MONDAY, March 23, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Psychedelic drugs don’t appear to work any better than antidepressants among people with major depression, a new evidence review says.

Despite the hype around using “magic mushrooms” and LSD to treat some mental disorders, psychedelic-assisted therapy did not outperform traditional antidepressants when researchers compared trial results for each in JAMA Psychiatry.

“What I wanted to show is that even if you compare psychedelics to open-label antidepressants, psychedelics are still much better,” senior researcher Balázs Szigeti said in a news release. He’s a clinical data scientist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Translational Psychedelic Research Program.

“Unfortunately, what we got is the opposite result — that they are the same, which is very surprising given the enthusiasm around psychedelics and mental health,” Szigeti said.

Previous studies have indicated that LSD or psilocybin – the psychedelic chemical in magic mushrooms – might have some positive benefits for treating conditions like addiction and depression, researchers said in background notes.

However, it’s been tough to design strict clinical trials that compare psilocybin directly against a placebo, because nearly everyone can tell when they’ve received a psychedelic, researchers said.

Clinical trials are designed that way to avoid what’s called the “placebo effect,” where people feel better because they’ve taken something regardless of whether it actually works.

To get around this problem, researchers compared the pooled results from psychedelic therapy trials to the results from open-label trials of antidepressants, in which patients are aware they’re taking an antidepressant.

That way, both treatments benefit equally from the positive effect that comes with patients knowing that they’re getting a drug instead of a placebo.

Researchers compared the results from 16 open-label antidepressant trials against eight trials of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Patients improved substantially from both types of treatment, the study found, their depression scores falling by about 12 points on a standard 52-point scale. 

Psychedelics have seemed impressive in recent trials because people who took the drugs improved much more than those who didn’t.

But these results indicate that people in those trials improved more because they knew they’d taken a psychedelic, while those who got a placebo did worse because they knew they hadn’t.

“Psychedelics may still be a valuable treatment option,” Szigeti said. “But if we want to understand their true benefits, we have to compare them fairly — and when we do that, the advantage over standard antidepressants is much smaller than many people, including myself, expected.”

More information

Mental Health America has more on psychedelics and mental health.

SOURCE: University of California, San Francisco, news release, March 18, 2026