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For years, experiments with LSD and other psychedelic drugs have suggested that ‘microdosing’ the substances can offer a variety of psychological benefits to people, with the potential to help treat depression and other mental health conditions.
The notion that these long-controversial drugs could improve people’s mental well-being, cognition, and creativity was hailed as an exciting new paradigm in medical research, but according to a new study, the purported benefits of these substances may not be what they seem.
In what is described as the largest placebo-controlled trial on psychedelics to date, researchers found that the positive psychological effects related to psychedelic microdosing may simply be a manifestation of the placebo effect.
The placebo effect is a strange phenomenon in which people seem to experience a medical benefit even when they have only taken a placebo, such as a sugar pill that does not contain any active medical substances.
While the mechanisms that enhance the placebo effect continue to be debated, researchers suggest that the phenomenon is linked to people’s expectations: if people believe they could be affected by something, that belief itself can trigger various effects physiological that can alter your experience.
In the new LSD study, the same phenomenon may well have been occurring.
Researchers from Imperial College London recruited 191 volunteers – people who already had experience in microdosing psychedelics.
In an online ‘self-blind’ experiment, in which participants did not know what was inside the capsules they were taking, half of the group ingested microdoses of LSD and the other half acted as controls, taking capsules that looked the same but they were in fact of placebos.
Over the course of four weeks, the participants took their mystery capsule regimen (either LSD or placebo), while completing surveys on how they felt and taking cognitive tests online.
The results ultimately showed that those who took LSD microdoses felt better after taking their pills, significant improvements in psychological measures of well-being, mindfulness, life satisfaction, and paranoia.
However, the same benefits were seen in the people who took the placebo pills, with no apparent significant differences between the two groups.
“Our results are mixed: on the one hand, we observed the benefits of microdosing in a wide range of psychological measures; on the other hand, equal benefits were observed among participants who took placebos,” says study first author Balázs Sziget, researcher associated with the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London.
“These findings suggest that the benefits are not due to the drug, but to the expected placebo-like effects.”
“Many participants who reported experiencing positive effects while taking the placebo were surprised to learn after the study that they had not been taking the actual drug.”
It’s not the first time researchers have investigated the strange nexus between psychedelics and placebos, but the researchers say theirs is the first to conduct a placebo-controlled investigation of the cumulative effects of repeated microdoses.
Based on the results, the experiment appears to confirm commonly reported anecdotal reports that the act of microdosing LSD confers positive psychological benefits; it only suggests that these improvements “are not due to the pharmacological action of the microdose, but are explained by the placebo effect.”
That said, minor differences in some psychological measures were evident between the two groups, although the researchers say the effect sizes were small, with debatable clinical and practical value.
“In summary,” the authors conclude, “these results strongly suggest that actual capsule content did not determine differences between conditions, but beliefs about its content. “(original emphasis).
The researchers emphasize that their self-blinding experiment, in which participants mixed their own capsules at home to participate in the trial, has certain limitations, recognizing that the results are less rigorous than data from a conventional clinical trial.
But the potential impact of these findings cannot be denied, which show that we cannot rule out the possibility that the placebo effect may influence the results of contemporary psychedelic research, and in quite mind-boggling ways.
“An empty pill with strong beliefs / intentions does almost everything,” one amazed participant, who only took placebos in the trial, told the researchers.
“You put spirituality in an empty pill here … wow!”
Findings are reported in eLife.
