Year: 2022
Type: editorial
Abstract: The past 15 years have witnessed an enthusiastic revival of research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs (e.g.psilocybin, MDMA) for people with serious psychiatric and addictive disorders (Bogenschutz & Ross, 2018;Johnson, Hendricks, Barrett, & Griffiths, 2019;Schimmel et al., 2021).If psychedelic drugs can be shown to ease the enormous human suffering caused by disorders like major depression, PTSD, and addiction, they should be approved for medical use like any other pharmacotherapy.But this approval requires rigorous scientific evidence on safety and efficacy.Unfortunately, psychedelic drugs have come to recent prominence through the unwise lowering of research standards by some major medical journals and the inappropriate exaggeration of research results in the popular media by scientists.In this editorial, we describe these problems and argue that it is essential that the high scientific standards required of clinical research in other areas also be applied to the evaluation of psychedelic medicines.
Source: Psychological Medicine
Authors: Wayne D. Hall, Keith Humphreys
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4306780560