How do de­pressed rats re­spond to psy­che­delics? New da­ta of­fer in­sight in­to the hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence

De­spite tricky reg­u­la­tions, re­search eval­u­at­ing the an­ti­de­pres­sant po­ten­tial of psy­che­delics in hu­mans is mush­room­ing — and the FDA has al­ready ap­proved a nasal spray con­coc­tion of the cat tran­quil­iz­er ke­t­a­mine for pa­tients whose de­pres­sion per­sists de­spite con­ven­tion­al ther­a­py.

But sci­en­tists still don’t quite ful­ly un­der­stand the an­ti­de­pres­sant im­pact of psy­che­delics on the brain — are the ef­fects pure­ly bi­o­log­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal? A new study looks in­to the de­gree and du­ra­tion of an­ti­de­pres­sant ef­fects in­duced by these drugs — large­ly brand­ed by gov­ern­ments as il­le­gal he­do­nis­tic com­pounds with no ther­a­peu­tic po­ten­tial — in an an­i­mal mod­el.

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