Psychdelics and Prosocial Effects

Autor/in: Prateep Beed, PhD

Psychedelics can be studied at every level of the nervous system, from receptor binding to behaviour. Prateep Beed walks through those levels, asks how serotonergic psychedelics compare in drug harm rankings, and traces how the research field developed over time. He then covers individual effect domains – neuroplasticity, therapeutic outcomes in depression, altered self-experience – and closes on prosocial effects: MDMA, LSD and psilocybin compared on empathy, trust and felt connectedness, and which of those are dose-dependent or persist beyond the acute drug state.