You could say that this is actually a good example of why I sometimes feel that psychedelic research is drifting more toward something like a belief system than toward a mature research field. I don’t mean that dismissively, and I think this is a real achievement, but that underlying feeling is hard for me to ignore.
At its core, this could be seen as an iteration of a Hawthorne effect study, just a much more elaborate one. People undergo an extremely intense, expectation-heavy experience, and then it’s shown that seven days later they are still affected by it. From that perspective, I’m not sure how surprising the main finding really is plus it’s clear that there is some confusion on correlation ≠ mechanism, treating phenomenology as evidence of pharmacological action? Plus how is 7 days relevant in depression, I mean come on….
What frustrates me is that this seems fairly representative of the current state of psychedelic research. Anyone working in this field knows, or should know, the methodological pitfalls very well. The most obvious ones (they do mention them and address the easiest ones, plus great careful safety practices) usually get mentioned, but once things become more complex, they often aren’t addressed properly, or sometimes not at all. Partly done in this thesis.
When you add the amount of hype surrounding psychedelics, it becomes even more problematic for me. Many psychedelic researchers appear to have a strong personal bias, simply because they use psychedelics themselves and are genuinely impressed by them. That makes this a very difficult field, and it reinforces my sense that it’s not always developing in a scientific direction.
Even though I do think this researcher is relatively critical, I still feel they are going along with the hype quite a bit, starting with the title
. So while I do think it’s an impressive piece of work, it mainly leaves me with concerns about where psychedelic research in a therapeutic context is heading.
End of grumpy Christmas morning rant
