Psychedelic research timeline
Palliative & End-of-Life Distress: the psychedelic research timeline
Distress around life-threatening illness links psychedelic psychiatry’s first clinical era to its modern revival. LSD supplied the early and modern restart; psilocybin produced the best-known randomised evidence.
Milestones are editorially selected from Blossom’s research catalogue. Future markers are limited to important trials with dated public guidance and are shown as planned, not promised.
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The first clinical era
1965 to 1973Cancer distress becomes an early focus for psychedelic psychotherapy.1965-01
Spring Grove: distress at the end of life
Pahnke, Grof, Richards and Kurland run an eight-year LSD-assisted psychotherapy programme for people with terminal cancer.
The most sustained clinical programme of the first era, and the one whose questions the modern field went back to first. Existential distress in life-threatening illness is exactly the indication the 2008 revival trial chose, forty-three years later.
The design limitations are the same as everywhere else on this lane, but the programme is unusual in two respects: it ran long enough to develop a treatment protocol rather than a single observation, and it kept going for eight years after Sandoz stopped supplying the drug, on stock held by the US National Institute of Mental Health.
The modern return
2008 to 2016Swiss LSD research restarts before two psilocybin trials publish together.2008-01
MAPS
The first modern LSD trial opens
Peter Gasser runs a MAPS-sponsored study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy for anxiety in life-threatening illness. It is the first controlled LSD trial in roughly forty years.
Twelve patients, in Switzerland, with a non-profit sponsor and no commercial interest attached. Everything the modern field has done with LSD descends from this study getting approved.
The indication is the Spring Grove question asked again with a control group: does LSD-assisted therapy reduce anxiety in people facing death? The answer took four years to collect and another two to publish.
Note who is not here. No pharmaceutical company sponsors an LSD trial until 2022, fourteen years after the compound returns to the clinic. The revival was carried by a patient-advocacy non-profit and a Swiss academic hospital, which is worth remembering when the capital lane fills up later.
2014-07
J Nerv Ment Dis
First modern results published
The Gasser trial reports reduced anxiety with no serious adverse events. It becomes the most-cited LSD clinical paper in the database.
744 citations, which for a twelve-patient study says more about how empty the field was than about the strength of the result. The sample is small, the active-placebo comparison used 20 micrograms rather than an inert control, and the primary outcome was self-reported anxiety.
What it did was reopen the door. A modern ethics committee had approved LSD dosing, the safety record held, and the results were publishable in a mainstream journal. Every trial to the right of this point had an easier approval conversation because this one existed.
A twelve-month follow-up published in 2024 reported that the reductions were sustained, which is unusual and worth its own scrutiny given the absence of a control group at that stage.
2016-11
Journal of Psychopharmacology
Two randomised cancer trials publish together
Hopkins and NYU report large, sustained reductions in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer.
Two independent randomised trials, run at Johns Hopkins and NYU, publish in the same issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology on the same day. Both report substantial reductions in depression and anxiety in patients facing life-threatening cancer, sustained for months after a single session. They are the two most-cited psilocybin papers in Blossom, at roughly 2,100 and 1,700 citations.
Simultaneous publication of two separately conducted trials pointing the same way is about as strong as an early signal gets. It is also where the modern field’s credibility was built: from this point on, psilocybin research is treated as mainstream psychiatry rather than a fringe interest.
The caveat that applies to both is the blinding one. Participants receiving an active dose almost always know it, and in a population confronting mortality the expectation effect is not a small nuisance variable. Neither team hid this. Later programmes have been less consistently candid about it.
Refining the evidence
2017 onwardsBlinded studies and palliative-care pilots test durability and delivery.2023-02
Biological Psychiatry
Randomised, blinded, placebo-controlled
The Basel anxiety trial reports a positive result under a double-blind placebo-controlled design, the first for LSD in the modern era.
This is the design the 2014 revival paper could not manage: randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, with a crossover and a six-year run from first patient to publication.
It matters because the rest of the anxiety evidence base is open-label. Expectation moves anxiety scores more than almost any other outcome in psychiatry, so a blinded comparison is the only version of this result that survives a sceptical reading.
It came out of a university hospital rather than a company. Both of the strongest clinical results on this canvas, this one and the ADHD null, were produced by the same Basel group, which is a reasonable argument for who the field should be funding.
2026-07
Psilocybin enters early palliative care
An open-label pilot integrates psilocybin-assisted care for demoralisation and chronic pain into an early palliative-care pathway. It broadens the setting but does not provide controlled efficacy evidence.
Palliative & End-of-Life Distress
The oldest clinical psychedelic question, revisited with modern trials
Research Landscape
What the registered trials connected to Palliative & End-of-Life Distress look like when you line them up. Counts come from Blossom’s trial records as of August 2026.
How fast is Palliative & End-of-Life Distress research growing?
SourcedRegistered trials by recorded study-start year; 7 earlier trials began before 2012. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total research effort: only registered trials with a recorded start date are counted (54 of 54 tracked). Recent years under-count because of registration lag; striped bars are still filling in or are planned starts.
What's live right now, and what stopped?
SourcedRegistry status of all 54 Palliative & End-of-Life Distress trials Blossom tracks. Orange marks trials recruiting or opening.
- Recruiting or opening
- 2241%
- Underway, not recruiting
- 47%
- Completed
- 1833%
- Stopped early
- 713%
- Unknown / other
- 36%
Don't read stopped trials as failures: trials end early for funding, recruitment, and strategy reasons too. Status is as last synced from the registry; some 'recruiting' trials may already have finished.
Which compounds carry the Palliative & End-of-Life Distress research?
SourcedTrials per compound. Orange marks the most-studied compound.
Don't read shares as adding to 100%: a trial testing several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. Trial volume signals research attention, not evidence quality.
Publication Landscape
How the 185 papers Blossom links to Palliative & End-of-Life Distress line up by year, compound and journal. This is the psychedelic-relevant literature in Blossom's records as of August 2026, not the condition's full medical literature.
How has Palliative & End-of-Life Distress research grown?
SourcedTracked papers by publication year; 10 earlier papers published before 2012. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total output: only the 185 of 185 tracked papers with a recorded publication date are counted, and these are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks, not a complete bibliography. The current year is still filling in.
Which compounds shape Palliative & End-of-Life Distress?
SourcedTracked papers per compound. Orange marks the largest literature.
A paper studying several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. These are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks.
Where is Palliative & End-of-Life Distress research published?
SourcedTracked papers per journal. Orange marks the most-used journal.
Counts the journal recorded on each tracked paper; papers without a journal on file are omitted. Blossom tracks psychedelic-relevant papers rather than each journal's full catalogue.