Treating depression with psychedelics: red flags and FAQ
There was a lot of hype in the last days around a new study on treating major depressive disorder via psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms. In the paper… Read more »
Category Archives: Clinical Trials
Modeling idiographic and nomothetic dynamics of 255 depressed inpatients
Led by the first author Kaat Hebbrecht, we published an open access paper a few days ago on “Understanding personalized dynamics to inform precision medicine: a dynamic time warp analysis… Read more »
The Myth of the Miracle Cure: Is Ketamine an Efficacious Antidepressant?
This blog post is the result of a collaboration between Dr Lucy Robinson (Twitter, email) & me. Life with depression can be miserable, painful and sad. The suffering it causes… Read more »
Ketamine as promising treatment for suicidal thoughts?
Imagine you are a group of scientists and want to find out whether a novel drug X works on a specific problem Y. You run the following study: You enroll… Read more »
Adjunctive Nutraceuticals as depression treatment
(Series: critical commentaries on depression trials. Prior posts: 1, 2, 3, 4) Antidepressants only marginally outperform placebos (Khan & Brown, 2015) – which has led to a number of novel… Read more »
Hyperthermia as depression treatment
A few months back, a study was published in JAMA Psychiatry claiming that whole-body hyperthermia is an effective treatment for depression (UPDATE: the paper was published in full now on… Read more »
Adjunctive Brexpiprazole as depression treatment?
Dr. Fava and colleagues have published an antidepressant trial on adjunctive Brexpiprazole, a novel atypical antipsychotic drug that was developed to treat schizophrenia, in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The… Read more »
Overinterpretation of SSRI study results: Halaris et al. 2015
Halaris and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in which they studied the impact of the SSRI antidepressant escitalopram (ESC) in a group of 30 depressed… Read more »
How to not interpret novel drug results: Fava et al. 2015
Imagine you are the editor of, or reviewer for, a very prestigious scientific journal, and you receive a paper about the efficacy of a novel drug for, say, cancer or… Read more »