No psychiatric treatment has attracted quite as much cash and hype as psychedelics have in the past decade. Articles about the drugs’ surprising results—including large improvements [in] depression scores and inducing smokers to quit after just a few doses—earned positive coverage from countless journalists…. Organizations researching psychedelics raised millions of dollars, and clinicians promoted their potential to be a “new paradigm” in mental health care.
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But the bubble has started to burst: It’s been a bad year for fans of psychedelics.
In [August 2024], the FDA rejected the first application for therapy assisted by MDMA, … saying that it “could not be approved based on data submitted to date,” according to the company that brought the application, Lykos.
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Many of the studies underpinning these substances’ healing powers are weak, marred by a true-believer mentality among its researchers and an underreporting of adverse side effects, which threatens to undermine an otherwise bright frontier in mental health treatment.
