JUST MORE FUN –
Mar. 18, 2026 – Psychedelic-assisted therapy may be no more effective than traditional antidepressants when patients know what drugs they are actually taking, according to a first-of-its kind analysis that compared how well each type of drug worked for major depression. Psychedelic-assisted therapy has resisted placebo-controlled testing methods — the gold standard in clinical trial design.
Due to their powerful subjective effects, nearly everyone in the trial knows whether they received a psychedelic or the placebo even if they are not told.
But in trials of antidepressants, participants may not figure out whether they have received the drug or a placebo, which makes it hard to compare them with psychedelics.
To get around this problem, researchers from UC San Francisco, UCLA, and Imperial College, London tried a different approach. They compared the results from psychedelic therapy trials to the results from so-called open-label trials of traditional antidepressants, in which the participants all knew they were getting an antidepressant. That way, both treatments benefitted equally from the positive effect of patients knowing that they were being given a drug instead of a placebo.
The findings both surprised and disappointed them: there was virtually no difference.
