Bottemanne, Hugo
Psychedelic medicine: A new fast-acting treatment for depression?
- 2024.
36
Depression is now the most common psychiatric disorder worldwide, with more than 300 million people worldwide and 20 percent of the population affected at some point over their lifetime. There is growing interest in the use of psychedelic molecules as a treatment strategy, offering hope of a revival of psychopharmacology as a way to address treatment-resistant depression. In this article, we present a descriptive overview of the use of psychedelic treatments for depression. We examine various psychedelics and related molecules (ketamine, psilocybin, DMT, LSD, MDMA, mescaline), indicating for each the level of evidence for their use to treat depression, technical procedures for their administration, plausible mechanisms of action, and research prospects.