While anecdotal evidence connecting psychedelics to the treatment of depression and anxiety has been available for a long time, scientific interest in those substances has had a more recent revival. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and DMT, found in the Latin American plant medicine ayahuasca, have shown promise in treating people with depression that is resistant to traditional antidepressant medications. A recent article in The Scientist reports that researchers are making headway in understanding how psilocybin works on the brain. Unlike traditional antidepressants that work by increasing serotonin or norepinephrine, psychedelics are believed to work by binding to intracellular serotonin receptors. In layman’s terms, psychedelics can gain access to parts of the cell that traditional anti-depressants cannot. These new findings were published in the journal Science on February 16th, 2023.

Although the study was conducted on lab rats and not on human subjects, the results suggest a new hypothesis for how psychedelics could treat depression in humans. If the findings are validated in further research, it could pave the way for a significant breakthrough in treating treatment-resistant depression. While the exact mechanism of how psilocybin works in the brain is still unclear, this new research provides a promising avenue for future studies.