Adults who microdose psychedelics report lower levels of depression and anxiety [pdf]
To me, this study has a few "smells" that makes it dubious:> We collected cross-sectional data between November 2019 and July 2020 from
self-selected respondents recruited via media related to psychedelic use such as podcasts and online psychedelic
research conference presentations.This is already a significant bias in participants.> Mental health was assessed with the questions “Do you currently have any psychological, mental health or
addiction concerns?” Participants who endorsed concerns identified specific mental health and substance use
categories from a drop down menu, and were allowed to select more than one categorySo mental health is not actually accessed medically and simply self-reported.To be clear I lack an informed opinion on microdosing psychedelics, but any study that picks its participant from a community engaging in X to study X but then uses the same community to sample their control group (for lack of a better expression) is questionable.EDIT: Page 6 has a table that compare microdosers/non-microdosers and the latter was actually less likely to self-report *any* mental health or substance use problem by 5%. It's only when using the DASS-21 subscales that they can draw the conclusion that non-microdosers are more anxious, depressed or stressed. Their microdosers/non-microdosers ratio is also almost 1:1.