Emerging evidence shows that it may be both safe and effective to add psilocybin to current antidepressant treatment

It's been believed for some time that adding psychedelics to pre-existing SSRI treatment is likely to be ineffective and potentially dangerous. Recent findings suggesting unhelpful interactions between SSRI's and MDMA serve to reinforce this suspicion. Two more recent studies however raise the exciting possibility that it could be both safe and helpful to add psilocybin-assisted therapy to SSRI's for patients (for example with depression) who may be daunted at the potential problems that could be triggered if they try to come off their SSRI treatments. Maybe in the future psilocybin-assisted therapy will be seen as a way of helping those who want to come off their long-term SSRI treatments ... rather than the current state of the field where the reverse approach is usually taken with patients being expected to come off all antidepressant treatment before beginning psilocybin-assisted therapy. So University of Basel research has now showed that the SSRI escitalopram seems to be safe to use at the same time as psilocybin, while more recently still a COMPASS Pathways funded study showed comparable results when treating patients with psilocybin-assisted therapy who were also on pre-existing SSRI treatment when compared with outcomes reported using similar psilocybin therapy with depressed patients who were not taking an SSRI. It's important to point out though, that even if mixing SSRI antidepressants and classical psychedelics is an option we can sensibly consider ... not all antidepressant/psychedelic combinations are as safe ... see Mixing psychedelics and SSRI's is generally safe, with significant exceptions for more on this.

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