Skepticism about Recent Evidence That Psilocybin "Liberates" Depressed Minds.

Abstract

A recent paper in <i>Nature Medicine</i> found that psilocybin therapy in patients with depression decreased brain network modularity (measured with task-free functional magnetic resonance imaging), an effect supposedly not found with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor <i>S</i>-citalopram. This decrease in network modularity also correlated with depression. Here, we raise several issues with this paper, including inconsistencies in reports of the primary clinical outcome, statistical flaws including a one-tailed test, nonsignificant interaction, and regression to the mean, the ambiguity and overinterpretation of "resting state" data, and a missing reference for a conceptually similar study that exemplifies why a one-tailed test cannot be justified. Together, these issues make us question the uniqueness and impact of these findings, as well as the unwarranted media hype that they generated.

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