"The mind can be solved. Pain can be destroyed," Dr. James K. Mantleray promises in the show. But could a real drug replace therapy and erase trauma by altering patients' minds?
Besides antidepressants and other mood-stabilizing medications, psychedelic drugs may be the closest thing we have right now to the pills in the show.
Research has suggested that psilocybin (the hallucinogenic agent in mushrooms), ayahuasca, and LSD may help patients with anxiety and depression rewire connections in the brain. Such drugs have the potential to kill the ego, which is responsible for erecting defense mechanisms.
"In the depressed brain, in the addicted brain, in the obsessed brain, it gets locked into a pattern of thinking or processing that's driven by the frontal, the control center, and they cannot un-depress themselves," David Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College London, told Business Insider in 2017. "Psychedelics disrupt that process so people can escape."
MDMA, a psychoactive compound also known as ecstasy or molly, has also gotten attention in the past couple of years for its potential to treat patients with PTSD. In fact, the FDA granted a special designation that could fast-track its approval for that purpose.
"MDMA can act as a catalyst to make the therapy go faster, be more efficient, be deeper, get to that malignant thing that needs to be taken out and examined in a more sort of peaceful environment with more acceptance," psychiatrist Julie Holland said at a London conference on the science of psychedelics in 2017.