A new phase II clinical study pitted psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic shrooms, against a conventional selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant to see which served as a better treatment for depression — and the psilocybin seems to have held its own.
Psilocybin performed about as well as the SSRI escitalopram as a treatment for moderate-to-severe major depressive disorder, according to the double-blinded, randomized experiment published in The New England Journal of Medicine. And in some regards, it may have even performed better.
“Psilocybin therapy appears to be at least as effective as a leading conventional antidepressant and is faster acting with a reassuring safety profile when given by professional therapists,” lead study author and head of Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research Robin Carhart-Harris told PsyPost.
Because the researchers didn’t want the participants’ perceptions of either drug to affect their outcome, they hid which drug each subject was getting. Half the participants were given a placebo pill instead of their SSRI pill but a full dose of psilocybin, while the other half was given an inconsequentially-small amount of psilocybin and a real SSRI pill.