Adolescents
Adolescents are a developing-brain, vulnerable population that the modern psychedelic field has mostly studied from the outside: almost all psychedelic trials enrol adults, not minors. The one mature clinical thread in under-18s is ketamine and esketamine for depression and acute suicidality, where benefits are real but modest and often matched by active-placebo arms. For classic psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA there is essentially no controlled evidence in adolescents, and the developing brain raises safety questions that adult data cannot answer.
Data updated
Key Insights
- 1
Almost all psychedelic research is done in adults. Minors are routinely excluded from trials, so the adolescent evidence is thin, mostly observational, and rarely tests a psychedelic as a treatment.
- 2
The only mature clinical evidence in under-18s is for ketamine and esketamine in depression and acute suicidality. The trials are small, the benefits are modest, and the active-placebo (midazolam) arms often improve almost as much.
- 3
Ketamine is an NMDA-receptor dissociative, not a classic serotonergic psychedelic. Its adolescent data should not be read across to psilocybin, LSD or MDMA in young people.
- 4
For classic psychedelics there is essentially no completed controlled trial in minors. The strongest data are roughly 20-year-old observational studies of ritual ayahuasca use, and population surveys that link use to lower distress are correlations, not proof, and sometimes point the other way.
- 5
The developing brain is the central concern. Documented risks include persisting visual disturbances, psychosis in those with genetic vulnerability, and dose-dependent developmental effects after prenatal exposure.
By the numbers
- 19
- Trials tracked
- 132
- Papers tracked
- 989
- Trial participants
as of June 2026
as of June 2026
as of June 2026
What is Adolescents?
Adolescence is the stretch of life between childhood and adulthood, which the World Health Organization defines as the ages of 10 to 19[1]. It is also a period of heavy mental-health burden: around one in seven 10 to 19-year-olds lives with a mental disorder, depression and anxiety are among the leading causes of illness and disability in this age group, and suicide is the third leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29. That combination, a developing brain and a high, often under-treated burden of distress, is the backdrop to every question about psychedelics in young people.
This page is about a population rather than a single condition, so it reads differently from our disease pages. The central fact is that the modern psychedelic field has been built almost entirely in adults. Minors are routinely excluded from psychedelic trials, for good reasons: the adolescent brain is still maturing, consent is more complex, and the long-term consequences of altering a developing nervous system are poorly understood. The result is that the evidence specific to adolescents is thin and mostly indirect, and that the bar for both proof and safety is higher here than in adults, not lower.
Current Treatments
Standard care for adolescent mental-health conditions starts with psychotherapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and family-based approaches, and, where medication is warranted, with antidepressants that have evidence in young people, fluoxetine being the best established. Crisis services, safety planning and inpatient care manage acute suicidality. These treatments help many young people, but response is incomplete: a substantial minority do not remit, treatment-resistant depression is real in this age group, and acute suicidal crises often have no fast-acting pharmacological option at all.
It is into that last gap, fast relief of severe depression and suicidality, that ketamine and esketamine have entered, used in research settings and a small number of specialist clinics rather than as established paediatric treatments. Classic psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD and MDMA are not approved or established for anyone under 18, and almost all of their clinical evidence comes from adults. The honest summary of the current landscape is that the unmet need is large and genuine, but the evidence for psychedelics in adolescents is early, and most of what exists is about safety and acute crises rather than about curing anything.
This report summarises what the Blossom database shows about psychedelics and adolescents, and, just as importantly, what it does not show. The short version: adolescents are a developing-brain, high-need population that the modern psychedelic field has studied almost entirely from the outside. The one mature clinical thread in under-18s is ketamine and esketamine for depression and acute suicidality, where the benefits are real but modest and often matched by active-placebo arms. For classic psychedelics and MDMA there is essentially no completed controlled therapeutic evidence in minors. Both halves of that sentence matter.
A note before the evidence
This page is a research summary, not medical advice, and nothing here is a treatment recommendation. Psychedelics are not approved treatments for anyone under 18, and several carry real risks that are amplified in a still-developing brain. Adolescent use of these substances outside a research setting can be dangerous. If you or a young person you care for is struggling, including with thoughts of suicide, please speak to a qualified clinician or a local crisis service rather than acting on anything described here.
