A study by researchers at New York University has found that people who stutter may benefit from the controlled administration of classic psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin.
The qualitative study, published in the Journal of Fluency Disorders, analysed the self-reported experiences of people who identified as having a stutter. The experiences were gathered from reports posted online on multiple Reddit forums, organising responses into “an established framework of psychedelics which includes behavioral, emotional, cognitive, belief based, and social effects.” Results were then grouped to determine if the outcome was positive, negative or neutral.
“Our search yielded 167 posts, with 14 excluded for lacking firsthand accounts (e.g., describing others’ experiences) and 39 for not discussing classic psychedelics (rather, they discussed ketamine or MDMA),” the study explains. “The final sample comprised 114 posts from 104 Reddit distinct users, including multiple contributions from some users. Due to 12 users deleting their usernames, the exact number of unique users was estimated to be at least 92.”
Researchers found that 74% of users reported positive short-term effects such as reduced stuttering and anxiety. 9.6% of users reported negative outcomes, while 4.8% reported mixed (positive and negative) outcomes. 11.6% of users reported neutral experiences.
“Given the positive effects of psychedelics on conditions like anxiety and PTSD, which share symptoms with stuttering, we think that investigating the potential impact of psychedelics on stuttering can be a fruitful area of research,” lead author Eric S. Jackson said.
The study claims to be the first to explore self-reported experiences of self-identified stutterers using classic psychedelics. However, the authors highlighted the limited nature of the results based on the method of data collection.
“The results support the possibility that psychedelics may impact stuttering, but caution must be applied in their interpretation given the entirely uncontrolled research setting and potential adverse health effects of psychedelics as reported elsewhere,” said Jackson. “While these results do not encourage the use of psychedelics by stutterers, they suggest that future work could examine the impact of psychedelics on stuttering in randomized controlled clinical trials.”
