Anna Skovgaard Lerche
DARE: Psychedelics can slow the progression of mental disorders – the potential is greater
She is trading the next ten months of her medical studies at the University of Copenhagen for top-level research at UCSF in California. She will be delving into psychedelics, investigating how they affect mental disorders and studying how the immune system and treatment of other diseases come into play.
Therapies with agents that have a psychedelic or psychotropic effect on the brain are gaining significant ground in psychiatric research. They help us understand the aetiology underlying mental disorders. Researchers around the world are in the process of identifying the receptors in the brain affected by these agents and the effects they have on the body. At the same time, researchers have found further links between the immune system – the body’s system that protects us from “alien” elements such as bacteria and viruses – and mental disorders.
‘We can see that people suffering from mental illness have higher levels of inflammation markers. This points to a potentially overactive immune system. And our aim is to find out whether psychedelics such as psilocybin, MDMA and DMT work by influencing our body’s immune system; in other words, whether it may help to suppress the immune system to prevent it from becoming overactive and presenting the symptoms we’re familiar with in mental illness today. We still don’t know what comes first – the mental illness or an overactive immune system. But that’s what we intend to learn,’ Lerche explains.
Psychedelics are inexpensive, effective and available drugs that can help treat a range of mental illnesses. And if the researchers find that psychedelics have an inhibitory effect on the immune system, we may be able to expand the range of disorders they can treat to include diseases of the immune system such as asthma and arthritis.
‘We can see that some of these psychedelics have an effect on the immune system at levels that ought not to trigger psychedelic or psychotropic effects in humans, and I’m thrilled to be given the opportunity to delve deeper into this topic during my stay in San Francisco,’ Lerche says.
Anna Skovgaard Lerche’s Danish supervisor is Professor Michael Eriksen Benros, University of Copenhagen. At the University of San Francisco, UCSF, her mentors will be associate professor and psychiatrist Joshua Woolley and associate professor of psychology Aoife O’Donovan.
‘Mental illness has always been “real” to me. Just as real as physical, so-called somatic, disorders. But during my studies, I’ve noticed that psychiatric patients receive a lot less attention and that they experience stigmatisation and discrimination within the health service. I want to change this by making a contribution to research on the biological processes underlying the disorders that will affect one in three Danes at some point during their lives,’ Lerche explains.
According to Anna Skovgaard Lerche, mental illness ought to be placed on an equal footing with somatic, “physical” diseases, and we need to identify available, effective therapies to ensure that they can receive comparable treatment. Psychedelics such as psilocybin could be part of the solution.
Anna Skovgaard Lerche, 27, has one semester left to complete at the University of Copenhagen when she returns to her medical studies in Denmark. She is one of five Danish medical students who have travelled to the USA with the Lundbeck Foundation's DARE (Danish American Research Exchange) programme. Lerche will spend the year on her studies and on research at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) – one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