How to read the numbers on this page
Blossom currently tracks 132 papers and 19 clinical trials tagged to this topic, and those counts appear on this page. They are broader than they look. The adolescent tag is leaky: it catches papers about recreational use, epidemiology, developmental toxicology, drug-safety surveillance and even adult trials that merely mention young people, not just studies testing a psychedelic as a therapy for adolescents. Once you strip those out, the genuinely adolescent-specific evidence is a much smaller set, on the order of a couple of dozen papers, and within that set the only prospective controlled trials are for ketamine and esketamine. Read the numbers as a measure of how much ground the database covers, not as a count of adolescent treatments.
Why adolescents are studied differently
Adolescence is not just a younger version of adulthood. The brain is still maturing into the mid-twenties, with synaptic pruning and the strengthening of long-range connections continuing throughout the teenage years. That makes the developing brain potentially more sensitive to drugs that act powerfully on serotonergic and glutamatergic signalling, and it makes the long-term consequences harder to predict. Layered on top is a heavy clinical need: the World Health Organization reports that around one in seven 10 to 19-year-olds lives with a mental disorder and that suicide is the third leading cause of death in 15 to 29-year-olds[1].
Those two facts pull in opposite directions. The need invites bold thinking about new treatments; the biology and the ethics demand caution. In practice the ethics usually win, and minors are excluded from psychedelic trials almost as a default. That is why the evidence base for adolescents is so much thinner than for adults, and why it leans so heavily on observation, epidemiology and extrapolation rather than on randomised trials. It is also why the appropriate posture for this whole field is humility: the gap in the evidence is not an oversight to be rushed past, it is a deliberate, protective feature of how research in young people is done.
Ketamine and esketamine: the only mature clinical thread
If there is a real adolescent story in this database, it is ketamine. The most rigorous single result is a 2026 Phase 2b trial of intranasal esketamine in 147 adolescents at imminent risk of suicide[2], which compared esketamine against an active placebo, midazolam, on top of standard care. The higher esketamine doses produced a statistically significant 5.8-point advantage on the childhood depression rating scale at 24 hours (95% CI -11.19 to -0.35), but, tellingly, suicidality fell sharply in every arm, with no significant advantage for the drug. A separate randomised trial of repeated intravenous esketamine in 54 adolescents[3] did find greater reductions in both suicidal ideation and depression than midazolam.
The negative and null results matter just as much. A 2026 emergency-department pilot of a single ketamine infusion in 20 adolescents[4] did not significantly reduce suicidal ideation at 40 minutes; its clearest signal was fewer subsequent hospitalisations, and the authors framed it explicitly as a feasibility study. An earlier open-label series of intravenous ketamine in 13 adolescents with treatment-resistant depression[5] reported a 42 per cent drop in depression scores, but only 5 of the 13, around 38 per cent, actually met the response threshold. A systematic review concluded that the whole paediatric ketamine evidence base came to just six studies and 46 participants, with a mean age of about 15.7[6].
Two cautions frame all of this. First, ketamine and esketamine are NMDA-receptor dissociatives, not classic serotonergic psychedelics, so their adolescent data say little or nothing about psilocybin, LSD or MDMA. Second, the adult ketamine literature, which is far larger, is itself dogged by placebo: a meta-analysis found that placebo response could account for up to 72 per cent of the total treatment response in ketamine and esketamine depression trials[7]. The fairest summary is that ketamine offers a genuine but small and short-lived benefit in acute adolescent crises, is being studied carefully, and is not a cure.
Classic psychedelics in minors: almost no controlled evidence
For psilocybin and LSD, the honest statement is that there is no completed controlled trial in adolescents. The nearest active work is an early-phase study using a psilocybin-augmented mental-imagery intervention for young people who self-harm, which is recruiting rather than reporting results. Everything else is indirect: epidemiology, naturalistic surveys that are overwhelmingly of adults, safety surveillance and a handful of historical case series.
