well as the positive feeling of being a small self in the presence of
something greater.”
The concept of awe, I realized, could help connect several of the dots
I’d been collecting in the course of my journey through the landscape of
psychedelic therapy. Whether awe is a cause or an effect of the mental
changes psychedelics sponsor isn’t entirely clear. But either way, awe
figures in much of the phenomenology of psychedelic consciousness,
including the mystical experience, the overview effect, self-
transcendence, the enrichment of our inner environment, and even the
generation of new meanings. As Keltner has written, the overwhelming
force and the mystery of awe are such that the experience can’t readily be
interpreted according to our accustomed frames of thought. By rocking
those conceptual frameworks, awe has the power to change our minds.
Three: Depression
Something unexpected happened when, early in 2017, Roland Griffiths
and Stephen Ross brought the results of their clinical trials to the FDA,
hoping to win approval for a larger, phase 3 trial of psilocybin for cancer
patients. Impressed by their data—and seemingly undeterred by the
unique challenges posed by psychedelic research, such as the problem of
blinding, the combining of therapy and medicine, and the fact that the
drug in question is still illegal—the FDA staff surprised the researchers by
asking them to expand their focus and ambition: to test whether
psilocybin could be used to treat the much larger and more pressing
problem of depression in the general population. As the regulators saw it,
the data contained a strong enough “signal” that psilocybin could relieve
depression; it would be a shame not to test the proposition, given the
enormity of the need and the limitations of the therapies now available.
Ross and Griffiths had focused on cancer patients because they thought it
would be easier to win approval to study a controlled substance in people
who were already seriously ill or dying. Now the government was telling
them to raise their sights. “It was surreal,” Ross told me, twice, as he
recounted the meeting, still somewhat stunned at the response and
outcome. (The FDA declined to confirm or deny this account of the