***Excerpt from the first part of the article:***

Could LSD treat common [psychiatric](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/psychiatry) disorders like generalized [anxiety](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/anxiety) disorder or major [depression](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/depression)? It sounds almost absurd considering LSD's long-standing reputation as psychiatry's “wicked witch”—a drug previously viewed as too dangerous, controversial, and politically radioactive to study. Yet that is precisely where the new data are leading.

In June 2026, Abigail Calder and colleagues added another piece to this story, reporting in *Neuropsychopharmacology* that LSD can alter learning in healthy human volunteers. The study was not a treatment trial, but it asks whether LSD produces changes in brain function that can reopen windows of learning, adaptation, and plasticity.

Early in my [career](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/career), we viewed LSD primarily as a pharmacologic model of schizophrenia, hoping it would illuminate the biology of severe mental illness. Today’s researchers, armed with state-of-the-art neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and carefully designed clinical trials, are asking a far more ambitious question: Can the transient changes produced by LSD reveal how the adult brain learns, adapts, and perhaps even heals itself?

Fifty Years of LSD Research: From Yale Labs to Clinical Trials - New research suggests a therapeutic window for learning and neuroplasticity. (Article by 
Mark S. Gold M.D. - Reviewed by Abigail Fagan - Psychology Today)

Fifty Years of LSD Research: From Yale Labs to Clinical Trials - New research suggests a therapeutic window for learning and neuroplasticity. (Article by Mark S. Gold M.D. - Reviewed by Abigail Fagan - Psychology Today)