Psychedelic enthusiasm must be more honest about the reality of the risks.

[Laird]

The debate about whether the NHS should use magic mushrooms to treat depression

Pallab Ghosh
2 January 2026
BBC

Prof Oliver Howes, chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Psychopharmacology Committee, is optimistic. He says he sees psychedelics as a promising potential new treatment for psychiatric disorders - including for patients in the NHS.

Others have also urged caution. A report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, published in September 2025, warned of the potential dangers of psychedelics, and doctors also stress that taking psychedelic drugs is not just illegal but can also be harmful.

Dr Das believes positive results from trials might change views as the emerging scientific evidence mounts. "I hope if there's sufficient evidence, the government will be open to revising the scheduling of these drugs," he says.

However, an analysis, published in the British Medical Journal in November 2024 by a PhD student Cédric Lemarchand and colleagues, questioned how easy it was to determine the precise effect of psychedelic drugs.

"Because hallucinogens are often combined with a psychotherapy component, it is difficult to separate the effects of the drug from the therapeutic context, complicating comprehensive evaluations and product labelling."

It also suggested short-term trials may not detect "the potential for harm and serious adverse events from long-term use of hallucinogens… The potential for abuse or misuse must also be considered."

’Shrooms Lead the Pack in Psychedelic Medicine, but Rollout Is Bumpy

More than 18,000 people have already gone through Oregon’s psilocybin program, and the early data on adverse events has been positive.

According to the Oregon Health Authority, there have been 23 incidents requiring emergency services, which experts consider low. Many of the calls involved clients in distress who sought to prematurely leave their session against the advice of a facilitator.

Angela Allbee, who oversees psilocybin services at the Oregon Health Authority, said that none of the incidents were serious.

“Statistically speaking, psilocybin therapy is safer than golfing,” said Ryan Reid, the operations director and co-founder of Bendable Therapy in Bend. “It’s safer than anyone thought it would be.”

That said, Oregon prohibits those with schizophrenia and active psychosis from participating in the program, because the drug can trigger or exacerbate manic and psychotic symptoms. For those without serious psychiatric diagnoses, the side effects can include headaches, nausea, anxiety and fluctuations in blood pressure.

Psilocybin’s therapeutic benefits are tied to the drug’s ability to temporarily rewire the brain, helping patients break the cycle of negative thinking that is the hallmark of many hard-to-treat mental health conditions. In a therapeutic setting, the drug can provide fresh insights into unresolved childhood trauma, or help a terminally ill patient find joy in daily life, experts say.

“What we see reliably through all of these studies is that psilocybin gives people a new perspective on mental health issues, oftentimes when they’ve been stuck for years,” said Heidi Pendergast, the Oregon director of the Healing Advocacy Fund, which promotes state-regulated psychedelic therapy programs around the country. “It’s not a panacea, but it does give people a renewed sense of hope.”

And a related article not about therapy but creativity:

How Psychedelics Can Catalyze Creative Breakthroughs

Cassandra Vieten, PhD
January 14, 2026
IONS blog

Work by scholars such as Manesh Girn, who has recently completed a comprehensive review of psychedelics and creativity, is helping clarify how psychedelic states influence brain connectivity and thought dynamics in ways that may facilitate creative generation and novel insight.

Others, including Kalina Christoff, whose work investigates the neural and psychological mechanisms of spontaneous thought, mind-wandering, and creativity, are exploring how unconstrained cognition relates to imagination and insight. Another fantastic cognitive scientist Isabel Weissner investigates how psychedelics such as LSD alter cognitive processes related to creativity—showing that these substances can increase novelty, symbolic thinking, and semantic breadth in problem-solving while reshaping patterns of thought.

Up and coming are scholars like Christine Chesebrough who works to understand how altered states of consciousness influence imaginative and creative processes, and Nick Denomme, who investigates creative cognition and the psychological processes underlying novel idea generation are exploring how spontaneous thought, cognitive flexibility, and altered states intersect. And more senior researchers like Jonathan Schooler have long explored consciousness, mind-wandering, meta-awareness, and the cognitive underpinnings of creativity and problem-solving, emphasizing how fluctuations in attention and spontaneous thought contribute to insight. Together, this research is moving the conversation beyond anecdotes toward testable models.

The debate about whether the NHS should use magic mushrooms to treat depression

Pallab Ghosh
2 January 2026
BBC




’Shrooms Lead the Pack in Psychedelic Medicine, but Rollout Is Bumpy


And a related article not about therapy but creativity:

How Psychedelics Can Catalyze Creative Breakthroughs

Cassandra Vieten, PhD
January 14, 2026
IONS blog

I looked at the "clinics" in Oregon that were 'authorized' to administer or coach 'shroom' therapy, and was very disappointed in the results. It has not even been legal for that long, yet 20 years of experience taking psychedelics appears to qualify someone with zero credentials to be your therapist.

Every single place administering this has some sort of woo woo nonsense going on, with very little focus on serious therapy.

The obvious issue to me is that we know that certain psychedelics can and will create plasticity in the brain neural networks. But what we don't know is whether we are creating the correct neural networks to help or heal the actual issues.

We would need to know where these networks are before therapy, and where they should be after therapy, and have a way of monitoring the progress so the networks can be rewired properly and any deviations could be corrected. But we don't.