History is worth a glance, because it is sobering rather than encouraging. In 1962 a study gave LSD-25 to twelve autistic, largely mute children[8], hoping the drug might unlock speech. It produced an assortment of somatic and psychic effects, but the hoped-for shift from muteness to language did not happen. The lesson is not that the compounds are worthless, but that enthusiasm has run ahead of evidence in this population before, and that the careful, consent-focused, trial-based path is the one that protects young people.
Ayahuasca in ritual settings: the oldest and most-cited data
The single richest source of classic-psychedelic data on actual minors comes from Brazil, where the Santo Daime and Uniao do Vegetal churches use ayahuasca as a sacrament and where some adolescents grow up within that practice. A cluster of 2005 studies compared these adolescents with matched controls and found lower frequencies of anxiety and attentional problems[9], no differences across a neuropsychological battery[10], and lower past-year alcohol use, 46.3 against 74.4 per cent[11].
It is tempting to present this as evidence that a psychedelic is safe or even good for teenagers. It is not. The studies are observational, come from one cultural setting and largely one research group, are now about two decades old, and cannot disentangle the brew from the strong, protective social structure of a religious community. A later developmental-toxicology review judged that ritual ayahuasca does not appear to be seriously toxic to humans[12] while emphasising how limited the human data on adolescents and on prenatal exposure remain. The practice of permitting children and pregnant women to consume ayahuasca in these churches[13] has itself been the subject of genuine ethical dispute. This is data about ceremonial cultural use, not about a clinical treatment, and it should be read that way.
MDMA: adult promise, adolescent absence
MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the most-discussed developments in psychiatry, but its evidence is an adult Phase 3 programme[14], and the single registered trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for adolescent PTSD was withdrawn before enrolling anyone. So there is no completed therapeutic study of MDMA in minors. What the adolescent literature does contain is a different and more cautionary picture: trauma-exposed teenagers with PTSD and substance-use disorders use MDMA more than their peers[15], which is a self-medication signal, and infants exposed to MDMA in pregnancy show dose-dependent motor delays[16].
Where young people, parents and clinicians have actually been asked about adolescent MDMA therapy, they tend to move from scepticism to cautious openness once the model is explained, but they consistently say that research has to come first[17]. That instinct matches the evidence. The adult results are a reason to design careful adolescent trials, not a licence to treat young people now.
What the population data actually says
Because controlled trials are scarce, much of the adolescent conversation leans on population data, which has to be handled carefully. Adolescent use of classic psychedelics is uncommon and, for several drugs, flat or falling: one analysis found hallucinogen use among US high-school students fell from 13.3 per cent in 2001 to 7.0 per cent in 2019[18], and the same study found that the adolescents who did use had higher odds of hopelessness, suicidal thoughts and suicide planning. That is the opposite of the reassuring narrative, and it is a useful corrective.
The most genetically rigorous datapoint comes from a Swedish study of 16,255 twins[19], which found that, after adjusting for other drug use, naturalistic psychedelic use was associated with fewer psychotic symptoms at age 15 (a beta of -0.39, 95% CI -0.50 to -0.27), yet interacted with genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to increase manic symptoms. The crucial word in all of this is associated. These are observational findings, self-selected and confounded, in a group where almost everyone who used a psychedelic also used other drugs. They generate hypotheses; they do not establish that psychedelics help or harm adolescent minds, and the YRBSS data point the other way. Direction of effect remains genuinely unresolved.
Safety and the developing brain
Safety, not efficacy, is the centre of gravity for this population. A systematic review of psychedelic-induced psychosis found 93 documented cases with an average age of 23.7, of whom about a third went on to develop a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder[20], a reminder that the people most exposed to these drugs are young and that a minority experience lasting harm. Persisting visual disturbances, known as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, and acutely distressing experiences are real, if uncommon, outcomes. Poison-centre data show that reported exposures to LSD and psilocybin mushrooms are concentrated in 13 to 29-year-olds[21], although serious effects in those reports were infrequent.
None of this means psychedelics are uniquely dangerous, but it does mean that the developing brain raises questions adult data cannot answer, and that the people most likely to use these substances recreationally are precisely the age group with the least evidence and the most at stake. A serious adolescent research programme has to treat psychosis risk, especially in those with genetic vulnerability, persisting perceptual effects, and long-term developmental outcomes as primary questions, not footnotes.
