This episode deals with anorexia and contains mentions of other eating disorders, as well as depression and suicide. So please take care. My first psychedelic ceremony was with Ayahuasca in 2016. By that point, I've been working on my recovery from anorexia and restrictive eating for about eight years. My intention was to not look at my eating disorder and I felt really afraid.
And I thought by saying, I don't want to look at my eating disorder, I would avoid anything negative because the eating disorder felt like such a negative place. In the weeks before her first ayahuasca ceremony, Francesca Rose Annenberg was excited and nervous. She was given a small list of rules to follow, including dietary rules. No pork, no caffeine, no added sugar or processed foods. It was a little bit triggering in the lead up to that ceremony and I didn't quite know any better.
The diet brought up old and familiar feelings. Even those few hours of fasting, slight restriction around the diet that woke up the disorder in a way that I hadn't experienced before. With her eating disorder now fully awake, Francesca made her way to the location of the ceremony on the appointed day, a spot outside of Cape Town in South Africa. The ceremony began. I don't really even remember an opening circle.
Just feeling totally like unprepared and then sitting next to strangers who are making their own sounds that are purging. The medicine, even though it was my first time, was light for me. The constant chatter of I'm not good enough, of I am unworthy, I'm undeserving, I am a bad person, I don't belong here. All of the variations of those beliefs just quieted down. And in that was a sense of embodiment, like I was in my body. I could feel my body on the ground. I wasn't going too far into space.
I was very much on the earth with my breath. And this feeling of genuine self-love, this sense of enoughness and this feeling of, I belong here on this earth and I'm part of this greater... orchestra and how wonderful is that that I have a certain sound to share, to sing, to contribute and that it matters. It was like a sense of innate enoughness, innate worthiness, innate belonging and what was really important was that it landed in a cellular way in the body.
For Francesca, that experience was profound. And although it didn't free her of the anorexia she'd been struggling with since her teens, it did accelerate her recovery in ways she hadn't anticipated. Now, 10 years ago, scientists weren't actively exploring the idea of using psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat anorexia nervosa. But now they are, and there is real excitement around this idea.
So, today on the show, anorexia is one of the deadliest mental illnesses, and recovery is notoriously difficult. But what if psychedelic-assisted therapy could change that? We'll hear about an ongoing and innovative clinical trial that's testing this idea in young adults using psilocybin. And we'll hear about what an attempt to self-treat this disorder without the benefit of therapeutic guardrails might look like. Because, as you've just heard, some people are definitely already doing that.
I'm Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and this is Altered States. So my name is Francesca Rose Annenberg. Francesca lives in Cape Town, where she works as an eating disorder recovery coach. But in the 90s, she was a kid growing up in what she describes as a bubble shortly after the end of apartheid in South Africa. My early childhood passions were ballet and horse riding. I fell in love with horses when I was five and started competing at the age of 12. Show jumping, dressage, eventing, cross country.
Ballet began also at about five and was competing from maybe, six, seven. At first, the dancing and horseback riding gave her confidence. They made her feel free. But that changed when she started to compete. She began showing signs of perfectionism. Because there was now a goal to gain, and there were people watching with judgments, perceived or real, and a certain way that I had to look, specifically with the ballet. At dance practice, for instance?
I just tried to really nail the technique, but it was so hard to allow myself to be seen in practice, to share my vulnerability. Whilst I was trying to get something perfect. She was self-critical and constantly trying to meet the highest of standards, often to her detriment. I would come to practice completely expressionless. It's like my heart was not even in my body. And it took a lot of energy to withhold a lot of that emotion that I would feel in class.
There would be a lot of emotion and then a lot of shame for feeling a lot of emotion. She developed this deep fear of failure. I was just terrified of people seeing me make mistakes. And growing older came with its own set of challenges. I was a late bloomer and at the same time didn't want to bloom even from a young age before major eating disorder symptoms showed up. I was seeing people, seeing their bodies changing and becoming fuller, bigger and that really scared me.
I thought if I stay in this industry for much longer I'm going to develop an eating disorder. At the age of 15, she quit ballet. But still, come the age 16, Francesca found herself restricting her food intake for the first time. It began initially with a desire to lose some weight and then got really bad with a breakup. That happened about maybe five, six months later after that initial impulse to just cut back here, restrict over here, exercise a little bit more over there.
At first, Francesca felt invincible. Feeling like I was a superhuman by how much I could control. Because I was eating so little, but doing all the things. And yeah, feeling this kind of weird superiority that anorexia can give. As she got smaller, so did her world.
