New study finds psilocybin greatly and quickly relieves depression

Curious if that's enough for the patients to have a psychedelic experience.

Psilocybin works great, and almost everyone I know with depression can attest to that- but without changing the circumstances that cause the depression it will likely always return.

Anecdotal example: My sister is in disability care and is routinely abused by patients with severe disabilities (to no fault of their own) and she will slip into a severe depression that usually lasts a long period of time. Tripping helps her substantially deal with this, but psilocybin is for treating the effect and not for fixing the cause... If you kick a dead horse it (probably) won't wake up.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

From the paper:

> Strengths and Limitations ... Further research with ... a placebo control is needed to better ascertain the ... efficacy of this intervention among patients with MDD.

> Conclusions ... Further studies are needed with active treatment or placebo controls

The paper explicitly mentions that there's no placebo control, so I'm not sure what you're trying to point out with your comment.

If you have found a protocol where (according to the study author) "the magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market", if it's just a placebo, that sounds like a great placebo to be giving!

As noted above I seriously doubt the concept of a placebo is even well-formed for psychedelics.

I quite like Scott Alexander's take on this issue:

> Actual carefully-researched psychiatric drugs are exquisitely selected for having few side effects. The goal is something like an SSRI – mild stomach discomfort, some problems having sex, but overall you can be on them forever and barely notice their existence. In the grand scheme of things their side effects are tiny – in most placebo-controlled studies, people have a really hard time telling whether they’re in the experimental or the placebo group.

> Nobody has a hard time telling whether they’re in the experimental or placebo group of a trial of high-dose MDMA. I think this might be the difference. If you go for large effects – even if you don’t really care what direction the effect is in – you’ll get them. And if you go for small, barely perceptible effects, then you’ll get those too.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/05/is-pharma-research-wor...

Also see https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/

> All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant.

> What happened? Probably placebo effects rode on the coattails of a more important issue, regression to the mean. That is, most sick people get better eventually. This is true both for diseases like colds that naturally go away, and for diseases like depression that come in episodes which remit for a few months or years until the next relapse.