MQ Open Mind

How can psychedelic drugs be used to treat mental illness? Former government drugs tsar Professor David Nutt is investigating how psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – could be used to revolutionise treatment for depression. David explains why he thinks it's working and the bureaucracy involved in researching illegal substances that leave him "treated like a drug dealer".

For Rose Bretecher, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has never left her handwashing or ordering things, instead she has been overwhelmed by distressing sexual thoughts, ranging from child abuse to sexuality and explicit mental images. Rose tells her story and chats to Dr Claire Gillan, an MQ-funded researcher, about the science behind this condition, how we can transform treatments and what it really means to be 'a little bit OCD'. 

What does it feel like to live with social anxiety? It’s the most common of anxiety disorders – defined as a long-lasting and overwhelming fear of social situations by the NHS. Claire Eastham, author of We’re All Mad Here, speaks about her personal experience of living with the condition – from describing her first panic attack, to receiving the diagnosis and how she copes today. She takes the opportunity to quiz Professor John Powell, an MQ-funded researcher who’s testing an online tool to help relieve the symptoms of social anxiety. Could this app really transform the lives of people like Claire?

This episode is brought to you by MQ: Transforming Mental Health, the new major mental health research charity. Find out more about MQ’s work here: https://www.mqmentalhealth.org

Read Claire's blog: http://www.allmadhere.co.uk/

Getting the right mental health treatment for you is often a game of trial and error – if one treatment doesn’t work, you’ll try another, and another, and another… People can wait months, sometimes even years, before they’re given a treatment that’s the right fit. It’s something that Mark Brown, mental health advocate and blogger, knows only too well.

After he was diagnosed with bipolar II he struggled to find the right combination of medication and therapy that worked for him – leaving him waiting years without the right help. We speak to Mark Brown about his experience and the researcher who’s aiming to transform how we select treatments – MQ-funded researcher Zach Cohen. Zach and his colleagues are creating and testing an algorithm which aims to predict which treatment option is right for a particular person.

If this works – doctors could have the tools to be able to select the right mental health treatment for a patient first time.

This episode is brought to you by MQ: Transforming Mental Health, the new major mental health research charity. Find out more about MQ’s work here: https://www.mqmentalhealth.org

1 in 4 people experience mental illness at some point each year and depression now affects a staggering 350 million people worldwide. Understanding the causes of depression is crucial if we’re to find ways of treating it effectively. And more and more research is suggesting that we look beyond our brains and into the immune system to find answers. We speak to Carmine Pariante, Professor of Biological Psychiatry at Kings College London, who’s been piecing together evidence on the role of our immune system in depression for 20 years. 

He explains why this research is considered by scientists to be "one of the strongest discoveries in psychiatry for the last 20 years", how it could revolutionise treatments and diagnosis and exactly why we think the immune system is causing changes in mood.

This episode is brought to you by MQ: Transforming Mental Health, the new major mental health research charity. Find out more about MQ’s work here: https://www.mqmentalhealth.org