I wasn't very fun to have around because most of what I was engaging with was many obsessive thoughts in my head and the capacity to be socially engaged was just really offline and of course I wasn't eating enough so I didn't have a lot of energy. She started to push her sister and her parents away, but she kept up with her studies and horseback riding.
It was the last three years of school, so I was just trying to eat as little as I could while still getting good grades and going to my horse riding classes and competitions. The obsessive behaviors continued and deepened. Looking at myself in the mirror from all angles, lots of times on the scale. As did the thought patterns. I'm fine. I just need to lose more weight. I need to run that extra kilometer. I'm only allowed to eat at this time. I am weak if I get hungry before then.
Lots of anxiety when it came to social events. Wanting to avoid them or bring my own food, but I don't want to look weird. Maybe I can just eat a little bit, and then how will that impact the rest of my day, my next days? The thought processes, they sound superficial, but they're indicating very deep fears and dysregulation. Fear about change for example. People around Francesca, people who loved her, they noticed that she was different.
My best friend, she came up to me and said, like, hey, like, are you, are your okay? You're, you've lost a lot of weight and you're not eating. You've become really internal and worried about you. And my immediate response was just defensiveness. She's overreacting, but knowing that she was right ultimately. Francesca's parents got her to see a therapist, but she went reluctantly.
So as graduation loomed, her parents and dietitian decided that the best course of action would be to send Francesca to a mental health treatment center where she'd receive 24-hour care. So when I'd finished school at 18, my friends went to go party and I went to an inpatient facility. It was a very unique experience being with nurses who would facilitate you in and out of the bathroom and getting certain health markers checked each day, each week. But it became a very safe place for me.
I still tried to secretly exercise and got caught twice. The four weeks she spent at that treatment center didn't end her eating disorder. When I spoke with her, she read a passage from a diary entry she wrote shortly after she left the program in 2010. Today I didn't do yoga, but I went horse riding, toned, and walked. I'm already scared. This is the start of my laziness. I can't see my spine through my clothes. I really want it to show.
I don't even know if it showed before, but now I can hardly feel it when I bend over. And the bones of my back, of my neck, don't feel as prominent. Once again, is it in my head or real? Francesca wasn't ready to let go of the anorexia, which by then had become a part of her. That would change in time, but just not right away. I feel some grief for that part of me and how much torment I was in to control my body and its size and how ultimately out of control I was.
I was a completely different paradigm of existence and I'm so grateful that I'm not there anymore. Still, Francesca told me that her time at the clinic helped her realize that she didn't want to get any worse. Something in me, woke up. I want something different for my life. Francesca eventually found tools that helped her heal. She credits a few things, her connection with nature, therapy she received later on, her meditation practice, her love of dance, and her experience with psychedelics.
Beginning with that one ayahuasca trip that you heard about at the top of the episode. It was like a sense of innate enoughness, innate worthiness, innate belonging. So there was a real sense of coming home to me and me in the wider world without needing to achieve or perform or do something to earn that belonging. Less than a year later, Francesca attended another ceremony. This one was pretty different. For one thing, she took psilocybin.
And for another, she went in with the explicit aim of tackling her eating disorder. And so this time, she was actually able to see this embodied version of her eating disorders as she was tripping. It came to her in the form of a box. Just carrying around this box wherever I go and I can choose to put down that box at any time. And with that was this feeling of I'm not my eating disorder and then that question of well then who am I?
So that was a really important realization to see it as something that I was holding and not my whole identity. I could create some distance and being able to put it down like I can choose to put it down gave me a sense of responsibility and choice and autonomy. She had heard all of this before. She talked about it in therapy plenty of times, but she'd always been resistant to the idea. There was always that invitation of someone else saying to me, "You can put the box down. You can. You can."
Now, under the influence of psilocybin, she finally saw that it was possible. I can. And so the realization itself wasn't necessarily new, but it came from within me and came with a feeling of empowerment that I hadn't experienced in therapy before. When you look back on those first two ceremonies, how do you characterize the role that they played in your eating disorder recovery?
It's a reminder of you are more than the seeding disorder and you are the co-creator of your reality and the psychedelics opened up that doorway and of course it is my own two feet to walk through that doorway that it requires active choosing and choice. Francesca's story offers a glimpse into a complete cycle, the downward spiral brought on by too many factors to count, and in this case, a hard-fought recovery that happened over years and for more reasons than one.
