Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
Research on MDMA for anxiety is promising but still limited. The strongest and most consistent results come from studies of MDMA used with psychotherapy for post‑traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety‑related illness. Some smaller studies have also tested MDMA and other psychedelics for other anxiety problems and reported reductions in symptoms, but the number of trials is small. Most studies give MDMA inside a carefully controlled therapy program, and safety looks acceptable in those settings. Still, trials are often small, participants are not very diverse, and scientists do not yet fully understand how MDMA produces its effects or what the long‑term risks are. More research is needed before MDMA could be considered a standard treatment for general anxiety disorders.
This paper reviews how scientists have tried to sort and name altered states of consciousness—short, noticeable changes in how you feel and think compared to normal waking life. The authors group past systems into three types: ones that classify by what the experience feels like, ones that classify by how…
