3 papers and 13 clinical trials exploring placebo as a treatment for adolescents.
Placebo is the most widely referenced comparator in psychedelic clinical research, appearing in over 500 trials. Understanding how placebos are designed, administered, and interpreted is essential to evaluating the evidence base for psychedelic-assisted therapies — and one of the field’s most contested methodological challenges.
Full Placebo profileAdolescents are a developing-brain, vulnerable population that the modern psychedelic field has mostly studied from the outside: almost all psychedelic trials enrol adults, not minors. The one mature clinical thread in under-18s is ketamine and esketamine for depression and acute suicidality, where benefits are real but modest and often matched by active-placebo arms. For classic psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA there is essentially no controlled evidence in adolescents, and the developing brain raises safety questions that adult data cannot answer.
Full Adolescents profile