Investigating Public Attitudes Towards Psilocybin Policies When Presented with Benefits and Harms: a Survey Based Experiment.
Abstract
Preliminary studies have found psilocybin to be an effective treatment for mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety (Carhart-Harris et al., 2021; Griffiths et al., 2016; Moreno et al., 2006; Ross et al., 2016). Few harms are associated with psilocybin such as nausea, headaches (Anderson et al., 2020; Santos & Marques, 2021), bad trips (Bienemann et al., 2020) and in rarer cases seizures (Kopra et al., 2022; Simonsson et al., 2022). However, these harms have been witnessed more with consumption of higher doses and in unsupervised settings. Despite this evidence, medical professionals seem to be more cautious about psychedelics and hold more unfavourable attitudes (Barnett et al., 2018; Grover et al., 2023) compared to psychosocial professionals (Davis et al., 2021; Hearn et al., 2022) and the general population (Corrigan et al., 2021; Jacobsen et al., 2021). Although some psychosocial professionals see psychedelics as less of a treatment option (Meir et al., 2013) and some of the general population seem more resistant to its medicinal value (Wildberger et al., 2017). There have been recent changes in Australia where psilocybin is being rolled out as a mental health treatment. If this is eventually implemented within the UK, understanding public support for this will be crucial. There are an array of reasons why the public may support or oppose this, such as psychological and social factors (Grella & Hoffman, 2023); source trustworthiness (Harring & Jagers, 2013); who it will target (Diepeveen et al., 2013); and evidence of its perceived effectiveness (Reynolds et al., 2019; Reynolds et al., 2020) where evidence of multiple benefits may lead to greater support (Mantzari et al., 2022). To our knowledge, no studies to date have explored public support for different psilocybin policies. The present study proposes that presenting evidence of the benefits and the few, minimal harms of psilocybin will lead to an improvement in attitudes and an increase in public support for psilocybin and psilocybin policies as it will assure the public of both its effectiveness and its safety.
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