Rare ‘extreme’ headaches target of magic mushroom trial
A rare condition could be treated with magic mushrooms, as an Australian study doubles down on the nation’s commitment to psychedelic medicine.
Psychedelic mushrooms may be the most promising treatment for cluster headaches, an acute condition that is also known as “suicide headaches” because of their sheer severity and correlation to depression.
An Australian clinical trial for treating cluster headaches with the drug psilocybin is being led by the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney.
The trial, currently in its feasibility stage, requires participants who suffer cluster headaches to trial prescription psilocybin and detail their experience in the health system to try to determine how the condition can be diagnosed sooner and treated more efficaciously.
Psychedelic medication has become a contentious and emergent field of neurology, but for father-of-two Jess Tale, a clinical trial for psilocybin treatment of cluster headaches represents his best chance at normalcy.
Mr Tale, 44, has endured cluster headaches since he was 18. They come in regular cycles, culminating in three months of chronic pain from January to March each year.
“It sort of builds slowly for the first few weeks and then the pain intensifies. You could set your clock by it,” Mr Tale said.
“I’ve got some treatments that help me deal with the pain a lot more but there’s always a feeling of doom and dread come that time of year.”
Mr Tale, who works as a marketing head for an aquaculture company, had struggled with the isolation of his condition when he was younger, given its low rate of incidence and the years it took for him to receive a correct diagnosis.
“It really sent me on a journey to know a lot about myself because I didn’t know it was clusters,” he said.
“I looked a lot into it just to know how to manage myself psychologically. I did a lot of meditation and Buddhist retreats. I developed a lot of skills in managing my mind.”
He currently uses a mix of steroid treatments and oxygen therapy to reduce the condition’s severity and frequency, but often runs into disruptive side effects.
“Psilocybin is the most promising treatment for this with the least impacts in the healthiest way,” Mr Tale said.
“It definitely seems less impactful than all the drugs I have.”
In 2023, Australia approved psilocybin for prescription in combating treatment-resistant depression, becoming the first in the world to do so.
George Institute researcher Faraidoon Haghdoost detailed the challenges of progressing psychedelic medication trials.
“Studying these kind of medications or treatments is really difficult because of the stigma around it, the difficulties in securing funding and also participants (because) some of them might be sceptical,” he said. “We believe the hypothalamus (a region of the brain that controls co-ordination) has an impact in the pathophysiology of cluster headaches, and medications like psilocybin also have an impact on that part of the brain.”
The trial’s lead researcher said a better awareness of the condition in the health system would be a way of making treatment faster and cheaper.
“We need more education for general practitioners, neurologists, different doctors and dentists,” he said.
“From diagnosis to treatment, we don’t have proper treatments, there are different treatments, but they are not mostly effective.
Clinicians have struggled to identify any predispositions or comorbidities that could make someone prone to cluster headaches.
According to Headaches Australia, it occurs in 0.1 per cent of people, and is three times more common in men than women.
Australians over 18 years experiencing cluster headaches who would like to learn more about the study can visit the UNSW site.
Lifeline: 13 11 14
Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467
Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636
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