A Dispatch from APA’s Annual Meeting: Psychedelics Return at an Awkward Moment for American Psychiatry

Last month, our Editor, Josh Hardman, attended the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) five-day annual meeting in San Francisco. There, he took the temperature of a field that is struggling to make sense of its standing in American society, and that is now confronted with a class of potential therapeutics—psychedelics—that it can’t quite place.

Over the course of the meeting, Hardman spoke with psychiatrists of all stripes, from interventional specialists working at the field’s cutting edge through to the rank-and-file and outright skeptics of modalities like TMS, ketamine, and psychedelics. Here, we share our key takeaways: a temperature check on psychiatrists’ views on the class, the questions most on their minds when it comes to psychedelics, and a closer look at the meeting’s psychedelics-focused programming.

Temperature Check

Psychedelics may be (re-)entering the world of American psychiatry right as American psychiatry is trying to make sense of its place in society. In recent years, the discipline has been subject to repeated challenges to its authority and credibility from political figures, podcasters, and the populace.

In the political realm, for example, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. has suggested that SSRIs contribute to mass shootings and last month—just over a week before the APA meeting—launched an initiative to encourage the deprescribing of the class of...