The trial pipeline
The forward signal is the pipeline, and it is lopsided. The active and recently completed adolescent trials are overwhelmingly ketamine and esketamine for depression and acute suicidality, including studies of ketamine for youth suicide attempters, subcutaneous ketamine for suicidal depressive episodes, and intravenous ketamine for suicidal adolescents in the emergency department. For the classic psychedelics there is essentially one early-phase psilocybin self-harm study and little else. A notable share of the tagged adolescent trials are withdrawn, terminated or of unknown status, including the lone adolescent MDMA trial, which is a realistic feature of an early and cautious field rather than a footnote to gloss over.
Reading this honestly
So where does that leave a careful reader? The need is real: a large, under-served population of young people, and treatments that do not work for everyone. The mature evidence is narrow: small ketamine and esketamine trials for acute crises, with modest, often placebo-matched benefits. The classic-psychedelic evidence in minors is close to absent, resting on decades-old observational ayahuasca data and on adult results that cannot simply be read across to a developing brain. And the safety questions are serious enough that excluding minors from trials has been the right default. The promise is worth taking seriously precisely by refusing to overstate it. That is the honest position, and it is the one this page tries to model.
Psychedelic Effect Matrix
Compound efficacy and evidence levels for Adolescents.
| Compound | Magnitude | Evidence | Consistency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ketamine The most-studied compound in under-18s, for depression and acute suicidality. Several small trials show modest, often short-lived benefit, but active-placebo (midazolam) arms frequently improve almost as much. An NMDA dissociative, not a classic psychedelic. | Small | Low | Low |
| Esketamine Has the only dedicated paediatric trial programme. A Phase 2b study in 147 adolescents at imminent suicide risk beat active placebo on depression at 24 hours but showed no advantage on suicidality. Not approved for under-18s. | Small | Low | Low |
| MDMA Efficacy evidence for PTSD is adults-only. The single registered adolescent trial was withdrawn; the adolescent MDMA signal that exists is recreational and self-medication, not therapy. | None | Very Low | Low |
| Psilocybin No completed controlled trial in minors. One early-phase self-harm imagery study is recruiting; adolescent data are otherwise epidemiological. Promising adult results do not transfer automatically to a developing brain. | None | Very Low | Low |
| Ayahuasca The only classic-psychedelic data in actual minors are roughly 20-year-old observational studies of ritual church use, confounded by the religious community itself. Suggestive, not a therapeutic trial. | None | Very Low | Low |
| LSD Adolescent data are limited to a 1962 case series in autistic children (no benefit on the target symptom) and poison-centre surveillance. No modern controlled data. | None | Very Low | Low |
Ketamine and Adolescents
Ketamine and esketamine make up the only mature clinical thread in adolescents, and even here the picture is modest and mixed. The most rigorous result is a 2026 Phase 2b trial of intranasal esketamine in 147 adolescents at imminent risk of suicide[1]: pooled higher doses beat an active placebo (midazolam) on depression scores at 24 hours, a 5.8-point difference on the childhood depression rating scale (95% CI -11.19 to -0.35), but suicidality improved in every arm, with no advantage for esketamine. A smaller randomised trial of repeated intravenous esketamine in 54 adolescents[2] found greater reductions in both suicidal ideation and depression than midazolam.
The cautions are as important as the signals. A 2026 emergency-department pilot of a single ketamine infusion in 20 adolescents[3] did not significantly reduce suicidal ideation at 40 minutes and was framed as a feasibility study. An open-label series of intravenous ketamine in 13 adolescents with treatment-resistant depression[4] saw depression scores fall by about 42 per cent, yet only 38 per cent met the threshold for response. A systematic review found the entire paediatric evidence base amounted to six studies and 46 participants[5]. Set against the adult literature, where placebo response can account for up to 72 per cent of the total treatment effect[6], the honest read is that ketamine offers a real but small and short-lived benefit for acute crises, not a cure, and that it is an NMDA dissociative rather than a classic psychedelic.
