27/08/2026
Why does it matter whether a psychedelic trial is truly blinded? Because the answer shapes whether we can trust what the science is actually telling us.
In a typical clinical trial, comparing a treatment to a placebo only works if participants don’t know which one they received. However, psychedelics produce such vivid, unmistakable effects that both patients and researchers can often tell who got the real thing, undermining the blind before the trial even begins. When that happens, the placebo group’s response becomes hard to interpret, and expectation itself starts to blur with the treatment’s true effect.
This isn’t a minor technicality, with functional unblinding being a major factor in the FDA’s rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, and it continues to shape how regulators, researchers, and clinicians evaluate the evidence behind psychedelic-assisted therapies.
Join Balázs Szigeti, PhD, a clinical data scientist at UCSF’s Translational Psychedelic Research Program, on Tuesday 8 September as we unpack this challenge. Balázs is known for his work on functional unblinding and the “know-cebo” effect, the diminished placebo response seen in psychedelic trials, and even invented “self-blinding,” a citizen-science method that lets people implement their own placebo control without clinical supervision.
📅 Tuesday 8 September, 7 PM CEST / 6 PM BST / 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT 💻 Online via Zoom
Learn more and register via the link in bio. 🌱
