Psychedelics Meet Up With Virtual Reality at South by Southwest

Welcome to my latest dispatch on the cannabis and psychedelics industries. This week I’m reporting from South by Southwest, the media, music and film festival in Austin, Texas. The conference’s SXSW Interactive program has become a mecca for cannabis and psychedelics advocates in recent years, giving them an opportunity to reach a wider audience despite federal prohibitions on drugs and an inability to market any legal products.

Augmented unreality

Virtual reality and hallucinogens might seem like unpredictable reagents. But according to speakers at South by Southwest, they might be the perfect pairing to treat a range of mental-health problems.

Optimism about psychedelic drugs ran high at the event. Paul Stamets, a mycologist and entrepreneur, made his case for how psilocybin can help save the world, while more than a dozen panel sessions focused on hashing out the details. One discussed how interactive, immersive experiences might help make the nascent field of psychedelic-assisted therapy, which combines drugs with classic talk therapy, more effective and safe, and less costly.

“VR technologies are going to be a powerful adjunct to support psychedelic therapy,” said Walter Greenleaf, a neuroscientist and medical technology developer at Stanford University. “And it’s emerging pretty fast.”

The psychedelics industry is advancing on two parallel tracks. On one, companies test drugs such as psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and ayahuasca in clinical trials, seeking regulatory approval to sell them for ailments including depression, PTSD and anxiety. On the other path, places such as Oregon, Seattle and Colorado are decriminalizing or legalizing use — and in some cases creating standards for therapists to oversee hallucinogenic trips.

Both tracks have sparked questions about how to optimize the malleable brain state the drugs create while avoiding risks of improper influence (think brainwashing on steroids) or psychosis (when the patient loses long-term touch with reality). One solution that’s been proposed is talk therapy to “integrate” a hallucinogenic experience; but there are concerns that this could be cost-prohibitive.

Some academics and entrepreneurs are pitching VR as a solution. Enosis Therapeutics, a research-and-development-stage company based in Melbourne, Australia, is preparing to offer VR programs to Australian therapists for free when the country later this year begins to allow MDMA and psilocybin prescriptions for specific mental-health conditions. The self-funded company is co-founded by Agnieszka Sekula, a Ph.D. researcher at Swinburne University of Technology, and Prashanth Puspanathan, a psychiatrist.

VR experiences can not only guide a person through a psychedelic experience, they can help make the therapy more sticky, according to Puspanathan. When patients rewatched recordings, it “reminded them of what they were thinking and what they felt during the psychedelic experience,” he said during a panel.

Murat Yucel, an honorary professional fellow at Monash University who directs its neuroscience research clinic, BrainPark, said VR can be just as effective as classic methods to treat some conditions. He screened videos of a VR rendering of a casino, which could be used to help someone with a gambling addiction, and one of a dirty kitchen which could be used for someone with obsessive compulsive disorder. In one interactive segment, the person could simulate picking toilet paper up off the floor in a dirty bathroom.

“You can get the disgust feel just as well as you can in real life,” Yucel said. “You can make it portable, and bring things into the office that normally you can’t.”

Still, the practice of putting a patient into a psychologically malleable state in a virtual-reality scenario raises some interesting legal and psychiatric concerns. Panelists discussed the risk that patients could be overwhelmed with sensory stimuli, and that some might struggle to find their way out of two layers of blurred reality — one from the drugs, the other from the VR.

In a phone interview before the event, Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, noted that those with a history or predisposition to anxiety, personality disorder or psychosis should be cautious. “It could unleash a problem that’s latent, that you don’t experience until you try it,” he said.

Josh Lawler, a partner in the Chicago-based firm Zuber Lawler who specializes in cybersecurity, pointed out that there would be concerns about storing sensitive health information, especially if such sessions are recorded.

“It has the same feel as someone lying on their couch and talking to their psychologist — except now there’s a recording,” he said in an interview before SXSW.