Trends in the psychedelic renaissance: applying artificial intelligence to measure media portrayal of psychedelic drugs in the 21st century.

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 sen

SUBMITTER: Bender DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12912910 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature