pre-requisite to a larger-scale (efficacy or effectiveness) intervention study with dosing informed by this trial, and explore mechanism of anti-obsessional action.