Psychiatry might need some psychedelic therapy

Introduction

Psychedelic drugs have a long history of use both in indigenous sacramental contexts and in mid-twentieth-century psychiatric research, where investigators reported promising therapeutic effects across a range of conditions. Historically, over 1,000 papers described treatment of more than 40,000 patients with psychedelics; discoveries such as LSD and early links to serotonin informed emerging biobehavioural models and therapeutic investigations, particularly for addiction and cancer-related existential distress. Research became marginalised after the 1960s because of widespread non-clinical use and sociopolitical backlash, leaving promising lines of inquiry unexplored for decades. This paper argues that psychiatry might benefit from renewed, empirically grounded psychedelic research. It sets out a narrative of re‑emergence since the 1990s, summarises modern clinical and epidemiological findings, discusses putative biological and psychological mechanisms, addresses safety and regulatory concerns, and introduces a set of articles in this journal issue that examine clinical methods, mechanisms, and novel therapeutic integrations. The aim is to frame why renewed investigation is timely and to propose directions for rigorous translational research that could address unmet needs in psychiatry.