Yet more bad news for the industry advocates pushing the “psychedelics are medicine” line: A new pre-print of a metanalysis from researchers affiliated with UCLA, Imperial College London, and UCSF suggests that despite the hype, mushrooms and other psychedelics aren’t any better than traditional anti-depressants at fighting depression.
The idea behind the paper is simple. Psychedelic studies don’t do a good job “blinding” their participants, i.e. obscuring from them what substance they’re taking (people are generally able to guess what it is from the effects). And the resultant “unblinding” can have effects on the statistical significance of any study’s results. Since there are high levels of this kind of unblinding in psychedelics studies, the authors argue, the correct point of comparison for them in the wider literature around treating depression is with so-called “open label” anti-depressant trials where participants know they are getting a specific drug.
Using these criteria, the researchers examined results from eight psycehdelic studies with a total of nearly 550 participants and 16 anti-depressant studies covering almost 9800 participants. These are not tiny samples, in other words; the results this analysis uncovered are deeply troubling.
In the words of the preprint:
Contrary to prior hypothesis, PAT was no more effective than open-label tAD [traditional anti-depressant] treatment . . . PAT’s lack of superiority compared to tADs under equal-unblinding conditions highlights the influence of blinding integrity and presents a sobering viewpoint on the treatment’s potential.
This result, in other words, undermines a key prop of the shroom salesmen.
The evidence advocates cite to bolster that conclusion was already thin, plagued by endemically small sample sizes, conflicts of interest, and other issues. But this new approach suggests that the overall claim of efficacy is due to “unblinding,” not the effects of the drugs themselves.
Yet another reason to slam the brakes on every effort to speedrun these dangerous, powerful, and potentially life-altering drugs into “medical” treatments.