Balázs Szigeti – Deconstructing psychedelic trials | Webinar September 29t h 2026

Psychedelic trials often face criticism due to functional unblinding, i.e. both patients and assessors can identify who was given the active drug and who was given the placebo due to intense effects of psychedelic drugs. In the summer of 2024, this issue was a major reason for the FDA’s decision not to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.

We’ll look into this topic in a webinar lecture on September 29th, where we’re glad to welcome back computational neuroscientist Balázs Szigeti. He describes his talk:

“In this talk I will discuss how functional unblinding affects both psychedelic and traditional antidepressant trials and how much bias can be attributed to it. I will show that the effect of blinding is small in psychiatric trials, which is surprising given its methodological status. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that in psychedelic trials there is no evidence for positive expectancy in the treatment arms, but there is convincing evidence for a powerful ‘placebo suppression’ that explains much of the perceived efficacy. 

At the end I will talk about the big picture on when and why blinding makes sense and when it does not and will briefly touch on some ideas how I would change drug evaluation to create a more level playing field for all medications.”

The webinar will take place on Tuesday September 29th at 6PM UTC+3. The event includes a Q&A section and the total length is 2 hours. 

We offer this webinar as a pay what you can event: you can participate without paying, but by paying, you can help us produce more events like this and ensure that we can keep offering them to people regardless of their financial circumstances.

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5–20 € – buy ticket here

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About the speaker:

Balázs studied physics at Imperial College, then earned a PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh. To study microdosing, he invented ‘self-blinding’, a citizen-science technology that enables self-experimenters to implement their own placebo control without clinical supervision. He is an expert at the intersection of placebo effects and psychedelic medicine. He is known for his work on functional unblinding and for the know-cebo effect, i.e. the diminished placebo response in psychedelic trials. Currently, he works as a clinical data scientist at UCSF’s Translational Psychedelic Research Program.