"Psychedelic exceptionalism" is the belief that these medicines are inherently healing and morally good. It quietly lowers a clinician's guard at screening, consent, and outcome claims, exactly where scrutiny matters most. A liberation-psychology alternative that holds hope and skepticism together.
A large cohort of treatment-resistant pain patients found ketamine's analgesia was mediated almost entirely by its effect on depression, not by dose. That reframes the clinical question from "will ketamine fix this pain?" to "is there a mood component driving it?" and argues for systematic depression screening before and during ketamine for pain.
