School of Medicine Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-12-2026
Abstract
Background: The relationship between media portrayal of psychedelic drugs, scientific research and drug policy is an area of debate.
Aims: To apply artificial intelligence technology to measure trends in media sentiment towards the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs.
Method: Up to 300 of the most relevant articles from Google News searches for the term 'psychedelics' were sampled for each year from 2000 to 2025. A large language model, ChatGPT, evaluated subject matter and sentiment.
Results: In total, 88.3% of screened URLs (3308 of 3747) were included in the analysis. The proportion of articles focusing on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics increased from 13.3% (26 of 198) from 2000 to 2009 to 85.3% (1254 of 1470) from 2020 to 2025. The average sentiment score from 2000 to 2025 for articles from all publications (N = 2168) was 78.5 ± 9.3 (mean ± s.d.) (possible range: 1-100). 1.3% (29 of 2168) of articles carried negative sentiment (< 50) whereas 4.8% (103 of 2168) had extremely positive sentiment (≥90). Average sentiment reached a peak in 2020 (80.8 ± 7.0), and a statistically significant trough in sentiment was observed in 2024 relative to 2020-2023 (2020-2023, 79.2; 2024, 74.3, P < 0.00001, Mann-Whitney U-test). The proportion of negative-neutral articles (≤65) increased annually from a trough of 3.6% (8 of 267) in 2020 to a peak of 20.9% (43 of 253) in 2024. Artificial intelligence sentiment scores were correlated and concordant with average human rater scores (r = 0.88, concordance correlation coefficient 0.84).
Conclusions: Although most 21st-century media coverage of psychedelic drugs has been positively framed, negative and neutral coverage has increased in frequency since 2020. Researchers, clinicians, regulators and policy-makers should be mindful of the complex relationship between media portrayals of psychedelics and the results of scientific research.
Recommended Citation
Bender, D. A., Dunn, H. M., Pekau, A., Mohite, A. D., Anandarajah, A., Ross, B. D., Steinle, J., Shankar, S., Kiley, B., Martin, S., Gonuguntla, R., Stonov, M., Pippala, N., Abdalla, R., Stille, M. K., Yusuf, J., Villalba, M., Werner, G., Divekar, A., Daniels-Tineo, M., … Nemeroff, C. B. (2026). Trends in the psychedelic renaissance: applying artificial intelligence to measure media portrayal of psychedelic drugs in the 21st century. BJPsych open, 12(2), e63. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2025.10974
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
BJPsych open
DOI
10.1192/bjo.2025.10974
Academic Level
resident
Mentor/PI Department
Psychiatry
Comments
© The Author(s) 2026
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.