As psychedelics create buzz as potential cure-alls for mental health conditions, a new study involving five Bay Area laboratories offers a more conservative endorsement.
Researchers, including some from UC Berkeley, found that a single dose of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, produced some short-term, antidepressant behavioral changes in mice but no reproducible, lasting therapeutic effects, according to a study published Monday in Nature Neuroscience.
Researchers from institutions including UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford University collaborated to address a longstanding challenge in psychedelic research: the difficulty of replicating findings across laboratories. The five labs ran parallel experiments to test if psilocybin could reliably reverse depression-like behaviors in mice exposed to prolonged stress.
Odilia Lu, a UC Berkeley doctoral student and co-author of the study, said academic incentives often favor novelty over reproducibility, leading researchers to investigate similar questions using different methods. As a consequence, research often comes to conflicting results, an issue Lu said this research meant to address.
“Our goal was to address replicability directly and build it into our experimental design from the beginning,” Lu said.
To test psilocybin’s efficacy, researchers first induced depression-like behaviors in mice by administering corticosterone in their drinking water for three consecutive weeks. They then measured whether one dose of psilocybin could restore the mice’s preference for sugar water, a common measure of anhedonia, a symptom of depression that causes a reduced ability to experience pleasure.
The mice were either given a saline control or a single dose of psilocybin, administered at 2 milligrams per kilogram of their body weights. The five labs observed the mice for about 10 minutes after they received psilocybin. Researchers then tested the mice again 24 hours later to see whether any behavioral changes persisted.
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