MDMA and Adolescents
MDMA-assisted therapy has its strongest evidence for post-traumatic stress disorder, but that evidence is a Phase 3 trial in adults[1], not in young people. The one registered trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for adolescent PTSD was withdrawn before it enrolled, so there is no completed therapeutic study of MDMA in minors at all.
What does show up in adolescents is the opposite of therapy. Trauma-exposed teenagers with PTSD and a substance-use disorder use MDMA more than their peers[2], a self-medication signal rather than a treatment effect, and infants with prenatal MDMA exposure show dose-dependent motor delays[3] through their first two years. Where clinicians, parents and young people have been asked, they become cautiously open to adolescent MDMA therapy once it is explained, but consistently insist that research must come first[4]. That is the right order.
Psilocybin and Adolescents
Psilocybin has generated the most public excitement and almost none of it rests on adolescent data. There is no completed controlled trial of psilocybin in minors; the nearest active work is an early-phase study using a psilocybin-augmented mental-imagery intervention in young people who self-harm, which is recruiting rather than reporting. Adolescent psilocybin use itself remains uncommon and has barely changed, rising only from 1.1 per cent to 1.3 per cent of 12 to 17-year-olds between 2019 and 2023[1] even as adult use climbed much faster.
The temptation is to read adult psilocybin results, which are genuinely encouraging for depression, straight across into adolescence. That move is not justified. A developing brain is not a small adult brain, the safety questions are different, and there is no efficacy signal in minors to extrapolate from. For now, psilocybin in adolescents is a hypothesis with a recruiting trial, not a treatment.
Ayahuasca and Adolescents
Ayahuasca is the unusual case where the only classic-psychedelic data on actual minors exist. A cluster of Brazilian studies from 2005 examined adolescents raised in the ayahuasca-using Santo Daime and Uniao do Vegetal churches. Compared with matched controls, the ayahuasca-using teenagers showed lower frequencies of anxiety and attentional problems[1], no differences on a battery of neuropsychological tests[2], and less past-year alcohol use (46.3 versus 74.4 per cent)[3].
These are the strongest existing data on classic psychedelics in young people, and they are still weak. They come from a single cultural setting, are roughly 20 years old, are observational, and cannot separate the brew from the protective structure of a tight religious community. A developmental-toxicology review concluded that ritual ayahuasca does not appear to be seriously toxic to humans[4] while stressing how limited the data on adolescents and on prenatal exposure remain, and the very practice of allowing children and pregnant women to take ayahuasca in these churches[5] has been ethically contested. This is evidence about ceremonial cultural use, not about a clinical intervention.
Clinical Outlook
The clearest way to read this field is as a pipeline weighted heavily towards one compound and one problem. The active and recently completed adolescent trials are dominated by ketamine and esketamine for depression and acute suicidality: studies of ketamine for youth suicide attempters, subcutaneous ketamine for depressive episodes with suicidal ideation, and intravenous ketamine for suicidal adolescents in the emergency department. Most are small, early-phase and oriented first to safety and acute crisis rather than to long-term cure. Alongside them sit a single early-phase psilocybin self-harm study and essentially nothing else for the classic psychedelics in minors.
A realistic outlook has to be candid about attrition. Across the adolescent trials tagged here, a striking number are withdrawn, terminated or of unknown status, including the one adolescent MDMA trial. That is a normal feature of an early and ethically cautious field, not a scandal, but it means the raw pipeline overstates how much settled evidence is coming. Real progress would look like adequately powered trials with active-placebo controls, pre-registered outcomes, long follow-up to catch developmental effects, and honest reporting of the studies that fail or stop. Reassuringly, at least one trial found that repeated esketamine did not harm cognition in adolescents[1], which is the kind of safety question that has to be answered first. The promise here is the size of the unmet need; the proof is not yet here.
Industrial Landscape
Work on psychedelics in adolescents is led by academic and clinical research groups far more than by a commercial sector. Child-psychiatry departments, paediatric emergency-medicine teams and university hospitals run the ketamine and esketamine suicidality trials, and the findings land in specialist child and adolescent psychiatry journals. The most visible commercial thread is the esketamine paediatric programme behind the Phase 2b imminent-suicide-risk study, an extension of an adult product into a carefully bounded young population rather than a dedicated adolescent psychedelic effort.
