269 ketamine and psychedelic trials are recruiting, out of 1,631 registered
The research base is larger than the headlines suggest and more lopsided. We track 1,631 registered studies across 4,550 sites, and depression accounts for more recruiting work than PTSD, addiction and OCD combined. This is the map of what's actually being tested, and where you could join it.
What's being studied
Depression dominates, which reflects where the money went after the 2018 breakthrough-therapy designations rather than where the need is widest. Chronic pain and headache are the quiet surprise in this data: 42 recruiting studies, a category most coverage ignores entirely. Cancer-related distress, the work that arguably produced psychedelic medicine's most striking early results, is down to 11 recruiting studies, and end-of-life and palliative care to 1.
Counts use the conditions each sponsor filed with the registry, so a study can sit in more than one group. These are the same groups the live index filters on.
How far along the field is
Phase 4 studies outnumber phase 3, which looks odd until you remember that ketamine and esketamine are already approved drugs and much of that phase 4 volume is post-approval work on them. Strip those out and the genuinely novel compounds are still clustered in phase 1 and 2. A psilocybin approval is not close in the way press coverage implies.
Who's running them
The most active recruiting sponsors in the current data: Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, University Hospital, Basel, Switzerland, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). University hospitals and a handful of well-capitalised sponsors carry most of the load, which is worth knowing when you evaluate a study: an academic center running its third psilocybin protocol is a different proposition from a first-time site.
Joining one
Trials are free, medically supervised, and the only lawful route to psilocybin, MDMA or LSD in 48 US states. They're also slow and you might get placebo. If that trade works for you, the recruiting sites list is sorted by country and state, and the enrollment walkthrough covers screening, what to ask, and the mistakes that get people excluded.