UCLA Wants to Build Rooftop Garden for Psychedelics Therapy Sessions

The University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) is planning to construct a rooftop garden designed for psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, UCLA Health reports.

The proposal would convert the eighth floor of the university’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior into a “living laboratory,” said Dr. Helena Hansen, Md, PhD, who is the director of the Semel Institute and the co-founder and director of Project ReConnect, the university’s Ecological Medicine and Psychedelic Studies Initiative. Under the plan, the building’s top floor would become a restricted space for the application and study of medicinal psychedelics, while one of the building’s lower-level decks would be converted to a publicly accessible green space and community garden.

Project Reconnect — through investigating humans’ connections with one another, their communities, and Earth’s natural ecosystems — aims to uncover “how we can foster connections with each other, foster connections with the natural world … and where necessary, bring the natural world of plants and animals into the biomedical clinic,” Dr. Hansen said in the report.

“For many people, just having contact with soil, plants and animals – that in itself was beneficial. For others, there were conversations with their peers, with their therapist, out in the garden that wouldn’t have happened in a room one-on-one with the door closed. I saw that being out there with the garden was really game-changing for many people, and that the nature contact was vitally important.” – Dr. Hansen, during a Project ReConnect presentation, via UCLA Health

Planning and funding efforts for both the rooftop deck and the lower-level community garden are already underway, the report said.

Preliminary research has found that certain psychedelics including MDMA (a.k.a. ecstasy) and psilocybin show promise against treatment-resistant cases of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The FDA recently reported concerns about the initial investigations of MDMA as a new therapy for PTSD.