Original title: Psilocybin with psychological support for treatment-resistant depression: six-month follow-up
Twenty people with treatment-resistant depressionDepression that has not improved enough with treatments already tried. received two doses of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug, in a supportive setting. Their depression symptoms were measured for six months using a questionnaire they filled out themselves. On average, symptoms fell quickly and stayed lower at later checks. Because everyone knew they were receiving psilocybin and there was no comparison group, this trial cannot show that psilocybin caused the improvement.
Imagine trying a new recipe when you have cooked the same meal many times and it has never turned out well. You change the recipe and the meal improves, but without cooking a comparison meal, you cannot tell whether the change caused the improvement. In this paper, the changed recipe is the supported psilocybin treatment, and the meals are the patients' depression symptoms over time.
People with treatment-resistant depression have not improved enough with usual treatments. In this small trial, symptoms fell after two supported psilocybin sessions and remained lower at six months, suggesting a possible approach worth testing more rigorously.
This was an open-label trial with only 20 patients and no comparison group, so it cannot establish that psilocybin caused the symptom improvements. Its findings do not establish how well the treatment works in a larger or different group. The authors say double-blind randomized controlled trials are needed.
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Psilocybin with psychological support for treatment-resistant depression: six-month follow-up — Robin Lester Carhart-Harris, Mark Bolstridge, Camilla Day et al. — Psychopharmacology — doi:10.1007/s00213-017-4771-x
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.