The Microdosing Placebo Problem: What New Research Means for Your Practice

For ten years, microdosing was the low-risk entry point into psychedelics. Take a tiny dose of LSD or psilocybin, too small to trip, and maybe your mood lifts, your focus sharpens, your depression loosens its grip. That was the pitch.

This week, that pitch ran into clinical data.

The study

MindBio Therapeutics, an Australian biopharma company, just published results from what they call the most rigorous placebo-controlled microdosing trial to date. Phase 2B, 89 adults with major depressive disorder, eight weeks, using the MADRS depression scale.

The result: patients given LSD microdoses (4-20 micrograms) reported feeling better subjectively. Their actual depression scores? Worse than patients given caffeine pills as a placebo.

"It is probably a nail in the coffin of using microdosing to treat clinical depression," said MindBio CEO Justin Hanka. "It probably improves the way depressed people feel, just not enough to be clinically significant."

What this means

For clinical depression specifically, microdosing LSD does not beat a good cup of coffee in controlled conditions. If you have been microdosing as your main depression treatment, this is worth knowing.

The study does not say microdosing has no value. People report gains in creativity, openness, general wellbeing. Those experiences are real. They might just be powered more by mindset, ritual, and expectation than by the molecule.

Placebo is not nothing

In 2020, researcher Jay Olson gave people sugar pills, told them it was a psilocybin-like substance, and had researchers act out psychedelic effects in a room with trippy lighting. Most participants reported feeling the "drug."

"There is this assumption that placebo effects are extremely weak, or that they are not real," Olson told WIRED. Placebo effects produce real changes in the brain. Real shifts in mood. Real symptom improvement.

The question is not whether microdosing "works." The question is whether the molecule is doing the work, or whether intention and belief are.

Ayelet Waldman, who wrote about her microdosing practice in "A Really Good Day," said it directly: "I took very seriously the possibility that what I was experiencing was the mother of all placebo effects. I decided in the end it did not matter. What mattered was that I felt better."

Full doses are different

None of this applies to full-dose experiences. That distinction is worth understanding.

Microdosing operates below conscious perception by design. You are not supposed to feel anything. That is the point. It also means the experience does not disrupt your default patterns of thinking or being.

Full-dose experiences with psilocybin, ayahuasca, or 5-MeO-DMT are different in kind, not just degree. They temporarily dissolve the sense of self. They surface unconscious material. They create openings for insight and release that sub-perceptual doses cannot.

The clinical trial data backs this up. Psilocybin therapy trials for depression show unusually strong effect sizes. GH Research's Phase 1/2 trials on 5-MeO-DMT for treatment-resistant depression showed 87.5% response rates. Different mechanism, different results.

What to do with this

If microdosing is working for you, keep going. Intention, ritual, and belief are real forces. Use them.

If you have been microdosing hoping to avoid the deeper work, this research is worth sitting with. Sometimes what we need is not the thing that lets us keep everything the same. Sometimes healing asks us to let go entirely, meet ourselves in the depths, and do the hard part of integrating what we find.

That is what integration support is for.

Track what you are doing

Whatever this research changes for you, tracking still matters. Otherwise you are guessing about what is working.

If you are microdosing or thinking about it, check out Microdose Tracker. Free, private, no ads. Log your doses, track mood and focus over time, see patterns in your data. No accounts required.

Your data is yours. Your practice is yours to understand.

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Source: WIRED, "Microdosing for Depression Appears to Work About as Well as Drinking Coffee," January 2026