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A new study tested the effects of LSD on generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). It showed that a single dose can have a positive effect, reducing anxiety and depression, that lasts for weeks.
In a trial involving 198 participants with moderate to severe anxiety, some participants were given different doses of LSD while others received a placebo. What the researchers learned was that a portion of those who received a single dose of LSD reported their symptoms being alleviated, and in many cases the effect lasted for at least three months.
However, it was only the participants who received doses of either 100 or 200 micrograms of LSD that reported a significant reduction in their symptoms, with those given 100 microgram doses having the best results. Participants who received 25 or 50 microgram doses did not see much change in their anxiety and depression.
“By the next day, they were showing strong improvements,” Dr. David Feifel of Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in San Diego, one of the 22 outpatient psychiatric research sites that participated in the study, told NPR. “And those improvements held out all the way to the end of the study, which was 12 weeks.”
After one month, participants who received the 100 and 200 microgram doses of LSD experienced an average 21 and 19 point reduction in anxiety, respectively. After 12 weeks, around 47% of the people who were given 100 micrograms were in remission and about 65% saw their anxiety reduced by at least half. In the placebo group, only around 20% of were in remission at 12 weeks and about 30% had their anxiety cut in half.
Some caveats and hope for the use of LSD in treating anxiety
Unfortunately, as one might expect, most participants could figure out if they were given a placebo or not based on their reactions to taking the dose. So it is difficult to discern whether the benefits they received were due to a their expectations or actual direct effects of the LSD, according to Sunjeev Kamboj at University College London.
That being said, Kamboj told New Scientist that it is still “a very promising finding that you can get a very rapid effect in symptom reduction, that would be extremely meaningful to patients.”
Dr. Claudio Soares, a professor of psychiatry at the Queen’s University School of Medicine in Ontario, echoed that sentiment in a commentary on the LSD trial, writing, “This work has the potential to make significant contributions to the emerging field of psychedelic drug research.”