Day Tripper

At a unique UCSF lab, researchers are studying the use of psychedelics to treat everything from depression to low-back pain.

By Daniel Jewett

YOU RELAX INTO THE COMFORTABLE COUCH, put on some nice music and glance at the soothing art on the wall before putting on your eye shades and taking a dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic sometimes called a “magic mushroom.” Your afternoon is set but you aren’t at home — you’re at a lab at the University of California, San Francisco.

“During the dosing day, we’re asking patients to really engage, go inward and pay attention to what’s coming up for them internally and then we’ll talk about it afterward,” says Andrew Penn, MS, NP, PMHNP-BC, a clinical professor at the UCSF School of Nursing, where, as a researcher, he collaborates on psychedelics studies of psilocybin and MDMA in the university’s Translational Psychedelics Research Program

(TrPR) lab (psychedelics.ucsf.edu). “We ask them to set an intention like, ‘I want to work on my trauma’ or ‘I want to understand my depression.’ It’s a very different experience in our lab versus a concert, Burning Man or something like that.”

Penn (www.andrewpennnp.com), who knew he wanted to focus his career on mental health since he was in high school, has spent the last four years conducting psychedelics research, including a study on using MDMA to treat PTSD, and the lab recently completed a larger phase two study of major depression and psilocybin-facilitated therapy. Now the group is conducting smaller pilot studies focusing on populations typically left out of research, including people experiencing depression related to Parkinson’s disease and bipolar II disorder. “People with Parkinson’s have depression at a rate of about 50 percent so we wanted to see if we could apply some of these psilocybin-facilitated therapies to help them,” Penn says, adding that studies in the pipeline include how psychedelic therapy might help people plagued by low-back pain.

Those participating in studies are screened beforehand and spend time talking to the researchers about their intentions, symptoms and the process before ever dosing, Penn says. When they are ready, patients are given a dose (or, in some studies, potentially a placebo) in the comfortable dosing room, where they will spend the day — and this may be repeated several times over a number of weeks with, non-drug integration therapy sessions happening in the days following each dosing session. But how and why does this therapy work?

“The idea behind psilocybin is that it allows a temporary shift in people’s internal mental experience,” Penn says. “In clinical use, one of the things that we’re looking at is that it allows people to kind of zoom back and look at their whole life at 30,000 feet.” According to Penn, one of the hallmarks of depression is that people get very ruminative and they’ll think about the same thing over and over again, often in an acutely negative way. “What’s interesting about psilocybin is that it seems to allow that part of the brain (that is overactive in depression) to turn down for a little while and for the brain to talk to itself in ways that it doesn’t normally do,” he adds.

And the best part is the positive feelings patients report continuing long after treatment. “The antidepressant effects appear to last anywhere from two months or even longer, so there’s a period of time afterwards where the depression seems to be alleviated,” he says, adding that it’s not because people still have psilocybin in their system. “That antidepressant effect lasts much longer than the drug in the body.”

Penn says that the public’s interest in psychedelic-assisted therapies is only growing and the demand for treatment will be hard to fill because there just aren’t enough specifically trained mental health clinicians for that treatment, even here in the Bay Area. He thinks this is where nurses, who number around 4 million in the U.S., can help, by getting trained and earning certification — like the Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research certificate Penn earned at the California Institute for Integral Studies.

Not only could nurses help administer these therapies, they are the ideal ones to do it, Penn argues. “A lot of psychedelic therapy is really just sitting and being present for people, which sometimes is actually harder than it sounds,” he says. “Nursing is always first and foremost about the care of the patient — and that care is also about presence.”

Hear from Penn and other experts at a June 10 TEDxMarin salon featuring an in-depth exploration of psychedelic science and medicine. The event takes place at 7:30 p.m. at Dominican University’s Angelico Concert Hall in San Rafael. www.tedxmarin.org

Window Wonderland

LiquidView is set to forever change how and what we see out our windows.

By Annie Gieser

IT’S SATURDAY MORNING. You’re sitting at your kitchen counter, drinking coffee, staring out the window that overlooks Central Park. The sound of birds, taxis and wind blowing through the spring trees echoes softly in the air. It’s a beautiful day in Manhattan. But you’re not there.

You live in Kansas City, Missouri. And although arguably a great city, it’s no Big Apple. Yet, instead of looking out to see the dry cleaners next door, you revel in a Central Park view — one people would (and do) pay millions for.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could transform a space into anything you want?” asks Mitch Braff, CEO of LiquidView (www.theliquidview.com), a new company set to give every room a view with futuristic — and realistic — virtual windows that transform any space.

A Marin native, Braff had the vision for LiquidView while working on his other company, video art provider Liquid Canvas. But his love for high-quality film goes way back — to earning a degree in film at UC Santa Barbara and having films shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival. The idea for LiquidView came while working with a lower Pacific Heights client in a previous business whose view was the side of his neighbor’s home and from Braff’s own experience living in the Mission District with no real view at all. Braff thought, “What if we could actually put a window in a wall?”

LiquidView doesn’t look or act like a TV mounted to the wall, but rather provides a fully immersive experience in idealistic locations sometimes thousands of miles away. Even incredibly filmed footage can look cheap on the wrong screen. So Braff partnered with notable global design company IDEO to create something new and innovatively organic.

LiquidView’s attempt to look, feel and sound like a genuine window on the world is no small feat. The company promises exact sunrise-to-sunset timing based on your location, no matter which scape you choose to view. Behind the scenes, this means shooting a single view for 24 hours (plus a couple of extra hours to give cushion for editing) on an 8.6K camera — think James Cameron Avatar quality. The sound for each view is recorded on site to imitate real life — edits are only made when obnoxious sounds like a diesel truck impede the ambience.

As for shooting the view over Sausalito harbor, Braff recalls the inopportune circumstances leading to incomparable footage on a beautifully clear day: “There was a bajillion birds. All of these herring come in and there are pelicans diving. You know, I grew up here. And I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The “window” is installed directly in the wall, just like a piece of glass would be. LiquidView also comes with hardware to give a realistic window appearance, molding and handles included. Owners of a LiquidView screen control the window with an app on their phones, with full capabilities to change the scene setting, adjust ambient sound volume, or turn it off and on.

Before thoughts of added screen time race through your mind, he says, take into account the possible wellness perks of having a window where never before possible — instead of a dark basement wall, why not look at the sunrise in Aspen? Braff mentions the hope of potential health benefits, noting that he is in conversations with two Stanford neurobiologists to discover how a product like this can positively impact mental well-being.

“Make people’s living environments more pleasurable. Ultimately giving people joy. That’s the goal,” Braff says.

LiquidView is set to launch its consumer product with the option of a panorama or three-screen window by the end of this June. So — for now at least — keep your eyes on the current landscape, ready for whatever view may come next.