Figure 3 is suspicious. Even the placebo arm has much better scores for depression and anxiety from baseline?

This happens in every depression study: Placebo effect is extremely strong for depression.

You can even collect depressed people, do nothing at all, and when you survey them 6 months later the average scores will improve. This is because depression is, on average, an aberrant condition and the average patient will tend to revert toward the mean.

However, psychedelic studies have a bigger problem: Psychedelics trigger false feelings of amazement and wonder, feeling like something magical has happened. This is like turbo placebo when you tell people that it’s a depression treatment. Maybe that’s a valuable therapeutic effect, or maybe not. There’s a lot to explore, but from all the studies I’ve read I’m not as bullish on mushrooms for depression as the headlines would indicate.

Thanks for this. Great insights.

Depression is a symptom, and for symptoms there are many causes.

Personalized medicine will fix this but that costs money and time and caring.

Setting aside the psychedlic aspect, do you think figure 3 supports the study's conclusion?

If this is your first time reading depression studies then it’s going to be surprising to see both groups improve. This is normal and expected.

The key indicator of efficacy is the difference between groups. In this case there is some difference between groups but it is small.

I don't want to be patronized about the number of depression studies I have or have not read. Can you answer yes or no: does figure 3 support the study's conclusion?

What do you mean by "false" feelings of wonder?

Not defending that - some times just knowing you are trying to better yourself helps make things seem better.

Sure - but I don't see the authors mention group convergence anywhere.

While the first 5 week post treatment actually looks impressive, I don't think the treatment arms being essentially the same after 6 months supports the conclusions of the study. Unless we backpedal and say the inactive grouo was microdosing (which has its own baggage...)

As far as I know antidepressants and even pain killers are the most susceptible to placebo effect.

Agreed. If I saw an SSRI with those curves I would doubt the efficacy of it. But this might be why I am not in charge of clinical trials. Just a layman taking pot shots.