And as moving as this story is, Francesca is just one person, so we can't really draw any generalizable conclusions from her story. For that, we turn to clinical trials, where many people receive the same treatment and data are gathered, analyzed, and published. Unfortunately for us, results are coming.
I spoke with a doctor who's currently conducting a trial to test if psilocybin-assisted therapy might lead to better outcomes for young adults with anorexia, people who are around same age Francesca was when she entered the clinic. I was blown away not just by the reasons why researchers think this might work, but also how they're setting up this trial. More on that after the break.
Since 2022, scientists have completed four clinical trials examining the use of psilocybin to treat anorexia nervosa. Among them were a pair of trials funded by one of the most prominent psychedelic companies in the world, Compass Pathways. The results of only one of those studies has been published so far, but Compass Pathway is moving forward with its clinical trials. Hoping that the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration will approve its patented formulation of synthetic psilocybin to treat anorexia nervosa. There is genuine excitement that people with anorexia might soon have more options for treatment, which any doctor who treats eating disorders will tell you is very much needed. We just absolutely need more options. Marissa is one of those doctors. My name is Marissa Raymond-Flesch. I work at UCSF. I am a physician and a researcher.
Marissa is a pediatrician who mostly works with teenagers and sometimes in her practice, she feels helpless. It is absolutely heartbreaking to watch a patient starve to death. That feeling is why Marissa is now running a clinical trial, looking at whether psilocybin assisted therapy might work as a treatment for anorexia nervosa in young adults, something that still surprises her. I was a D.A.R.E. Student of the year. I never set out to do this work. I think that's really important to know.
She was the just say no to drugs girl, and she didn't come to this work because of her interest in eating disorders either, at least not at first. What got her here is her love of working with teenagers. Oh my gosh, they're so much fun. They are just blooming, and the potential for impact is huge. It's so fun to see their energy, to see their hopefulness, to their incredible capacity for growth. And I love to witness that and support young people as they do that.
And then really discovered what a challenge eating disorders are for our patient population. As a pediatrician, Marissa had always seen eating disorders in her practice, but at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, things suddenly got much worse. All mental health concerns for adolescents and young adults just exploded. And when I say that, I mean, literally exponentially worsened.
The hospital where Marissa works had reached capacity and couldn't admit all of the patients coming in with severe anorexia. We just don't have beds and resources in our hospital to do that. That's something we just couldn't have fathomed needing to learn about our service a couple of years before. Not only that, but because of the isolation that many people experienced during the first two years of the pandemic. Our patients were presenting later and sicker.
And things had already started to worsen even before that. Patients are presenting at younger ages. There's been an increase in the incidence of anorexia in kids below the age of 15. The age of onset may be falling or our ability to detect it earlier may be improving, but we are starting to take care of people at younger and younger ages. Marissa told me one of her patients in particular. I remember being in a patient's room who was profoundly sick.
Most of my patients don't actually want to die, but she was really in a place where she did want to die. She didn't want to eat. We had to support her with a feeding tube, which is rare, but something that happens for some of our patients. And she wanted so much to die that she was able to sort of take that feeding tube out in a way that I've never seen someone do. And I felt really powerless. I didn't know what I was going to do to help her.
Anorexia is one of the most fatal mental health conditions. It has the second highest fatality rate of any mental health condition. It's second only to opiate use disorder right now in terms of likelihood of death. Feeling overwhelmed and more powerless than I think most doctors would like to feel, Marissa got to thinking. That was a moment when I would say I let my heart and mind open to this thing that had been floating in the back of my mind, the idea of psychedelics.
Which brings us back to her ongoing trial. That trial is a study of psilocybin for young adults with anorexia nervosa. And we are enrolling young people between 18 and 25 years old. And what we're really testing, and I wanna emphasize this, is psilocybin assisted therapy. So this isn't just about the medication. It's about having appropriate psychotherapy support while engaging with this medication. The trial focuses on young people whose brains are still developing.
The brain continues to change and develop into the mid-20s. And Marissa says that unlike previous trials. We're enrolling patients down to a BMI of 12 because we really want the sickest patients, the patients who need these new treatments most to be able to access them. BMI, or body mass index, is a metric that doctors use to determine if a person's weight is, quote, healthy in relation to their height. It's an imperfect metric.
But for people in their 20s, the general recommendation is that their BMI should fall between 19 and 25. So 12 is really low. And the researchers had to take that into account when they designed the study, right down to the dose of psilocybin. The first dose is a 20-milligram dose, which is a little lower than a lot of other clinical trials use just because of how medically fragile some of our patients are and we want to make sure they're okay.
