AJP is the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the largest such organisation in the world with around forty thousand members and a global reach. Along with AJP and other journals, APA publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is something of a dictionary for psychiatric illnesses, used in the U.S. and many other countries to classify mental disorders.
The news comes the same week (day, even!) as another APA—the American Psychological Association—discussed psychedelics for mental health in its Emerging Trends report. In that article, the professional body also announced that a group of psychologists across six of its divisions plan to launch a free toolkit and webinar series on psychedelics this year. That content will cover topics like present research, foundational elements, ethical considerations and models of care.
While 2024 might be remembered as the year that psychedelic research and therapy was called into question by incumbents, then, 2025 might go down as the year that those same incumbents came to the table in earnest to attempt to understand and engage with the field more meaningfully.
Some in the psychedelics field have derided what they deem to be the psychiatric body’s late engagement with psychedelics, or have even suggested that the group is increasingly irrelevant. But it’s difficult to ignore its impact on the research and practitioner community, as well as other stakeholders in the mental health care milieu, like payers and health care systems.
What’s more, the psychedelics research field—often critiqued as or suspected of being cliquey or insular—could do with all the help it can get, with thorny methodological challenges compounded by small sample sizes and a relative paucity of funding from non-industry or non-psychedelic-philanthropy sources.
Indeed, in their Editor’s note, Kalin and co. hint at the “ongoing challenges and looming questions” for the field, before teasing the commentaries, reviews, and articles contained in the special issue.
“The potential for therapeutic strategies utilizing psychedelic drugs is exciting and yet there is a long path ahead toward clinical success”, they conclude, adding that they believe “it is important to honor the journey to this point, spanning multiple generations, several decades, and countless hours of work by numerous individuals.”
For the average Psychedelic Alpha reader, most of the content in this special issue will be well-trodden ground. Rather than a cover-to-cover read, then, the headline takeaway is that AJP, and by extension APA, have done something substantial here to legitimise the field and even endorse, to some extent, a wide array of future research directions.
Here, we provide a brief review of the commentaries, reviews and articles contained in the 132-page special issue…