{
  "id": 8690954,
  "title": "Psilocybin and standard antidepressants both shift the brain away from negative biases",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/20/psilocybin-and-standard-antidepressants-both-shift-the-brain-away",
  "topic": "health",
  "section": "Health & Medicine",
  "published": "2026-09-20T13:00:56.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "PsyPost",
    "slug": "psypost",
    "url": "https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-and-standard-antidepressants-both-shift-the-brain-away-from-negative/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Both psilocybin and standard antidepressants such as SSRIs can reduce the brain's tendency to view the world through a negative lens. This suggests that both treatments may help alleviate depression by altering how the brain processes emotional information. The study, published in Translational Psychiatry, involved 59 patients with long-standing moderate-to-severe depression. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either two 25-milligram doses of psilocybin, spaced three weeks apart, or a daily dose of the SSRI escitalopram for six weeks. Both groups also received an inactive placebo pill daily during the study. The emotional recognition task measured the participants' ability to accurately identify different facial expressions, from negative to positive emotions, before and after the treatments. Both treatment groups showed a reduction in their negative bias, meaning they became less accurate at identifying negative emotions compared to their baseline scores. They also made fewer errors misclassifying faces as negative. The speed at which participants recognized positive emotions improved significantly after the treatments. The study found that the reduction in negative emotional bias did not correlate with a decrease in depression scores for either group at the six-week mark. However, one month after the trial ended, a decrease in misclassifying positive faces as negative in the escitalopram group predicted lower depression scores at the ten-week follow-up. This suggests that SSRIs may gradually improve mood as patients experience the world through a less negative lens. The different neurological effects of the two drugs, such as the amygdala activity reduction in SSRIs and no such effect in psilocybin, did not result in significantly different behavioral outcomes on the emotional recognition task.",
  "summary": "A new study reveals that psilocybin and standard antidepressants both reduce the brain's tendency to misinterpret facial expressions as negative. The research suggests these two distinct treatments share a common cognitive effect in the fight against depression.",
  "key_points": [
    "Both psilocybin and SSRIs reduce negative emotional bias in depressed patients.",
    "Psilocybin alters amygdala activity, while SSRIs do not show similar effect."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}