Each participant will also undergo extensive medical testing throughout the trial. You need to show up to medical visits? You need to show up to some brain scans, you need to show to a lot of psychotherapy. I think the total for our trial is about 21 visits. And then there's two full days off of work or school for the actual dosing days in our trial. And really asking people to make as much room
in their lives as they can for processing these experiences, right? You shouldn't kind of have a psilocybin dosing day and go straight to taking finals. And. Because of... What we know so far about what is helpful in supporting young adults through treatment, we are actually asking each of the young adults who enrolls in the trial to bring in two support people.
Very often that's family members, but at least one up to two people who have been supporting the young adult for at least a year with their illness. The researchers had originally made it mandatory that each participant bring two people into the trial with them, but Marissa told me that fairly early on they recognized that they had to revise the requirement. This is a very isolating illness.
It was very hard for some people to find two people, so we backed down to one support person to make it more accessible for more people. How many participants are you hoping to enroll? Forty. And we are trying to recruit across all genders, across all races, across all ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses. The trial is open to anyone who fits the criteria. And the recruitment? It was a crucial element for Marisa, in part because of the stereotypes that are associated with the illness.
I think sometimes when people think about anorexia nervosa, they picture someone, perhaps someone who is white, perhaps someone who was female. Sometimes even the stereotype extends to socioeconomic class to someone who has more financial resources. But that is not actually what we see at all in practice. There's a large chunk of our patients who are Latine, a large chunk of patients who have various Asian backgrounds.
And then given kind of our geography, a smaller portion of our patience who are black identifying and other racial and ethnic groups. But it is not an overwhelmingly white group and there's no reason to believe that it doesn't occur with the same frequency in all populations. To make it easier to recruit a wide range of individuals, Marissa and her team are conducting the trial in both Spanish and English. And because of what we know about the patient population that we treat at UCSF.
In the future, I would love to roll it out in other Asian languages as well. One thing that impressed me when I spoke with Marissa was how badly she wants to get this right. She told me that part of her process when she was designing the study involved forming two advisory boards. One made up of parents of people with anorexia and another made up of young adults with anorexia or a history of anorexia. And she got some important feedback from both of those boards.
To illustrate this, she told me about speaking with the members of the young adult board about the need for preventing low blood sugar. During and after the dosing sessions. She asked them. I really need our patients in this study to eat on dosing day. How can I talk with our patients about that and make sure that the participants understand the reason for it and come up with a structured way to do it that will be as least anxiety provoking as possible.
And one of the answers was unexpected, but also deeply informative, she told me, because one of the young advisors mentioned that. The first thing I would have thought if I was enrolling for this trial at the height of my illness is you want to get me high and then feed me all day. And so you need to tell them that that is not your intention. That needs to be the first thing you say. And it was simultaneously like heartbreaking and I was deeply grateful to have that feedback.
After that Marissa worked with the board members to develop food options that felt appropriate, where participants have a few options and can also feel safe knowing exactly what they are eating. We created a sheet so that people could literally see like this is the exact kind of soy milk we're offering you. And now that the trial is underway, all anyone can really do is hope that all that careful planning pays off. How is the trial going so far?
In the exit interviews participants have been glad that they have participated and found it really meaningful and most family members have felt that way too. We're hearing a little bit about participants and families feeling more connected and able to communicate which wasn't a specific intended consequence exactly but something that makes me hopeful and obviously we will wait and see what the data looks like as the trial progresses.
Marissa and her team are still recruiting participants right now, and they'll be checking in with them for up to a year after their second session, so it'll be a while before we see complete results.
But thanks to previous trials that were done on treating PTSD and alcohol use disorder with psychedelic assisted therapy, as well as the published results from one very small safety trial done on patients with anorexia, Marissa told me that she has some sense of what psilocybin might be able to do for participants in her trial. We have a few different hypotheses. The biggest one is if you have a severe and enduring mental illness, your mind kind of gets stuck in ruts.
You can imagine like a sled going through the snow over and over and in the same circle. And after a while, it's very hard for the sled to change course, right? Psilocybin is like if you had that in a snow globe and you shake the snow globe, right, all the ruts disappear. It's a huge moment of potential. And we actually can kind of see that on brain scans using fMRI. We can actually see this change in connectivity in the brain when people are on psilocybin and after psilocybin.
