Psychedelics may be no more effective than traditional antidepressants for treating depression. Drugs like psilocybin, LSD and DMT have shown huge promise recently in treating various mental health conditions, but an ongoing issue in such research is that people can often gauge whether they have received these drugs or a placebo, based on the former’s hallucinogenic effects. When this is accounted for, it seems that psychedelics can be effective for depression, but no more so than antidepressants are. “Our results do not disprove the exciting results about psychedelic treatments,” says Balázs Szigeti at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “We also show that psychedelics are effective at treating depression; it is just that they are not more effective than open-label [unblinded] traditional antidepressants, which feels underwhelming given the attention [on psychedelics].” Hallucinogens have shown promise for treating depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. The gold standard for drug development is usually to test a treatment against a placebo. This overcomes the placebo effect, when someone’s medical symptoms are lessened through the power of suggestion …