Researchers have ruled out any link between psychedelics like LSD and magic mushrooms and mental health problems after analysing information from more than 135,000 randomly chosen people, including 19,000 people who had used psychedelics.
The study was carried out by clinical psychologist Pal-&Ostroke;rjan Johansen and neuroscientist Teri Krebs using data from the US National Health Survey (2008-2011) to analyse the relationship between psychedelic drug use and psychological distress, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts. The researchers found no link.
“Over 30 million US adults have tried psychedelics and there just is not much evidence of health problems,” says Johansen.
Johansen said that there was not enough evidence of health problems, with Krebs adding that drug experts consistently rank LSD and psilocybin mushrooms as much less harmful to the individual user and to society compared to alcohol and other controlled substances. In contrast to alcohol, psychedelics are not addictive.
They found that, on a number of measures, the use of psychedelic drugs is correlated with fewer mental health problems, with many people reporting deeply meaningful experiences and lasting beneficial effects from using psychedelics.
However, they added that they could not exclude the possibility that use of psychedelics might have a negative effect on mental health for some individuals or groups, perhaps counterbalanced at a population level by a positive effect on mental health in others.
The results are published in Journal of Psychopharmacology.
