Opinion

Opinion

Editor's perspective on the mental health industry — labeled and separate from news reporting.

OPINION

State psychedelic programs should ask clients what happened after they went home

Oregon's rules have a facilitator try to reach each client once, within 72 hours, and count a reaction only if it led to medical care. Colorado asks facilitators for more, and its 2025 law would collect participant-reported data if donations pay for it. Neither state requires that anyone other than the provider ask the client, or sets a later date for asking. We think that should change, and that it can be done without turning a service program into a clinical trial.

By Editorial Desk · Oct 12, 2026 · 10 min read
OPINION

Postpartum psychedelic therapy has real momentum now. The evidence it needs most has barely started.

A Phase 2 trial met its endpoint. The FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy status. A drug candidate is moving toward postpartum depression faster than almost anything else in psychiatry right now. Meanwhile, the most rigorous evidence available on what psychedelics actually do to the postpartum body and a nursing infant comes from a single mouse study, and it found something the field's current pace does not yet reckon with.

By Editorial Desk · Aug 4, 2026 · 9 min
OPINION

Massachusetts mandated postpartum depression screening. Funding to train the clinicians who treat what it finds has lagged behind. That gap should worry the whole postpartum mental health field.

A bill to fund the perinatal mental health workforce has sat in committee for over a year while the state's 2024 screening mandate is designed to identify more people who need care. Screening and drug approval both assume a trained clinician exists on the other end. The coalition and the state medical society backing the bill say that assumption doesn't hold, and workforce funding deserves the same urgency as everything built on top of it.

By Editorial Desk · Jul 28, 2026 · 7 min
OPINION

Pharmaceutical psilocybin and community psilocybin are becoming two different drugs. Treating them as one policy question is the industry's biggest blind spot.

A patented, FDA-track product moving through Lilly-scale pharma capital. A licensed-facilitator service model built entirely outside the FDA. A capped state clinical pilot. A federal access program that fixed its supply chain by narrowing who gets through. These are not four routes to the same destination. They are becoming different products, for different patients, at different prices, and the field's habit of discussing psychedelic access as a single question is obscuring that rather than clarifying it.

By Editorial Desk · Jul 25, 2026 · 8 min
OPINION

The government is moving fast on psychedelics. None of it answers the open scientific questions. Confusing the two is the mistake to watch this year.

Final guidance, a public hearing, an interagency MOU, a state pilot program, new federal funding, all inside a matter of weeks. None of it resolves a single one of the open scientific questions this desk has spent the year tracking. Readers, sponsors, and investors who read process speed as scientific validation are making the same mistake the field has made before, with the same likely outcome.

By Editorial Desk · Jul 15, 2026 · 7 min
OPINION

Read the executive order as a process change, not a methodological one

The same FDA that issued the Lykos CRL also issued the vouchers, and two of the three recipients say the vouchers speed review without changing the standards a filing must meet. Sponsors who hear political acceleration as scientific accommodation will misread it as the field misread the original draft guidance, and pay the same kind of price.

By Editorial Desk · May 29, 2026 · 6 min