In 2016 psychiatrist Benjamin Kelmendi was treating two patients with severe, treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) at a Connecticut mental health center when the patients abruptly disappeared, abandoning their treatment plans without a word of explanation.
Kelmendi, who is now an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, had begun evaluating them as candidates for deep brain stimulation treatment after working with them a few years, he recalled recently.
"And they just stopped showing up for appointments."
Some months later, both patients resurfaced - looking better than Kelmendi had ever seen them, and they no longer wanted deep brain stimulation. Their reason? They told him that they'd discovered "magic mushrooms."
"They had participated in some sort of ceremonial therapeutic setting to take psilocybin mushrooms," Kelmendi said. "It was striking, how much better they seemed. How could a single dose of something have such a remarkable impact? That's when I first became aware of the use of psilocybin for psychiatric conditions."
