Is good science leading the way in the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs?
Open accessAbstract
The past 15 years have witnessed an enthusiastic revival of research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs (e.g.psilocybin, MDMA) for people with serious psychiatric and addictive disorders (Bogenschutz & Ross, 2018;Johnson, Hendricks, Barrett, & Griffiths, 2019;Schimmel et al., 2021).If psychedelic drugs can be shown to ease the enormous human suffering caused by disorders like major depression, PTSD, and addiction, they should be approved for medical use like any other pharmacotherapy.But this approval requires rigorous scientific evidence on safety and efficacy.Unfortunately, psychedelic drugs have come to recent prominence through the unwise lowering of research standards by some major medical journals and the inappropriate exaggeration of research results in the popular media by scientists.In this editorial, we describe these problems and argue that it is essential that the high scientific standards required of clinical research in other areas also be applied to the evaluation of psychedelic medicines.
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Recent critiques highlight notable limitations in many psilocybin studies, including small sample sizes, assessments by raters likely to be functionally unblinded, an open or waitlist comparator design, and an inadequate assessment of adverse events.
“recent critiques highlight notable limitations in many of these studies, [16][17][18][19] including small sample sizes, assessments by raters likely to be functionally unblinded, an open or waitlist comparator design, and an inadequate assessment of adverse events (AEs).”
From Single-Dose Psilocybin Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial (2023) · cites this paper as [16]
In “Lowering of standards by major medical journals” (page unavailable), the paper describes a psilocybin trial with 30 and 29 patients in its two arms, calls it underpowered, and questions whether participants remained blinded. It does not say that outcome raters were functionally unblinded or that the studies used open or waitlist comparators or inadequately assessed adverse events. The trial it discusses used escitalopram as its comparator. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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References 19 · Cited by 17
Research works printed but not linked: 2
- [5]5. Carhart-Harris, R., Daws, R. E., & Nutt, D. (2022). A critique of: Skepticsm about recent evidence that psilocybin opens depressed minds. Version 2. PsyArViv. Retrieved from https://psyarxiv.com/pdbf5/
- [17]17. Love, S. (2022). Inside dispute over a high profile psychedelic study. Vice. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en/article/4awj3n/inside-the-dispute- over-a-high-profile-psychedelic-study NEJM Media Center. (2022). Fact sheet: Publication process. Retrieved from https://www.nejm.org/media-center/publication-process
- Authors
- Hall, W. D., & Humphreys, K.
- Affiliations
- The University of Queensland (AU)
- VA Palo Alto Health Care System (US)
- Corresponding author
- Hall, Wayne D.
- Venue
- Psychological Medicine
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2022-10
- Volume
- 52
- Issue
- 14
- Pages
- 2849-2851
- ISSN
- 0033-2917 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-8978
- OpenAlex
- W4306780560
- Semantic Scholar
- a31ce82302aedb5d16275be4d75143a10b104a69
- Cited by
- 17
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2025: 3 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 1
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Psychological Medicine (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychedelics and Drug Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications
- Keywords
- psychedelics, psilocybin, MDMA, psychedelic therapy, mental illness, addiction, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, research standards, publication bias, drug approval, treatment efficacy and safety
- MeSH terms
- Hallucinogens, Humans, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, Psilocybin
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