Psychedelics, the media portrayal and large-language model evaluations
BJPsych Open June 18, 2026 Catherine L. Clelland
Media coverage of psychedelic therapies surged from 2000 to 2025, with positive sentiment peaking in 2020 before declining sharply from 2024. This downturn coincided with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's decision not to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, mirroring the rise-and-fall pattern seen in the 1960s. The authors used a large-language model validated against human raters to analyze 25 years of news articles. They stress that continued progress depends on grounding therapeutic advances in scientific evidence rather than media-driven narratives.