Purpose: Ketamine and classic psychedelics have recently gained increased scientific interest regarding their role in pain management, while there is evidence that pain induces neural connectivity changes. We performed a scoping review to investigate the correlation of ketamine and classic psychedelics with pain-related neural connectivity, aiming to find potential therapeutic targets for these...
Psychedelic MedicineJuly 24, 2026Matthew C. Company, Dylan J. Lifshitz, M. Farris Sawaya et al.
This narrative review traces how the scientific understanding of psychedelics has intersected with “reward processing” from before the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) era to the present, emphasizing how cultural and regulatory climates shaped what was viewed as an acceptable research question. Reward processing is treated as a family of partially overlapping phenomena: (1) reward-linked...
Introduction: The renewed clinical interest in psychedelics is often framed in ways that blur the distinction between psychotherapy and the psychedelic drug experience itself. Revisiting early research and clinical observations from the first wave of psychedelic science may help clarify how these processes were originally conceptualized. In the mid-20th century, LSD and other serotonergic...
Background: Previous research indicates that psychedelics may produce outcomes that are dependent on the immediate context. Recent scholarship hypothesizes that such outcomes may also depend on the broader sociocultural context, but empirical data are lacking. Methods: Using a longitudinal observational research design with a large sample of US adults ( N = 21,990) followed during a 2-month...
This commentary critically examines the interpretation and analytic choices in Goodwin and colleagues’ recent analysis of therapeutic alliance in psilocybin treatment for treatment-resistant depression. While the authors conclude that alliance did not meaningfully contribute to treatment efficacy, we argue that this interpretation is not supported by the reported results, which are, in...
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has demonstrated efficacy in treating individual mental health conditions such as addiction, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, current research predominantly focuses on individual experiences, overlooking the relational and systemic factors that influence healing and long-term therapeutic outcomes. This conceptual article...
Little is known about the correlates of repeated non-medical lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) use. Therefore, we aimed to determine the prevalence and correlates of past-year LSD use among people aged 18 years and older in the United States who first used LSD at least 5 years ago. Using data from the 2015-2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, we examined the estimated weighted prevalence...
Psilocybin shows encouraging outcomes for patients with cancer and major depressive disorder (MDD). However, there is insufficient evidence on the use of evidence-based psychotherapeutic interventions to consistently guide and standardize psilocybin preparation, dosing, and integration. Meaning-centered psychotherapy (MCP) is a manualized, brief psychotherapeutic intervention that enhances...
The neuropsychological effects of psychedelic compounds are well-documented; however, their respiratory activity is less clear. Since respiration is a physiologically significant process and psychedelics have increasingly attracted attention in therapies, assessing the potential effects on respiration is relevant. The present narrative literature review compiled evidence on serotonergic...
Background and Purpose: Ayahuasca can produce a dynamic set of both positive and negative acute effects. Commonly reported challenges include physical symptoms (e.g., nausea, vomiting) and emotional distress (e.g., frightening hallucinations, paranoia). Despite these difficulties, many individuals describe their challenging experiences as contributing to personal healing and beneficial...
Background: Institutional review boards (IRBs) are gatekeepers of psychedelic research, deciding whether and under what conditions it may proceed. Yet IRB understanding, attitudes, perspectives, and concerns regarding psychedelics and psychedelic research have not previously been studied. These factors are important to assessing whether US IRBs are likely to be over- or underprotective of...
Psychedelics rose to prominence in the 1960s, around the same time when neurobiologists identified the midbrain raphe as the brain’s primary source of serotonin. It is therefore no surprise that early studies on classical psychedelics like d -lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) focused on their effects within this brainstem nucleus. This review traces the arc of discovery: from the initial report...
Background: There are currently three FDA-approved medications for opioid use disorder (OUD), but none of them are especially effective, some can precipitate withdrawal in dependent individuals, and all of them require daily administration. In the appropriate settings, single administrations of psychedelics can elicit persistent anti-addiction effects in humans and in laboratory animals, but...
There is growing interest in incorporating MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine) into structured, evidence-based cognitive-behavioral treatment protocols for post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet this risks overlooking the distinctive qualities of MDMA-assisted therapy, which has already demonstrated strong clinical effects, high response rates, and low dropout using a principle-guided,...
This article corrects an idea in psychedelic science and culture that the ancient Eleusynian Mysteries used psychedelics, as claimed by Carl Ruck and co-authors in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (1978), revitalized by Brian Muraresku's The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (2020), and popularized by social media heavyweights such as Joe...
Muslims living in the United States (MLUS) are underrepresented in psychedelics research. Despite growing research on psychedelic-assisted mental health care, little is known about its acceptance among MLUS, a population with some history of rejecting mental health services. This study examined whether MLUS' rejection attitudes toward mental health services were related to lower acceptance of...
There has been great interest in the use of very low doses of psychedelic drugs like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to improve mood and cognition. However, controlled studies have thus far provided little support for their efficacy. One challenge is that the subjective effects are subtle and on the threshold of detectability, whereas the questionnaires used to assess the drugs' effects were...
New treatment options are needed to improve outcomes for patients with both opioid use disorder (OUD) and injection-related infections. Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) has been suggested as a potential treatment for substance use disorders (SUD). To address this need, a qualitative study was conducted to understand the attitudes toward PAT from individuals with OUD who have survived...
Objective: While data on perceived availability of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) [paLSD] are collected annually in the United States, detailed investigations of recent trends in paLSD have not been published. Therefore, we sought to explore this topic. Method: Data were sourced from the 2015–2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) administrations. To identify factors associated...
Background: Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy (PAP) may be an effective intervention for a range of mental disorders. However, there appears to be a relative lack of qualitative evidence to complement emerging quantitative findings. To our knowledge, no reviews have systematically mapped the literature on qualitative studies on PAP for the treatment of mental disorders with the intent to...
Psychedelic MedicineFebruary 8, 2026Carolyn M. Porta, Cheng-Chang Wu, Anna Graefe et al.
Background: Despite being the largest sector of the health care workforce with potential to support advancing psychedelics in health care, nurses and their views toward psychedelics and changing legal restrictions remain mostly unknown. Aims: To identify an optimal predictive model for nurses’ support (or not) of decriminalization of psychedelics. Methods: Secondary analysis of e-survey data...
Introduction: Cognitive flexibility is essential for behavioral adaptation in response to environmental changes and is impaired in various neuropsychiatric disorders. The serotonergic psychedelic psilocybin has shown potential in enhancing cognitive flexibility, although with mixed results. In this study, we investigated the effects of psilocybin on cognitive flexibility in rats using a...
Background: Psilocybin is a promising therapy for cancer-related distress, but existing individual treatment models are resource intensive. In this study, we designed and tested a group model of psilocybin therapy for people with metastatic cancer and cancer-related anxiety and depression. Method: Eligibility criteria included metastatic cancer, moderate-to-severe symptoms of anxiety or...
Objective: Emerging evidence suggests that mystical experiences mediate the therapeutic effects of psychedelic-assisted therapy. The current study examines associations between mystical experiences and components of “set” (positive mindset, participant intentions, and spirituality) and “setting” (perceived positivity of the dosing environment) in the context of psilocybin-assisted therapy for...
Sponsor companies and physician investigators engaged in clinical research, including those involved in psychedelic drug development, are to design quality into the clinical studies upfront as outlined in International Council for Harmonization (ICH) E8 R1, General Considerations for Clinical Studies, and ICH E6 R3, Guideline for Good Clinical Practice. Identification of what is critical to...