UC Davis

Psychedelic medicine is gaining rapid popularity for treating neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, PTSD and addiction. Unlike current medications on the market, these compounds appear to act rapidly and in treatment-resistant populations. However promising, these therapeutics are hindered by the fact that they cause intense hallucinations, which can be dangerous and decrease accessibility to this type of medical care. We sought to determine if hallucinations are necessary to achieve the therapeutic effects, or if these two phenomena are dissociable. Using rodent behavioural paradigms, cell culture assays and human survey data, we demonstrate that both psychedelic microdosing and novel non-hallucinogenic psychedelic analogs may have therapeutic effects.