Araujo will never forget the sixty-three-year-old man with intractable depression and a stomach as rigid as wood. He told de Araujo that he had been a fisherman all his life but, over the last ten years, he had rarely left his home. He hadn’t seen the ocean in years.
After the ayahuasca trial, he had a dream that brought these two aspects of his life into perspective. What if, after spending all of his working life at sea, the ocean had become the only place he felt comfortable, content, at peace? Could this explain his depression? Could the sights and smells of the ocean be curative? “You know what, Doctor?” the patient told Araujo. “Your tea of the Indians [ayahuasca] just relieved me from something that I had for years. I woke up thinking that I want to go to the ocean.” After leaving Araujo’s lab, he went straight to the shore and peered over the endless blue toward the horizon. The old fisherman had never taken ayahuasca before and didn’t know where the experience would lead him.
Unbeknownst to him, he still hadn’t taken ayahuasca, even after the trial had finished. He was given a placebo. “For me, it was the most beautiful moment I’ve had in the trial,” says Araujo, chuckling at the thought of it coming from a fake ayahuasca drink.
“Psychiatrists treat the placebo effect as something that’s bad,” Araujo says. “After the experience we had in our trials, the placebo effect is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.” Some patients had been depressed for decades, had lists of medications that were two pages long, and had been given several sessions of ECT. Easily making the cut for a diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression, some of them, like the retired fisherman, responded beautifully to a drink that was little more than lemon juice turned brown.
– Alex Riley, A Cure for Darkness
Zero Gate • 16 April 2021