For the classic psychedelics, the dedicated drug developers are focused on adults and, sensibly, defer minors until adult approvals and safety data mature. That leaves the adolescent space populated mainly by investigator-initiated studies and by ethicists, who feature unusually prominently here because consent, long-term developmental risk and the protection of vulnerable young people are central rather than peripheral concerns. The thread worth watching is read-across: if and when psychedelic therapies are approved in adults, the pressure to study them in adolescents will grow, and the field will need adolescent-specific evidence rather than borrowed adult data to answer it.
Quick Indicators
Organisations
Search →Janssen Research & Development
Janssen Research & Development is the pharmaceutical research and development arm of Johnson & Johnson (J&J). Operating under J&J's Innovative Medicine division, Janssen has sponsored clinical trials into ketamine-derived compounds, including esketamine (Spravato), the first FDA-approved psychedelic-adjacent treatment for treatment-resistant depression.
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
U.S. federal institute defining mental-health research agendas and evidence-generation priorities including psychedelic-relevant studies.
Resilient Pharmaceuticals
Resilient Pharmaceuticals (formerly Lykos Therapeutics, formerly MAPS PBC) is a US-based public benefit corporation developing MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. It was founded in 2014 by MAPS as a commercial spinout to carry MAPS MDMA research through late-stage trials and regulatory approval. After two Phase 3 trials and an NDA filing, FDA issued a Complete Response Letter in August 2024 and requested an additional Phase 3 trial before approval. The company subsequently restructured and rebranded, while the public Lykos web presence continues to describe the organisation as pursuing FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy. As of the June 2026 review, no public company announcement of a new pivotal trial start or NDA resubmission date was found. VA/DoD-backed MDMA/PTSD research is proceeding in the broader field, but it should not be treated as direct support for Resilient/Lykos NDA resubmission unless linked by company or FDA evidence.
MAPS
MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit research and educational organization founded in 1986. It works nationally and with a broader global audience to develop medical, legal, and cultural contexts for the careful use of psychedelics and marijuana. Its core activities include research, education, advocacy, and convening the field through large public events. In psychedelic medicine and policy, MAPS positions itself as an advocate for legal access, drug policy reform, harm reduction, and health equity. Its Policy & Advocacy work includes legislative advocacy, community organizing, and impact litigation, and it has also launched work on access for system-impacted people and broader health equity in the legal psychedelic ecosystem. Current documented initiatives include the Psychedelic Science conference series, the Health Equity Program, The Zendo Project, and Ask MAPS, which handles public inquiries about therapy, research, and policy reform.
University of Amsterdam
The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is one of the Netherlands' leading research universities, with its Amsterdam UMC Department of Psychiatry conducting clinical trials on psilocybin and psychedelic-assisted therapies for treatment-resistant mental health conditions.
University of California, San Francisco
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) hosts major psychedelic research activity through the Translational Psychedelic Research Program (TrPR), Neuroscape Psychedelics Division, and psychiatry-led clinical research on psychedelic-assisted therapies.
Imperial College London
The Centre for Psychedelic Research, led by Professor David Nutt and Dr. David Erritzoe, focuses heavily on the action of psychedelic drugs in the brain and their clinical utility as aides to psychotherapy. Thanks to their extensive neuroimaging studies, this group has proposed vital mechanisms for how psychedelics work, including the Entropic Brain Theory and REBUS (RElaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics).
Columbia University
Research with psychedelics has been taking place at Columbia University in New York since 2014. Researchers from various departments at the university including Medicine, Psychology and Psychiatry have conducted numerous trials investigating the effects ketamine has on substance use disorders. Some research exploring the anti-depressant effects of ketamine has also taken place. More recently, Columbia University served as a test site for COMPASS Pathway's COMP360 trial which explored the effects of psilocybin on treatment-resistant depression. Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Dr David Hellerstein served as the principal investigator at this study site.
