Examining mystical experiences as a predictor of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy (PAP) is a promising treatment for various psychiatric disorders. However, the exact biological and psychological mechanisms of action of PAP remain to be determined. Examining predictors of PAP outcomes may help identify necessary processes for positive treatment outcomes. Mystical experiences are considered a key aspect of the subjective effects of ingesting psilocybin. Mystical experiences have been observed to be possibly predictive of positive outcomes in psilocybin treatments. Therefore, some argue that mystical-type experiences are necessary to achieve therapeutic benefits. AIMS: The current study examines mystical experiences as a predictor of antidepressant treatment outcomes in PAP, in a complex clinical sample. METHODS: Participants included 31 individuals with a primary diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD) or Bipolar II Disorder (BDII), with treatment resistance to symptoms of their disorder. Participants had one, two, or three PAP treatments with a fixed dose of 25 mg of psilocybin. Depressive symptoms were measured at baseline, at a pre-dose visit and at 2 weeks post-dosing. The presence of mystical experiences was measured on the dosing day after the acute effects had resolved. RESULTS: For the first psilocybin dose, participants with greater levels of mystical experiences exhibited a greater antidepressant effect from PAP. This effect was not found at the second or third doses. CONCLUSION: These results provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that mystical experiences have therapeutic importance in PAP and extend the literature to include a clinical sample of individuals with treatment-resistant depression in the context of MDD or BDII.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".