Could LSD change the game in anxiety treatment?

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A once-controversial psychedelic substance could potentially be a promising treatment for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). That’s the view of Dr. Rakesh Jain, a psychiatrist with extensive experience in clinical practice, research, and education, affiliated with Texas Tech University School of Medicine. Jain expressed optimism in LSD-based therapy while acknowledging the challenges inherent in such a radical shift, in a recent MindMed analyst briefing on the heels of its MM-120 winning a breakthrough designation for an LSD-based treatment for GAD, based on promising topline data from a phase 2b study.

A once-controversial psychedelic substance could hold the key to treating Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). This is the view of Dr. Rakesh Jain, a prominent psychiatrist who serves as a clinical professor at the Department of Psychiatry at Texas Tech University School of Medicine. While ack…

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Can the U.S. unify around psychedelics for mental health?

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The U.S. has perhaps never been more divided than it is today. Americans are divided over politics and myriad social issues, COVID-19, climate change, immigration and seemingly everything else. 

Not surprisingly, opinions also diverge on whether psychedelic drugs have therapeutic potential. Earlier this year, a survey from The Harris Poll found that 65% of Americans with anxiety, depression or PTSD believe that drugs such as the classic psychedelic psilocybin and the empathogen methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine (MDMA) should be available for therapeutic use. The compounds remain Schedule I drugs but could find FDA approval in the coming years. 

Mental health professionals have tended to view psychedelics skeptically after they were illegal in the 1970s. A 2018 survey in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found that psychiatrists tended to view psychedelics as “potent…

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