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 is a careful review of research about treatment-resistant depression. The authors looked through medical studies to see how doctors define this kind of depression, what makes it hard to assess, and which treatments have been tried. They describe drug strategies like adding lithium or thyroid hormone, switching antidepressant…
This review looks at how psilocybin mushrooms and their active ingredient psilocin might affect the brain and mental health. The authors say that brain inflammation seems to play a role in many cases of depression and anxiety. Lab and clinical studies show that psilocin can lower brain inflammation, boost the…
