Therapeutic Effects of Psychedelics and their Non-Hallucinogenic Analogs on Depressive-Like Behaviour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a complex and debilitating condition affecting approximately 280 million people worldwide. Its heterogeneous nature makes it difficult to establish clinical treatment guidelines that address individual differences in treatment response. As a result, many individuals experience treatment-resistant depression (TRD) failing to respond to first-line antidepressants. This increases the burden on healthcare systems and highlights the need for new, fast-acting therapies. Psychedelics have emerged as promising candidates due to their rapid and sustained antidepressant effects, with compounds such as psilocybin demonstrating the ability to enhance neuroplasticity through 5-HT2A receptor activation. However, their hallucinogenic properties limit clinical accessibility, necessitating intensive therapeutic supervision. Non-hallucinogenic analogs, like 2-bromo-lysergic acid diethylamide (2-Br-LSD), offer a potentially safer alternative by promoting neuroplasticity without causing hallucinations. Indeed, it still remains unclear whether hallucinatory activity is required for therapeutic benefit. This thesis examines the antidepressant effects of psilocybin and 2-Br-LSD in rodent models of depression following chronic stress. It is hypothesized that both compounds will reduce depression-like behaviours in mice by modulating neural circuits involved in mood regulation. By investigating whether the therapeutic benefits can occur without hallucinations, this work aims to assess the potential of 2-Br-LSD as a more accessible treatment option for TRD.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".