That rut, that stuck place is called the default mode network, how we think about ourselves. And it's often where our mind rests when we don't give our mind anything else to do. So for some of my patients with eating disorders, it might be I'm so fat, I'm so ugly, it's never going to get better. Our patients need help out of those ruts, and then they need help to make new pathways, where they have more choice.
And on fMRI, we see that that really tight referential loop gives way to this incredible interconnectivity over the brain surface. There's still a lot that we don't know about how this works in human brains, but Marissa told me about some interesting research in mice. After just one administration of psilocybin, an isolated neuron from a mouse will grow extra dendrites, those little arms that reach out to connect to other neurons.
Some scientists think this might be happening in humans, too, and that maybe those growing dendrites are related to a therapeutic effect. That's still unclear at this point. But in the trial, Marissa and her team are looking at the brains of participants using fMRI brain scans to see if they can spot new connectivity.
And then I don't have to go into a deep detail, but we are hypothesizing, and there's growing evidence in the field, that psilocybin also has anti-inflammatory properties in some illnesses. And there are some people who hypothesize that there is an inflammatory aspect of anorexia nervosa. So that's something that we will be investigating as well. And those ruts, we're gonna be measuring cognitive flexibility is the technical term.
So like how quickly can people learn new rules, adapt to different rules, adapt to things. And that's hopefully a proxy for like, are you able to get out of these ruts and these stuck places? Right, because there is an incredible rigidity involved in the way that anorexia manifests, right? Like, that's right. No, I can't do this before I do that. This is the right way. And this is what I always eat. And, this is the time at which I eat. That's exactly right.
Yeah. And so the idea is that this could break down some of those walls, shake that snow globe. And from a therapeutic standpoint, what are we talking about? Giving you an opportunity to build back different? Exactly, that's exactly right. And we're trying to hit this kind of place where there's more room for that plasticity and that connection and that growth. And I'm curious about what that means in terms of their ability to change behaviors and thoughts.
As I was listening to Marisa, I couldn't help but wonder why there aren't any medications that have been approved to treat anorexia already. Because if psilocybin assisted therapy ever gets this kind of approval, it'll be the first. We've tried a lot of different medications for anorexia, including antidepressants.
And they can help with some of the symptoms that arise related to anorexy in some cases, but none of them shift the core symptoms and the core drive towards thinness or energy restriction or body dysmorphia concerns. Most of the antidepressants prescribed in the US are SSRIs, and these drugs, they target the serotonin system in the brain. Into the synapse, the place kind of between neurons and the brain, and they keep your serotonin there so it can work for longer.
And having enough of it allows those circuits to be more regulated related to feeling down or feeling anxious. But anorexia can break that system. The problem is that if you're severely malnourished, you don't actually make enough serotonins. You have to be eating tryptophan and the amino acids that you need in order to make those neurotransmitters. So our patients are often very depressed and anxious because of their lack of serotonin, but these medications have nothing to work on.
And it's variable from individual to individual and how malnourished someone is. All of those things are factors, but it's one of the reasons these medicines don't work as well and don't target the core symptoms for anorexia. So right now, the standard of care for young adults is different forms of psychotherapy. But a lot of the time, it just doesn't work. Relapse rates are as high as 52%. But maybe combining therapy with psilocybin could change that.
And interestingly, one of the reasons Marissa thinks that's possible is because of the results from a recent trial on alcohol use disorder. This is how she explained that. Substance use disorders and eating disorders, especially anorexia, have a particular quality that is often true for patients who have them that's different from many other illnesses. They're egocentonic. Egocentonic.
What that means is that the illness may feel like part of someone or like something that they don't want to give up. That's not always true. It's not true for all patients. But it's a common feeling that comes up for those two sets of disorders. And generally, no one wants to be depressed, certainly no one who wants to have cancer.
But there are times for some patients with eating disorders and some patients with substance use disorders where the disorder is so close in that it feels like part of them and feels like something they don't want to give up. The results from the alcohol use disorder trial were promising. So Marissa found herself asking. We could see results in some very early trials related to substance use disorder. Could that translate for my patients with anorexia?
Because there are not very many illnesses like that, that are egocentonic. So coming back to the snow globe idea, maybe one of the ruts that psilocybin is able to erase is that attachment. Like Francesca's box, that she suddenly knew she could put down. And then hypothetically, maybe that could give the therapy part of Marissa's trial more of an in, more of a chance to work as it should. Oh, and the whole low serotonin thing that people with malnutrition can experience?
