Felix Müller

Universitäre Psychiatrische Kliniken Basel | UPK · Department of Psychiatry

Psychedelics have recently attracted significant attention for their potential to mitigate symptoms associated with various psychiatric disorders. However, the precise neurobiological mechanisms responsible for these effects remain incompletely understood. A valuable approach to gaining insights into the specific mechanisms of action involves compa...

Psychedelics are a group of substances within the heterogeneous class of hallucinogenic drugs. Via binding to the serotonin (5-HT) 2A receptor, psychedelics exert profound alterations in various mental domains, including sensation, cognition, emotions, and self-perception. Psychedelics comprise phenethylamines (e.g., mescaline), tryptamines (e.g.,...

Background Anxiety disorders are a major public health burden with limited treatment options. Aims We investigated the long-term safety and efficacy of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)-assisted therapy in patients with anxiety with or without life-threatening illness. Method This study was an a priori -planned long-term follow-up of an investigat...

Background: While the exploration of serotonergic psychedelics as psychiatric medicines deepens, so does the pressure to better understand how these compounds act on the brain. Methods: We used a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover design and administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), and d-a...

Psychedelics have emerged as promising candidate treatments for various psychiatric conditions, and given their clinical potential, there is a need to identify biomarkers that underlie their effects. Here, we investigate the neural mechanisms of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) using regression dynamic causal modelling (rDCM), a novel technique tha...

There is substantial contemporary interest in psychedelic agents as medicines for maladies of the mind. This follows research in the 1950s and 1960s exploring the use of LSD and other psychedelics to treat a range of psychiatric illnesses as well as addictions. This research was shut down after prohibition of these drugs; however, the last decade h...

Psychedelics have emerged as promising candidate treatments for various psychiatric conditions, and given their clinical potential, there is a need to identify biomarkers that underlie their effects. Here, we investigate the neural mechanisms of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) using regression dynamic causal modelling (rDCM), a novel technique tha...

Die Alkoholabhängigkeit ist eine häufige psychische Erkrankung mit erheblichen Auswirkungen auf die Betroffenen und deren Umfeld. Die aktuellen Behandlungsansätze sind wirksam, allerdings spricht ein erheblicher Teil der Patienten nur sehr unzureichend auf etablierte Therapien an. In den 1950er- und 1960er-Jahren wurden Halluzinogene, insbesondere...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)-assisted therapy in patients who suffered from anxiety with or without association to a life threatening illness. METHODS The study is an investigator-initiated two-center trial that used a double-blind, placebo-controlled, two-period, random-orde...

Background LSD and psilocybin are increasingly used in phase I trials and evaluated as therapeutic agents for mental disorders. The phenomenon of reoccurring drug-like experiences after the acute substance effects have worn off was described for both substances and especially attributed to LSD. According to the DSM-V, the persisting and distressing...

Clinical research into serotonergic psychedelics is expanding rapidly, showing promising efficacy across myriad disorders. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a commonly used strategy to identify psychedelic-induced changes in neural pathways in clinical and healthy populations. Here we, a large group of psychedelic ima...

Background Patients with psychotic disorders present alterations in thalamocortical intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) as measured by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). Specifically, thalamic iFC is increased with sensorimotor cortices (hyperconnectivity) and decreased with prefrontal-limbic cortices (hypoconnectivi...

Growing interest has been seen in using lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin in psychiatric research and therapy. However, no modern studies have evaluated differences in subjective and autonomic effects of LSD and psilocybin or their similarities and dose equivalence. We used a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover des...

Psychiatry has a well-established tradition of comparing drug-induced experiences to psychotic symptoms, based on shared phenomena such as altered perceptions. The present review focuses on experiences induced by classic psychedelics, which are substances capable of eliciting powerful psychoactive effects, characterized by distortions/alterations o...

Creativity is an essential cognitive ability linked to all areas of our everyday functioning. Thus, finding a way to enhance it is of broad interest. A large number of anecdotal reports suggest that the consumption of psychedelic drugs can enhance creative thinking; however, scientific evidence is lacking. Following a double-blind, placebo-controll...

It has been reported that serotonergic hallucinogens like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) induce decreases in functional connectivity within various resting-state networks. These alterations were seen as reflecting specific neuronal effects of hallucinogens and it was speculated that these shifts in connectivity underlie the characteristic subject...

Growing interest has been seen in using lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in psychiatric research and therapy. However, no modern studies have evaluated subjective and autonomic effects of different and pharmaceutically well-defined doses of LSD. We used a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover design in 16 healthy subjects (eight w...

A 39-year-old female patient suffering from severe, treatment-resistant depression and other symptoms associated with a complex personality disorder was admitted to our open psychiatric ward for an experimental treatment with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). The substance was administered in repeated weekly and ascending doses. Curiously, there we...