Massachusetts General Hospital
The Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics aims to better understand how psychedelics can be used to improve the treatment of mental illnesses. The core mission of the center is to understand exactly how psychedelics enhance the brain's capacity for change—or neuroplasticity—to optimize current treatments and render the term treatment resistant obsolete.
University of California San Diego
The Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative (PHRI) focuses heavily on conducting pilot studies and clinical trials while collecting diverse biometric data—including fMRI, EEG, and cognitive metrics—from study participants. This data-driven approach aims to unravel the biological and neurological underpinnings of how psychedelics facilitate healing.
Yale University
In 2016, the 'Yale Psychedelic Science Group' was established as a forum where clinicians and scholars from across Yale can learn about and discuss the rapidly re-emerging field of psychedelic science and therapeutics in an academically rigorous manner. Research with psychedelics is also underway at Yale School of Medicine. A recent study at the university found that a single dose of psilocybin can cause structural changes in the brain that counteract symptoms of depression.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances is dedicated to exploring the scientific, historical, and cultural aspects of psychoactive substances, focusing on psychedelics.
People
Search →Hartej Gill
Researcher in mood disorders psychopharmacology at the University of Toronto / University Health Network
Notable for coauthoring multiple reviews and meta-analyses on ketamine, esketamine, suicidality, cognition, and psychedelic drug trials in psychiatric research.
Jeanine Kamphuis
Psychiatrist and researcher at the Department for Mood Disorders, University Hospital Groningen (UMCG)
She studies ketamine, esketamine, and classic psychedelics for treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders, including depression, and is a coauthor on multiple psychedelic/ketamine reviews and clinical studies.
Joost Breeksema
Postdoctoral researcher and Executive Director of the OPEN Foundation
He is a prominent psychedelic researcher and advocate whose work helps shape evidence-based psychedelic policy, ethics, and patient-centered understanding of psychedelic and ketamine/esketamine treatments.
Kayla Teopiz
Researcher in psychiatry and ketamine/psychedelic medicine research; likely affiliated with the University of Toronto/Trillium Health Partners research network
Teopiz coauthors multiple systematic reviews and clinical studies on ketamine, esketamine, and psilocybin in depression and suicidality, helping synthesize the evidence base for psychedelic and glutamatergic treatments in psychiatry.
Jolien Veraart
Psychiatrist and PhD researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen / University of Groningen
She is a leading clinical researcher on ketamine and oral esketamine for treatment-resistant depression, including safety, efficacy, and real-world implementation.
Joshua Di Vincenzo
MSc researcher / clinical research staff member at the University Health Network and University of Toronto
He coauthors multiple systematic reviews and real-world studies on ketamine for treatment-resistant depression, making him a visible contributor to the evidence base on psychedelic-adjacent psychiatric therapeutics.
John Kelly
Associate Professor / Consultant General Psychiatrist at Trinity College Dublin
John R. Kelly is a leading academic psychiatrist in Ireland whose work has helped shape modern psychedelic psychiatry, including psilocybin research across depression, service-user attitudes, and transdiagnostic treatment frameworks.
Yvan Beaussant
Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and palliative care physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
He is a leading clinical researcher in psychedelic-assisted therapy for serious illness, especially cancer-related depression, demoralization, and existential distress.
Kruti Joshi
Employee at Janssen Scientific Affairs, LLC
Joshi appears to be a Janssen-affiliated researcher coauthoring multiple real-world evidence studies on esketamine access, barriers, utilization, and economic outcomes in treatment-resistant depression.
Neşe Devenot
Senior Lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University
Neşe Devenot is a notable critic and scholar of psychedelic medicine whose work examines ethics, public discourse, and the social meanings of psychedelic-assisted therapy.
David Mathai
Psychiatrist and Assistant Professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
He is a psychiatric researcher at Johns Hopkins whose work spans psilocybin, ketamine/esketamine, and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, with multiple publications on experiential and therapeutic outcomes.
Heith Copes
Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
Heith Copes is a criminologist whose research connects drug use, identity, and narrative meaning, including multiple collaborations on classic psychedelics, microdosing, and related social/behavioral outcomes.
Connected Evidence
The latest clinical data and verified academic findings associated with Adolescents.