Louis-Francois P Belanger | Writer Page | The Harvard Crimson thecrimson.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thecrimson.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Massachusetts General Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, launched a new center to study the clinical benefits of psychedelics in treating mental illness.
The Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics comes amid a statewide push for psychedelic decriminalization, including acts passed in Cambridge and Somerville that specifically cite the possible medical benefits of substances like psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms.”
One of the Center’s first studies, to begin this spring, will examine psilocybin’s efficacy in mitigating rumination, a common feature of depression. The researchers also plan to explore the substance’s impact on cognitive and emotional processing, as well as on personality traits that make an individual susceptible to mental illness.