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 psilocybin for low mood and depression is promising but still early. Small clinical trials that pair psilocybin with professional therapy have found reductions in depressive symptoms, and some people report benefits that last weeks or months after one or a few doses. Scientists also see brain changes in lab and animal studies that could explain mood effects, but the exact reasons are not settled. Important limits remain. Most clinical studies are small, often use the drug together with therapy (so it is hard to separate drug from therapy), and the participants are not very diverse. Safety in these studies has been acceptable under careful medical supervision, but more and larger trials are needed to know how well psilocybin works long term and how safe it is for many different people.
This paper describes psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which means giving drugs like ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, LSD or ibogaine together with guided therapy. The authors say this approach has shown promising safety and benefits so far, even for people who did not get better with usual treatments. They also argue that these therapies…
This paper reviews research on three naturally occurring psychedelics: psilocybin, ibogaine, and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (the active part of the brew ayahuasca). It explains that these drugs work on the brain's serotonin system and summarizes growing studies that suggest they might help with problems like post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, anxiety, and…