I have experienced the ketamine folks, the LSD folks, the psilocybin folks, and many others in my lifetime. None of those I have personally known have improved for any lengthy period of time because of any drug experience or drug therapy. Most of them have become worse, or dependent on the experience, or end up losing the last grip on reality and life that they had. To me, drugs are a horrible crutch and very worthless to actual recovery.

Some of them have ended in an early exit from life. Just because that isn't some public study doesn't mean that there aren't a huge number of people trying to self-medicate that end up dead. They usually blame how they died, and not the drugs or the lifestyle that they were leading. They blame guns, driving under the influence, depression, and any number of other things.

Meditation is not even recommended for people with certain mental health issues, because it exacerbates the mental health problems. I lost a friend many decades ago because he was already schizophrenic and started using drugs to try and fix his own issues. I lost a shaman friend just last year that went down the ketamine route and turned a revolver to his own temple.

Of course there are serious issues and consequences to drugs and these kinds of therapies. They are not magic bullets. They are not the cure or fix they claim them to be. Many people are simply using and abusing a system to get high and call it therapy. Many others are using and abusing this system to make a living selling drugs and services, with very little moral or ethical oversight.

I don't think I will ever be a fan of using drugs on broken minds or broken people, unless they spend more time monitoring the actual before, during, and follow-up of each patient instead of just filling their own bank accounts at the expense of the less fortunate.

I looked at the "clinics" in Oregon that were 'authorized' to administer or coach 'shroom' therapy, and was very disappointed in the results. It has not even been legal for that long, yet 20 years of experience taking psychedelics appears to qualify someone with zero credentials to be your therapist.

Every single place administering this has some sort of woo woo nonsense going on, with very little focus on serious therapy.

So... a selection bias to feed an inaccurate perspective. You look at one location, as if that says everything you need to know? It seems obvious to me that such clinics will not have clear rules in place, if they can be that sporadic and all over the place.

Stuff being "woo woo" is no indicator of anything, other than that you that is what you believe.

The obvious issue to me is that we know that certain psychedelics can and will create plasticity in the brain neural networks. But what we don't know is whether we are creating the correct neural networks to help or heal the actual issues.

We would need to know where these networks are before therapy, and where they should be after therapy, and have a way of monitoring the progress so the networks can be rewired properly and any deviations could be corrected. But we don't.

The brain plasticity is perhaps the least important part of the psychedelic healing process ~ that is just a result of psychological processing and healing, not the cause of psychological processing or healing. Talking about "correct neural networks" is meaningless rhetoric because no-one has a single idea what "correct" looks like.

Knowing how they were before and after therapy is also meaningless ~ what matters is psychological health before and after, especially long-term, as healing can take time in conjunction with integration and processing of the experience.

I have experienced the ketamine folks, the LSD folks, the psilocybin folks, and many others in my lifetime. None of those I have personally known have improved for any lengthy period of time because of any drug experience or drug therapy. Most of them have become worse, or dependent on the experience, or end up losing the last grip on reality and life that they had. To me, drugs are a horrible crutch and very worthless to actual recovery.

Those that you have personally known... which is an obvious selection bias.

You seem to generalize them as a whole with some odd rhetoric ~ what does "becoming worse" mean? What does "becoming dependent" means? What does "losing the last grip on reality and life" mean? These words mean something to you that they do not mean to me. Yet you almost... seem to assume that I will understand what you mean? Assumptions never go well.

Some of them have ended in an early exit from life. Just because that isn't some public study doesn't mean that there aren't a huge number of people trying to self-medicate that end up dead. They usually blame how they died, and not the drugs or the lifestyle that they were leading. They blame guns, driving under the influence, depression, and any number of other things.

You reference a whole of unrelated stuff that has nothing to do with Psilocybin. I have self-medicated with Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, and in my experience, healing can take weeks and months ~ the experience can take a long time to process and integrate, as it happens unconsciously.

Meditation is not even recommended for people with certain mental health issues, because it exacerbates the mental health problems. I lost a friend many decades ago because he was already schizophrenic and started using drugs to try and fix his own issues. I lost a shaman friend just last year that went down the ketamine route and turned a revolver to his own temple.

With alcoholism, do we blame the alcohol, or do we blame the underlying mental health issues that led to the alcoholism? The depression, the anxiety?

Here you are, blaming the substance, without any evidence that it is specifically the substance, and not their lifestyle and environment. You seem to conflate lifestyle with "drugs" in a way that shows your lack of comprehension around the subject.

Of course there are serious issues and consequences to drugs and these kinds of therapies. They are not magic bullets. They are not the cure or fix they claim them to be. Many people are simply using and abusing a system to get high and call it therapy. Many others are using and abusing this system to make a living selling drugs and services, with very little moral or ethical oversight.

They are not "magic bullets", no. Healing and integration is never one-and-done with psychedelics ~ healing, integration, takes a long time, as it is a process of psychological shifting and reorganization. Any place that may claim to be one-and-done is selling a lie. But that is also strange, because they're essentially killing their own service...

I don't think I will ever be a fan of using drugs on broken minds or broken people, unless they spend more time monitoring the actual before, during, and follow-up of each patient instead of just filling their own bank accounts at the expense of the less fortunate.

Agreed ~ in the cases such accusations are applicable.