Psychedelic therapy may help break the chains of gambling addiction

David Nutt oversees an early brain scanning study involving gambling stimuli. Researchers at Imperial's Centre for Psychedelic Research are using brain imaging to understand addictions and devise new approaches to treating them. Addiction is like having your brain hijacked. The activities that used to make you feel happy and satisfied leave you cold, and only the object of the addiction triggers the brain's reward mechanisms. Now, researchers at Imperial are looking at new ways of setting the hijacked brain free, using psychedelic substances such as psilocybin. In particular, they are working on psychedelic therapies for behavioural addictions such as gambling, building on promising results in the treatment of substance addictions, from nicotine and alcohol to harder drugs. "We want to find out if psilocybin therapy can reverse or restore the dysfunction that we see in gamblers' brains," says Dr Rayyan Zafar , a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Psychedelic Research , part of the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial.