Researchers are testing psychedelics as a novel treatment for depression. Alexander_Volkov/Getty Images Psychedelics are substances that may be beneficial in treating mental illness.
Research is ongoing about the effectiveness of using psychedelics such as psilocybin and how they compare to more traditional treatment options.
Evidence from a recent review suggests that the psychedelic psilocybin at high doses was slightly more effective at treating depression than the common antidepressant escitalopram.
Depression is a widespread mental illness, impacting about 280 million people worldwide. Researchers are interested in expanding treatment options and finding the most effective medications. Using psychedelics to treat depression is one area of ongoing research.
A review and meta-analysis published in the BMJ compared the effectiveness of psychedelics to escitalopram.
The results of the review indicate that high doses of psilocybin were minimally more effective than escitalopram in relieving depressive symptoms and slightly more effective than the placebo results in escitalopram trials.
The results suggest that psilocybin may be comparable to current antidepressant treatment.
Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that have the potential to treat several mental illnesses like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Common examples of psychedelics include psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA.
While psychedelics have shown promise in the treatment of depression, it can be challenging to do blinded studies because of the subjective effects of psychedelics. Thus, there can be differing placebo effects and possible bias.The researchers of the current review wanted to compare monotherapy use of psychedelics with escitalopram , a common medication used to treat depression. To help get over some of the problems with the reduced placebo effects of psychedelics trials, the review authors made sure to distinguish between the placebo response in psychedelic studies and the placebo response in antidepressant studies.This review and Bayesian network meta-analysis included randomized controlled trials with adult participants who had clinically diagnosed depression.For all the data, they focused on changes in depressive symptoms as the primary outcome. Altogether, they were able to include data from 19 trials: 811 participants in psychedelic trials and 1968 participants in escitalopram trials.Based on their synthesis of the data, researchers did find that the […]
Psilocybin may be as effective as common antidepressant in treating depression