The last years have seen an increasing interest in research on hallucinogenic drugs, like psilocybin and LSD. Similar developments were observed for the entactogen MDMA. During the 1950s and 1960s, this field was in the focus, and relatively broad investigations of psilocybin and LSD were conducted, both in basic and clinical research. In this era,...

There is growing interest in the therapeutic utility of psychedelic substances, like psilocybin, for disorders characterized by distortions of the self-experience, like depression. Accumulating preclinical evidence emphasizes the role of the glutamate system in the acute action of the drug on brain and behavior; however this has never been tested i...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a classic psychedelic, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is an empathogen, and d-amphetamine is a classic stimulant. All three substances are used recreationally. LSD and MDMA are being investigated as medications to assist psychotherapy, and d-amphetamine is used for the treatment of attention-deficit/hyp...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a potent hallucino-genic substance that was extensively investigated by psychiatrists during the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers were interested in the unique effects induced by this substance, some of which resemble symptoms seen in schizophrenia. Moreover, during that period LSD was studied and used for the treatm...

Aims The aim of the present study was to characterize the pharmacokinetics and exposure–subjective response relationship of a novel oral solution of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) that was developed for clinical use in research and patients. Method LSD (100 μg) was administered in 27 healthy subjects using a placebo‐controlled, double‐blind, cro...

In this meta-analysis, we aimed to assess the evidence from neuroimaging studies for chronic alterations in the brains of MDMA users. The databases PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science were searched for studies published from inception to August 24, 2018, without any language restriction. Sixteen independent studies comprising 356 MDMA users and 311...

Abstract The effects of hallucinogenic drugs on the human brain have been studied since the earliest days of neuroimaging in the 1990s. However, approaches are often hard to compare and results are heterogeneous. In this chapter, we summarize studies investigating the effects of hallucinogens on the resting brain, with a special emphasis on replica...

LSD is an ambiguous substance, said to mimic psychosis and to improve mental health in people suffering from anxiety and depression. Little is known about the neuronal correlates of altered states of consciousness induced by this substance. Limited previous studies indicated profound changes in functional connectivity of resting state networks afte...

Rationale: 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is used recreationally and investigated as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Methylphenidate and modafinil are psychostimulants that are used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy, respectively, but they are also misused as cognitive enhancers. Little is known about differen...

Figure S1. Connectome ring showing the results of the ROI‐to‐ROI‐analysis using the right (a) and left (b) thalamus as sources and ROIs covering the whole brain as targets (see Table S2 for ROI labels). Results are corrected for multiple comparisons across all ROI‐pairs (P < 0.05, FDR). The colour bar represents the t value. Table S1. Cumulative l...

Background: Stimulants such as methylphenidate (MPH) and modafinil are frequently used as cognitive enhancers in healthy people, whereas 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ecstasy) is proposed to enhance mood and empathy in healthy subjects. However, comparative data on the effects of MPH and modafinil on negative emotions in healthy subject...

Background Recent evidence shows that the serotonin 2A receptor (5-hydroxytryptamine2A receptor, 5-HT 2A R) is critically involved in the formation of visual hallucinations and cognitive impairments in lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)-induced states and neuropsychiatric diseases. However, the interaction between 5-HT 2A R activation, cognitive impa...

Objective: It has been proposed that the thalamocortical system is an important site of action of hallucinogenic drugs and an essential component of the neural correlates of consciousness. Hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD can be used to induce profoundly altered states of consciousness, and it is thus of interest to test the effects of these drugs...

Rationale: Renewed interest has been seen in the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in psychiatric research and practice. The repeated use of LSD leads to tolerance that is believed to result from serotonin (5-HT) 5-HT2A receptor downregulation. In rats, daily LSD administration for 4 days decreased frontal cortex 5-HT2A receptor binding. Addi...

Background: Psychostimulants such as methylphenidate (MPH) and modafinil are increasingly used by healthy people for cognitive enhancement purposes, whereas the acute effect of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ecstasy) on cognitive functioning in healthy subjects remains unclear. This study directly compared the acute effects of MPH, modaf...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) induces profound changes in various mental domains, including perception, self-awareness and emotions. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the acute effects of LSD on the neural substrate of emotional processing in humans. Using a double-blind, randomised, cross-over study design, pla...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is used recreationally and has been evaluated as an adjunct to psychotherapy to treat anxiety in patients with life-threatening illness. LSD is well-known to induce perceptual alterations, but unknown is whether LSD alters emotional processing in ways that can support psychotherapy. We investigated the acute effects...

MDMA ("ecstasy") is widely used as a recreational drug, although there has been some debate about its neurotoxic effects in humans. However, most studies have investigated subjects with heavy use patterns, and the effects of transient MDMA use are unclear. In this review, we therefore focus on subjects with moderate use patterns, in order to assess...

After no research in humans for >40 years, there is renewed interest in using lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in clinical psychiatric research and practice. There are no modern studies on the subjective and autonomic effects of LSD, and its endocrine effects are unknown. In animals, LSD disrupts prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle re...