Turns out that psilocybin might provide a fix for that too. Instead of trying to keep the body's serotonin in place for the medication to work. What psilocybin does is it pretends to be serotonin. It goes in and locks into the serotonin receptors. So for even really malnourished patients, we hypothesize that it could be effective.
And we even had a little bit of data in patients who've done psilocybin trials related to end-of-life cancer, anxiety and depression, as well as end-stage HIV, who were very malnoursed population. And so all of those things converged to make us want to focus in on psilocybin as a possible medication for anorexia. How did this trial come together? Blood, sweat, and tears. The real story is worth telling because it showcases just how badly people want new treatments for anorexia.
Back when Marissa was just starting to explore the idea of doing this trial, she reached out to a colleague of hers at UCSF. Josh Woolley, whose lab goes by the acronym TRIPPER, which is a very fun acronym. And after a little bit of pestering, he agreed to work with her to get the trial off the ground and conduct it with her. He said, okay, sounds like we're gonna do this trial. You just need to find $3 million. Marissa was undaunted. Within three years, she had the money to get started.
And the funds, they didn't come to her through government grants. We've had more than 100 individual donors who have given a huge range of donations to make this trial possible largely from families who have children suffer with this illness. When you say that there have been more than 100 donations, can you give me a sense of the range of the donations? You know, as small as, as large as? As small as $5, as larger as a million more. Wow. Yeah, so really a very wide range. That's incredible.
What is driving people to want to donate to your clinical trial? Without sort of revealing any personal information, I guess one vignette that comes to mind is a parent who has been a really amazing champion of this work. She told me, I am running out of ideas about ways that I can help my daughter, and I feel powerless because of that. But you have power and privilege because there's something you can do. And that was very striking to me.
I think it's been a big exercise in trying to bring forth power and privilege of a lot of different people to see if we can make change. I'm hearing a certain amount of emotion in your voice. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I use the words moral imperative. As a physician, I have the privilege of being trained as a researcher. And it's my job to try and make sure that my patients are never without hope. Do we think that this could also be helpful for folks with other forms of eating disorders?
Something that I'm very interested in investigating over the long run. We started with anorexia because of its fatality rate and we're kind of enrolling people with three different subtypes with atypical restrictive and binge purge anorexy for this trial and we are trying to enroll enough people so that we will get a large enough sample that'll allow us to do some amount of analysis on each group.
And that will give us some data about both safety and efficacy for people with that binge purge subtype and maybe help us start to think about what about this might translate to a population of patients with bulimia nervosa? What about binge eating disorder? I think all of those are really important questions. Someone dies about once every hour in the United States from those conditions.
And it's really important to understand that part of the urgency in finding new treatments is about how fatal this condition is. And it's such a new feeling to be able to feel hopeful about a new treatment in this illness. And I'm trying to, of course, keep my perspective and stay very grounded in the fact that we won't know how it's going. But even just in my role as a physician in this space, it's exciting to be thinking about
new things. To just have new treatments that are actually coming down the pathway is so different than where we were five years ago. I don't typically report on clinical trials that are still in progress, because you really never know what's going to happen. I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression. As this study and others begin to publish their findings, we may find out that psilocybin assisted therapy can help people with anorexia, or we may not.
If that's the finding though, if it helps, then that will be a huge deal for a lot of people, as well as their friends and families. And I would know because I had anorexia in my very early 20s. And much like Francesca, I am so happy that I am free of it today. But man, it would have been nice to not have to do it on my own, to have the support of a medication that could have helped me overcome the biggest barriers associated with recovery.
Instead of just fighting hundreds of tiny, excruciating battles with my brain Every single day? Year after year. I don't care if it's psilocybin-assisted therapy or something else, we just need better options than what we have now. So I'm rooting for that. If you or someone you know are struggling with an eating disorder, help is available. Please call the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline at 866-662-1235.
And for 24-7 support, please call the national suicide prevention lifeline at 988 or text HOME to 741-741 to reach the crisis text line. Those numbers and links can also be found in our show notes. Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. This episode was reported and produced by me, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Adizah Eghan is our senior editor. Our executive editor is Malia Wollan.
Jennie Cataldo is our Senior Producer, and our researcher is Cassady Rosenblum. Our associate producer is Jade Abdul Malik, and our audio engineers are Terence Bernardo and Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Special thanks to Michael Silver. Our executive producers are Malia Wollan and Jocelyn Gonzales, and our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. Our theme music is by Thao Nguyen and Nate Brenner. And I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
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