Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2024 Jan 12:14:1326815.
doi: 10.3389/fphar.2023.1326815. eCollection 2023.

Psychedelics, epilepsy, and seizures: a review

Ninon Freidel #  1   2 , Liliane Kreuder #  1   3 , Brenden Samuel Rabinovitch  1   4   5 , Frank Yizhao Chen  1   6 , Ryan S T Huang  1   7 , Evan Cole Lewis #  1   8
Affiliations
Review

Psychedelics, epilepsy, and seizures: a review

Ninon Freidel et al. Front Pharmacol. .

Abstract

Psychedelic compounds have been utilized by humans for centuries for medicinal, religious, and tribal purposes. Clinical trial data starting from the early 2000s and continuing today indicates that psychedelics are a clinically efficacious treatment for a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. However, all clinical trials examining these substances have excluded any individual with a past or current history of seizures, leaving a large cohort of epilepsy and non-epilepsy chronic seizure disorder patients without anywhere to turn for psychedelic-assisted therapy. These exclusions were made despite any significant evidence that clinically supervised psychedelic use causes or exacerbates seizures in this population. To date, no clinical trial or preclinical seizure model has demonstrated that psychedelics induce seizures. This review highlights several cases of individuals experiencing seizures or seizure remission following psychedelic use, with the overall trend being that psychedelics are safe for use in a controlled, supervised clinical setting. We also suggest future research directions for this field.

Keywords: LSD; MDMA; epilepsy; ketamine; magic mushrooms; psilocybin; psychedelics; seizures.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Author FC was employed by Jamaican Medical Cannabis Corporation. Author ECL is employed by Numinus. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Process of screening papers with initial and final inclusions.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Descriptive statistics of the psychedelic and epilepsy literature. Bar plots of the number of publications describing reports where (A) drug dosages were known, (B) multiple drugs (prescription and non-prescription) were ingested, and (C) there was clinical supervision. (D) The number of publications based on the psychedelics ingested in each report. These data highlight variability and sparsity in the literature. Note: Pauwels et al. (2023) counted as n = 2 in this figure due to its reporting of two separate and unrelated cases. (A,B) Do not include Serafetinides (1965) due to this study being a clinical trial. This figure was made using GraphPad Prism 10.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

References

    1. Aakerøy R., Brede G. I., Stolen S. B., Krabseth H. M., Michelsen L. S., Andreassen T. N., et al. (2021). Severe neurological sequelae after a recreational dose of LSD. J. Anal. Toxicol. 45, e1–e3. 10.1093/jat/bkaa145 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Agin-Liebes G. I., Malone T., Yalch M. M., Mennenga S. E., Ponté K. L., Guss J., et al. (2020). Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for psychiatric and existential distress in patients with life-threatening cancer. J. Psychopharmacol. (Oxf.) 34, 155–166. 10.1177/0269881119897615 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Argento E., Omene E., Jaeger A. H., Kertes A., Mitchell K. A., Necyk C., et al. (2023). Case report: improvement in refractory functional seizures, depression, and quality of life with ketamine-assisted therapy. Front. Neurosci. 17, 1197409. 10.3389/fnins.2023.1197409 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bedi G., Hyman D., de Wit H. (2010). Is ecstasy an ‘empathogen’? Effects of ±3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine on prosocial feelings and identification of emotional states in others. Biol. Psychiatry 68, 1134–1140. 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.08.003 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Blond B. N., Schindler E. A. D. (2023). Case report: psychedelic-induced seizures captured by intracranial electrocorticography. Front. Neurol. 14, 1214969. 10.3389/fneur.2023.1214969 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.