In recent years there’s been a renaissance of interest in psychedelics in the West, on a scale not seen since the first wave of medical research in the 1950s and 60s. Drugs like DMT, ketamine and psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms), are now being researched as medications to take alongside therapy for the treatment of various mental health problems. Across this series of interviews, Rose Cartwright explores so-called ‘psychedelic assisted psychotherapy’. What is it? Can it help tackle our mental health crisis? And what are the risks?

Her guest today is Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, one of the world’s leading psychedelics researchers, former founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, and now Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at the University of California. How to these drugs work on the brain? What are the current medical trials indicating? And how are the laws around the medical use of these drugs changing?