Our research and projects
Rigorous economic evidence across the questions that determine whether psychedelic therapies become accessible.
Cost, cost-effectiveness, and budget impact analysis
Coverage rests on two questions: what a therapy costs to deliver, and what it returns. We answer both with the methods payers already use — cost-effectiveness analysis, which weighs the cost of a therapy against the health it produces, and budget impact analysis, which asks what covering it would do to a payer’s spending over a defined period.
This is the oldest and largest part of CEP’s work. In collaboration with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), we evaluated the cost-effectiveness of MDMA-assisted therapy for people with chronic PTSD and modeled the health and economic effects of scaled-up access. With the Usona Institute, we modeled the cost-effectiveness of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for major depressive disorder, with a further study on treatment-resistant depression now in peer review. With Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, we evaluated the cost-effectiveness of psilocybin-assisted therapy for smoking cessation. And with Sunstone Therapies and the Social Neuroscience and Psychotherapy (SNaP) Lab, we analyzed how group delivery changes costs, cost-effectiveness, and the number of qualified clinicians that scaled-up access would require.
We also publish critical appraisals of other groups’ analyses when the assumptions behind them would not survive payer scrutiny.
Methods & measurement development
An economic analysis is only as good as the outcomes it measures. Symptom scales capture part of what psychedelic therapies do and miss much of the rest, and trials across the field do not measure well-being the same way, which makes their results hard to compare and hard for payers to act on. CEP develops the measures and methods the field needs: consensus standards for outcomes, and study designs built together with the communities that will receive the care.
Global access
Access questions do not stop at national borders, and the countries with the greatest unmet need have the thinnest evidence. CEP works with local researchers and institutions to assess whether psychedelic-assisted therapies can realistically be delivered where mental health systems are already stretched — what they would cost, who would deliver them, and what has to be in place first.
Supply/Demand estimation
Every downstream question — what a state program will cost, whether a health system can absorb the volume, how long a waitlist becomes — depends on two numbers. How many people would qualify for these therapies and seek them out, and how many trained providers, sites, and clinical hours exist to serve them. CEP estimates both. Demand sets the ceiling on every budget-impact and coverage question that follows; supply decides whether the answer is reachable in practice or only on paper.
Epidemiology
Most people who use psychedelics do so outside a clinic, and what happens to them over time is one of the first questions regulators and payers ask. The published answer is scattered across decades of small and inconsistent studies. CEP reviews and synthesizes that literature — who uses these substances, what their health looks like, and which outcomes persist — so that the risks and benefits can be described accurately.