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No Ecstasy for Lykos Therapeutics Right Now      By Robert Carter/August 9, 2024      Lykos Therapeutics announced today that the FDA has not approved their application for an MDMA based drug with psychotherapy to treat PTSD because of concerns about how the pharmaceutical company conducted its trials. Lykos Therapeutics was also cited for unethical conduct at one of its research locations after one of its therapists had been accused of practicing without a license and of sexually assaulting one of the participants in Lykos’ MDMA trials.      MDMA – more commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly — is an illicit, mind-altering psychedelic drug that can affect a user’s visual and time perceptions. While usually taken recreationally to chemically increase happiness and energy levels, MDMA can cause potentially severe “side effects” such as high blood pressure, vomiting, heart problems or liver damage, per the National Institute of Health.      MDMA is classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act and it has “no currently accepted medical use,” but it does have “a high potential for abuse.”      Despite that, and apparently prompted by anecdotal “evidence” that taking MDMA may for a few lead to a positive mental shift away from depression and anxiety, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies are now trying to get FDA approval for its use those who have not had relief from taking standard antidepressants.      Such is the interest of this psychedelic avenue of approach that a $3 million professorship was established at Yale University last fall by Vikram Sodhi to study the value of DMT – an illicit derivative drug of the South American shaman potion ayahuasca — to psychiatric treatments for PTSD. Deepak Cyril D’Souza was named the inaugural Vikram Sodhi Professor of Psychiatry at Yale.      “We don’t, as yet, know how long a person needs to have psychedelic effects in order to be able to derive antidepressant effects,” D’Souza said. “Another question is how intense a psychedelic experience do you need order to be able to derive antidepressant effects?”      His questions seem a grim reminder of the MKUltra experiments with psychoactive drugs such as LSD which were carried out by the CIA in the nineteen-fifties to identify drugs that could be used during interrogations. Science Insider has reported that today at least two other pharmaceutical companies are also involved in clinical trials to evaluate the use of psilocybin – known on the street as magic mushrooms – to treat depression.      Despite the early momentum seen for these experimental trials, the Institute for Clinical and  Economic Review reported this year that insufficient evidence has been found for any benefits from the research which would outweigh the known risks of cardiovascular problems, worsening mental health problems, and suicidal thoughts that come from these drugs.

Decades of Child Abuse and Torture Uncovered at New Zealand Psychiatric Hospital By Robert Carter/July 30, 2024 The New Zealand government released the results today of a Royal Commission of Inquiry, the highest investigatory body of the government, into child abuse from 1950-2019 in various institutions in the country, including religious care facilities, foster care institutions, and psychiatric hospitals. The most egregious crimes against young children and adolescents occurred at the Lake Alice Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Lake Alice, Manawatū-Whanganui, New Zealand. Despite it being a psychiatric facility, most of the children admitted to Lake Alice did not have a mental illness. The Department of Social Welfare records showed that 60% of admissions were for “behavioral” problems, and many of the children simply came from disadvantaged communities. Their mean age was thirteen years old. Former patients of the hospital’s child and adolescent units revealed to the commission that the abuse they endured during the 1970s included being punished by electroconvulsive therapy without anesthetics and being injected with paralyzing drugs such as paraldehyde (a central nervous system depressant). These young patients were also frequently victims of sexual assault on their ward. All of the children who were shocked, drugged or sexually abused named the same perpetrator, Dr. Selwyn Leeks, the lead psychiatrist of the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit. Leeks administered electric shocks to them for minor infractions such as passing wind, being anti-social, being picky about food, “being in a world of his own,” “showing off in front of the girls in class,” annoying others during work periods, and being argumentative, the Lake Alice medical records show. Leeks would use electroconvulsive shock treatments as punishment for what he termed “aversion therapy,” and he applied the electrodes not just to the temples, but also to the children’s breasts, groins and genitals. He also required some young residents to administer shocks to their peers and he forced others to watch while their mates were being shocked. When the first of these children’s allegation about him became public in the 1970s, he dismissed them as coming from “bottom-of-the-barrel kids” who had been lying. Leeks’ unit at Lake Alice had opened in 1972 and over the next six years admitted between 400 and 450 children and adolescents. The unit permanently closed in 1980, but Leeks had already moved to Australia to continue practicing. In August 2006 Leeks was ordered to pay a $55,000 in damages for sexually assaulting a former patient. The victim said that Leeks had told her that complaining would be futile. “You’re a long-term psychiatric patient and no one will believe you,” he said. In 2023 more evidence of his abuse was uncovered, but he was by then 92 and was deemed medically unfit for trial. In 2020 a United Nations committee labeled Leeks’ acts at Lake Alice “torture.” This sad story of an institution originally created to help the unfit and the disadvantaged being turned into a psychiatric torture chamber is not unique. Lake Alice had opened in August, 1950, and its therapeutic rural setting included its own farm, workshop, bakery, laundry, swimming pools, glasshouses, and vegetable gardens. These facilities could be used for the original nineteenth century “moral therapy” concept of work and worthy endeavor being used as part of the therapy for resident patients. Like many similar, charitable institutions around the world which had evolved from the community almshouses of the previous centuries, the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit in New Zealand was intended to be a sanctuary for care and healing. However, like many other once benign institutions for the public good – the word “asylum” means sanctuary, in fact – these facilities became mental hospitals. Psychiatrists now controlled populations of vulnerable, unprotected people, and these too often sadistic “doctors” were now free to unleash the brutality of their insulin shock therapies, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive shocks on the innocent victims without oversight. No one would see, no one would hear, and psychiatry could experiment on or, worse, simply destroy these poor souls without interference. (Thanks to the Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, Member of the Royal Commission Forum, Nelson, New Zealand, and to Susanna Every-Palmer, Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand for some of this information).