Moderating factors in psilocybin-assisted treatment affecting mood and personality: A naturalistic, open-label investigation (Irrmischer, et al, 2025)
"Findings indicate that individual psilocybin-assisted therapy has the potential for beneficial effects on mood and personality characteristics. Moreover, the study highlights the importance of subjective experiences and demographic factors in moderating this effect."
Psychedelic Experiences After Bereavement Improve Symptoms of Grief: The Influence of Emotional Breakthroughs and Challenging Experiences (Low, et al, 2025)
"Findings provide preliminary evidence that support the development of a psychedelic-assisted therapy protocol to target symptoms of grief. Psychedelic-assisted therapy might offer an alternative to current grief treatment options. "
Spotlight: A long, strange trip: Ketamine treatment in psychiatry (Nutt, et al, 2025)
"...mystical experiences were strongly related to immediate and sustained psychiatric benefits at the group level and on an individual, session-by-session basis across the six doses, providing mechanistic support for ketamine-psychotherapy pairings."
Spotlight: Changing your mind: neuroplastic mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effect of psychedelics in depression, PTSD, and addiction (Palhas, et al, 2025)
"Serotonergic psychedelics & ketamine appear to share common cellular mechanisms. They both recruit glutamatergic neurons to stimulate BDNF-trKB signaling, promoting synaptogenesis via the mTOR pathway. These changes may explain their efficacy in depression, anxiety, PTSD, & addiction."
How does ketamine affect psychotherapy?
Studies suggest that human support is a factor in ketamine psychedelic therapy
Spotlight: Antidepressants and the endogenous opioid system (Fricker, et al, 2025)
"A growing body of evidence links the opioid system w/ major depressive disorder... two different widely used antidepressants, tianeptine & ketamine, both interact with MOR; tianeptine as a full agonist, ketamine as a positive allosteric modulator. Both produce antidepressant effects within days."
