Psychedelics Research Links October 2021

This is all the other psychedelic research that came out in October 2021. These papers don’t (yet) have their own page in our database.

Find our recap of the most interesting papers this month in our October Recap.

You can find all interesting papers in our Papers Database.

Related papers

Use CTRL/CMD+F to quickly search if anything relevant for you has been published this month.

• Low-dose ketamine infusion in treatment-resistant double depression: Revisiting the adjunctive ketamine study of Taiwanese patients with treatment-resistant depression (finds that 14mg/70kg is not sufficient for anti-depressant and anti-suicidal effects, 35mg/70kg is though)

• Psychedelics have shown great promise in treating mental-health conditions, but their use is severely limited by legal obstacles, which could be overcome (discusses the social and legal obstacles facing psychedelic therapies and they might be overcome)

• Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency (opinion piece discussing the ability of psychedelics to induce a shift in political beliefs and how it relates to the political set and setting)

• Psychedelics and Other Psychoplastogens for Treating Mental Illness (the ability of psychedelics to alter neural plasticity is discussed)

• Psychedelics and Response Duration (viewpoint)

• The Power of Social Attribution: Perspectives on the Healing Efficacy of Ayahuasca (perspective)

• United States National Institutes of Health grant funding for psychedelic-assisted therapy clinical trials from 2006–2020 (no funding for psychedelic studies by the NIH, but this has changed with the recent funding of a smoking cessation study)

• Couple Therapy with MDMA – Proposed Pathways of Action (soon to be published paper proposing a proposing a new mode for MDMA-assisted couples therapy)

• Analytical Challenges for Identification of New Psychoactive Substances

• 5-HT2 Receptor Subfamily and the Halogen Bond Promise (“... DOX serotonin agonist psychedelics at all three 5-HT2 receptor subtypes is up to two orders of magnitude stronger for X = Cl, Br, or I (but not F) than when C-4 bears a hydrogen atom and more than expected from their hydrophobicities.“)

• Psychedelics, Mystical Experiences, and Meaning Making: A Renegotiation Process With the Challenges of Existence

• Trends in Ketamine Use, Exposures, and Seizures in the United States (1% of population used ketamine in last year (2019) for non-medical/recreational use, an upwards trend but still very small percentage total use)

• The resilient phenotype elicited by ketamine against inflammatory stressors-induced depressive-like behavior is associated with NLRP3-driven signaling pathway (in mice! “these findings suggest that ketamine elicits a pro-resilient phenotype against inflammatory stressors-induced depressive-like behavior, an effect associated with the suppression of the NLRP3 inflammasome-driven signaling pathway.“)

• New trends in pharmacological control of neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia (suggest to try (es)ketamine for Alzheimer’s)

• Ketamine and other glutamate receptor modulators for depression in adults with bipolar disorder (review, finds still limited evidence for ketamine and other glutamanergic compounds for bipolar depression)

• Macrodosing to Microdosing with Psychedelics: Clinical, Social, and Cultural Perspectives (author copy)

• The therapeutical role of psychedelic drugs in treatment of mental disorders (review)

• A role for pre-stimulus theta activity in the generalization of salient stimuli (thesis)

• Psychedelics and mindfulness: A systematic review and meta-analysis (“… mindfulness and specific facets relating to acceptance have been shown to increase following ingestion of psychedelics”)

• Ketamine Alleviates Depressive Symptoms in Patients Undergoing Intracranial Tumor Resection: A Randomized Controlled Trial (n=84, “… intraoperative administration of ketamine could alleviate moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms in neurosurgical patients without worsening safety.“)

• Characterization of Comorbid Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder Using Ketamine as an Experimental Medicine Probe (study proposal)

• Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (“We provide background on who Huxley was, how his mescaline experience came about and the key messages of his essay. We also discuss the impact of Huxley’s essay and advocacy on early psychedelic research.“)

• Translating Psychedelic Therapies from Clinical Trials to Community Clinics: Building Bridges and Addressing Potential Challenges Ahead (to be published)

• Effects of Ketamine and Midazolam on Simultaneous EEG/fMRI Data During Working Memory Processes (… “ketamine administration attenuated theta power increases and alpha power decreases and midazolam attenuated low beta band decreases to increasing WM load. Additionally, ketamine caused larger blood-oxygen-dependent (BOLD) signal increases in the supplementary motor area and angular gyrus, and weaker deactivations of the default mode network (DMN)…”)

• Antisuicidal efficacy of ketamine infusion in suicidal patients of depressive disorder (n=60, RCT, India, finds antisuicidal effects up to one week after ketamine infusion (3x))

• Caution at psychiatry’s psychedelic frontier (reaction to Mitchell et al., 2021, MDMA Phase IIIa study)And subsequent reply by Mitchell and colleagues

• The treatment of depressive disorders with psychedelics (book chapter)

• Claire and Jose get off their cake: ecstasy, raving and women’s pleasure in 1990s Britain (recap of harm-reduction materials from 1990s)

• Study Protocol for “Psilocybin as a Treatment for Anorexia Nervosa: A Pilot Study” (study protocol, one of the few/only to pre-register the protocol)

• Examining psychedelic-induced changes in social functioning and connectedness in a naturalistic online sample using the Five-Factor Model of personality (to be published)

• Should Ketamine Not Be Banned? A Scoping Review (review, focus on ketamine use in clinical practice for resource-poor settings and disaster zones)

• Finding the divine within: exploring the role of the sacred in psychedelic integration therapy for sexual trauma and dysfunction (comments)

• Rapid quantification of Psilocybin with reversed-phase HPLC and single-wavelength detection (novel analytical technique to quantify psilocybin and psilocin)

• Chemical syntheses of the salvinorin chemotype of KOR agonist (review of salvinorin A syntheses methods)

• Toward a Typology of Hallucinogen Users in the United States (n=6381, most used multiple psychedelics (70%))