PurposeThis paper aims to examine evolving practices and discourses surrounding psilocybin mushrooms on an online drug forum. Situating use within hybrid digital and ecological contexts, it traces shifts in user engagement before and after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to contextualize localized realities of the contemporary psychedelic renaissance.Design/metho...
Interest in psychedelics has expanded beyond clinical treatment contexts, yet little empirical work has examined how users describe psychedelic use in relation to sport and physical activity. This study conducted a qualitative content analysis of Reddit discussions involving psychedelics and physical performance. A Reddit search for “sports psychedelics” ret...
Floatation-REST (Reduced Environmental Stimulation Therapy) systematically alters sensory and bodily input by combining neutral buoyancy, thermal and proprioceptive neutrality, attenuation of exteroceptive stimulation, and enhancement of cardiorespiratory signaling to the brain. Here we examined whether this non-pharmacological sensory perturbation induces a...
Background: Understanding the benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) will require scientific attention to the causal interaction between the therapeutic context and process. Measuring what actually happens during PAT in large-scale studies will be an essential component of this work. Objective: We aim to develop and preliminarily evaluate the feasibi...
Background: Advanced Alzheimer's disease (AD) is generally regarded as a stage of irreversible functional decline. Psilocybin is known to transiently alter large-scale brain network dynamics and to induce plasticity-related mechanisms in preclinical models, yet clinical data in advanced dementia remain lacking. Case presentation: We report the case of an oct...
Informed consent in psychedelic-assisted services is ethically complex, difficult to implement, and remains largely unstudied and unstandardized. The current study sought expert recommendations on informed consent challenges, best practices and recommendations for supervised psilocybin experiences across various settings. Participants with psilocybin content...
Non-human models, including fish, are increasingly important for investigating how pharmacological agents such as hallucinogens influence behavior, physiology, and cellular processes. These models help to reveal underlying mechanisms and to support assessments of toxicological impact, efficacy, and safety. In this study, we used isogenic lineages of the amph...
Depression is one of the most common mental health challenges people face today. It goes beyond just feeling sad - it shapes the way a person thinks, behaves, and experiences the world around them. The persistent low mood, the fading interest in things that once brought joy, the fog that makes even simple decisions feel overwhelming - all of it quietly chips...
Objectives: For English, the validated part of Psychedelic Experience Scale (PES48) is a four-factor structure called the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30). The other validated part of the PES48 consists of four more factors: two more mystical factors (paradoxicality and connectedness, which together with the MEQ30 form the MEQ40), and two more non-m...
Mystical experiences are characterized by a profound sense of interconnectedness and transcendence of ordinary reality. These experiences can facilitate feelings of connectedness with oneself and others and have been documented as leading to significant positive changes in thoughts, emotions, and behavior. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the...
Reliable documentation of the traditional use of serotonergic psychedelics has long been confined to the Americas. Prevailing narratives often overstate the global prevalence and uniformity of traditional psychedelic use, extrapolating from a limited set of well-documented cases. Here, we report evidence of psilocybin mushroom use among Basotho traditional h...
Abstract Background and aims Psilocybin, a psychoactive compound found in fungi commonly referred to as “magic mushrooms,” is consumed for both spiritual and recreational purposes. However, psilocybin use in Puerto Rico remains understudied. This exploratory cross-sectional survey aimed to describe patterns of use, motivations for consumption, explanatory fa...
Introduction: Psilocybin therapy has demonstrated efficacy for cancer-related anxiety and depression, but resource-intensive individual treatment models raise important questions for psychedelic public health about equitable access and scalability. In our prior Phase 1/2 study of group retreat psilocybin therapy for patients with metastatic cancer, we observ...
This article presents the results of a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of metaphors used in a series of interviews by a single healthy volunteer following four moderate-to-high dosing sessions with psilocybin. The interviews were conducted by members of a human psychedelic research lab in a deep-sampling fMRI and EEG brain imaging study, allowing the participa...
This commentary critically examines the interpretation and analytic choices in Goodwin et al.’s (2026) analysis of therapeutic alliance in psilocybin treatment for treatment-resistant depression. While the authors conclude that alliance did not meaningfully contribute to treatment efficacy, we argue that this interpretation is not supported by the reported r...
Background: Self-stigma refers to the internalization of negative societal beliefs and has been associated with reduced self-efficacy, self-esteem and treatment avoidance among substance users. However, little research has explored antecedents of self-stigma such as substance use motives. This may be particularly salient for psilocybin which is used both as ...
Depression and psychological distress are highly prevalent among patients with cancer and are associated with impaired quality of life, reduced treatment adherence, and poorer clinical outcomes. Standard pharmacological and psychosocial interventions often demonstrate limited efficacy or delayed onset of action in oncological and palliative settings. Psilocy...
Rationale: Ego-dissolution represents a key therapeutic mechanism in psychedelic-assisted therapy, yet current measurement approaches may inadequately capture its multidimensional nature. Objective: To develop and validate the Multidimensional Ego-Dissolution Assessment (MEDA) and examine substance-specific patterns across classical psychedelics. Methods: It...
This paper follows 8 scientists who ventured into the world of psychedelics on a quest to find transformational pathways forward. Each have worked on aspects of global environmental change for decades, and observing environmental crises converging into a global polycrisis/metacrisis with genuine potential for collapse, we have all carried psychological burde...
Background: Informed consent in psychedelic-assisted services is ethically complex, difficult to implement, and remains largely unstudied and unstandardized. Objective: The current study sought expert recommendations from experienced psychedelic facilitators on what constitutes informed consent best practices for supervised psychedelic experiences across var...
