Four years ago, a small group of us started the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, an NGO dedicated to learning more about post-psychedelic difficulties and what helps people recover. We’ve published 11 articles, two pre-prints, and have more papers on the way. When we started, psychedelic science and culture wasn’t even prepared to admit there was such a thing as ‘post-psychedelic extended difficulties’, now it’s widely accepted and there are many researchers working on the topic, trying to find out what helps people recover.

One of the great pleasures of this project, for me as a journalist and humanities scholar has been collaborating with psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists on studies, which are published in scientific journals like Nature Medicine, PLOS One, Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice, and the catchily-titled Current Topics in Behavioural Neuroscience.

Although I worked in a humanities department for eight years, to be honest I much prefer the ethic and vibe of science, and the idea that you can gather data, test your hypotheses, amass new evidence and thereby - maybe - help people heal.

At the same time, I still appreciate the things that humanities can bring to mental health research - ethical discussions, critical thinking around the field’s assumptions, historical research, and above all, stories and thinking critically about stories.

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As a journalist and interviewer, I absolutely love to tell stories. I think it’s my superpower - the ability to interview someone, or interview lots of people, and shape all that data into a coherent, interesting and moving narrative.

Stories are important for how we think about psychedelics - not just qualitative research and thematic analysis, but actual flesh-and-blood stories of people’s non-linear journeys before, during and after trips.

One way to think about psychedelics is as story-producing drugs. Louis Lewin, 102 years ago, called this class of drugs phantastica, that’s to say, fantasy-stimulating substances. They activate serotonin receptors, enhancing pattern-formation and pattern-recognition, they release dream-like symbols and archetypes from the subconscious (maybe), they provoke fresh perspectives (‘I became my grandmother, I became a tree, I became the universe’ and so on), they gives people this sense of the heroic self and their epic mission that one normally only finds in religion or fantasy-fiction. And they make people desperate to tell their story and spread the word.

Psychedelics, according to one leading explanation of how they heal, are both narrative-disruptors and narrative-creators. They can disrupt the rigid negative self-narrative that mentally unwell people are stuck in (‘I’m a loser’, ‘I am an addict’, ‘I am depressed and will always be depressed’, ‘the world has treated me unfairly’, ‘everyone hates me’ and so on), dissolve habitual self-beliefs, and create a space or aporia for new, more positive, more flexible narratives to emerge. And they also sometimes create new narratives - ‘you’re basically OK’, ‘the universe loves you’, ‘everything happens for a reason’, ‘your nasty father was doing the best he could’ and so on.

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To take two examples, from a story I’m working on about Mormons and ex-Mormons and psychedelics:

Alf is a 35-year-old Mormon entrepreneur. He had a messy divorce and felt a lot of anger and bitterness. He had a profound MDMA experience in which he managed to see the situation from his ex-wife’s perspective and let go of his anger and bitterness. He also came to the perspective that everything happens for a reason, and all that suffering was helping him to grow. The MDMA experience gave him a new story, new perspectives.

Mark is a 38-year-old ex-Mormon. He was introduced to psychedelics at a difficult moment in his life - he had recently left the LDS church, and was coping with depression and suicidality, partly stemming from childhood sexual abuse. On his first MDMA experience, he saw his body from above, and it was filled with green ooze. He asked what it was, and a voice told him it was his anger. And then he was shown why he felt so much poisonous anger. He was shown everything that had happened to him, in vivid detail. He could even remember the smell of the man who had abused him. He saw all the pain he had experienced in various moments in his life. And the voice said ‘that’s why you’re so angry, because of everything that has happened to you, but you can let go of the anger now’. And then he saw all the green ooze leaving his body. That night gave him a new story, a new trajectory. ‘I have felt better ever since that night’.

As the Harvard psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman wrote in his 1988 book The Illness Narratives, illness and recovery are never just physical events, they are often stories, and a good healer pays attention to the story and listens to the patient. What story do they tell about the symptoms they experience and how it affects their relationships, work and identity? What story do they say about their ‘healing journey’, their path to recovery? What metaphors or symbols do they use?

The psychedelic anthropologist David Dupuis has described psychedelics as ‘super-placebos’, which does not mean they’re inert or sugar pills. What he means is they amplify the contextual effects that can help healing, such as expectancy, relationships, ritual and meaning. Psychedelics, he writes, can inspire a ‘narrative reframing’ and ‘identity reconfiguration’. I’m sure anyone who has taken or worked with psychedelics has seen this sort of narrative reframing and identity reconfiguration happen often, like it did with Alf and Mark.

But the narrative reconfiguration is not always to a more positive, resilient and flourishing story. If psychedelics act as super-placebos, they can also act as super-nocebos…

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Have you noticed that sound recently - a strange quietness? Yes, Jordan Peterson has been off social media. The culture war has temporarily lost its biggest megaphone. What has silenced the grumpy prophet? Well, almost since the day he became the most famous intellectual and spiritual authority in western culture, Peterson has been beset by strange ailments: depression, chronic pain, akathisia, myopathia. In the last few years, those ailments have become incapacitating and neither he nor his family is quite sure what to do about it. His daughter, nutrition influencer Mikhaila Peterson, suggested last year that her father might be under ‘spiritual attack’. Yes, the most famous psychologist in the world is beset by demons. But now, a new enemy has been identified: mold.

Peterson, according to the latest diagnosis, is suffering from Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), a controversial diagnosis according to which exposure to mold leads to a host of mental and physical health problems. It’s the dark side of the shroom boom: evil fungi.

I feel sympathy for Peterson and cannot imagine how terrifying and demoralizing it must be to have one’s ability to function robbed by incapacitating symptoms which doctors struggle to diagnose and treat. It’s frightening because it could happen to anyone. But I was also struck by the parallels between the invisible enemies of Christianity - demons - and the invisible enemies of wellness.

Every couple of years, wellness culture becomes obsessed with a new invisible enemy that is the root of all evil, or rather, the root of all inflammation: mold, electro-magnetic fields / 5G, heavy metals (in your food, water, vaccines, chemtrails), food additives / seed oils / gluten, blue light, parasites / ticks, glyphosates, microplastics, and so on and on and on. Once you’re in the wellness Instagram slipstream, you won’t just be warned about one issue, but a whole pandaemonium of invisible agents trying to invade your body and the body of your children.

Some of these invisible enemies are infections of modernity - EMF / 5G / blue light / vaccines / pesticides / food additives. And some are ancient enemies of the natural world, as old as Satan - parasites, mold.

The body in the wellness universe is like the body of a medieval saint - it finds itself in hostile territory, filled with invisible enemies trying to penetrate it, and it must try to protect its sovereignty. Except in wellness, it’s not a monk, it’s a MAHA mom trying to protect her kids from the demons of civilization.

Maeve Eberhardt is a linguistics professor at the University of Vermont. She analysed the language of the website of Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s famous wellness brand.

What emerges from the keyword analysis are three major discursive themes threaded throughout the corpus: (i) harmful substances are everywhere, (ii) the larger environment is beyond individuals’ control, and (iii) good citizens must exert control over body, food, and home.

The way wellness culture talks about invisible enemies is strongly reminiscent of medieval demon language. This from the Goop website:

While all toxic heavy metals wreak havoc on the body, MERCURY is an especially insidious beast, responsible for untold suffering throughout human history… MERCURY toxicity can be responsible for countless disorders and symptoms, including anxiety, ADHD, OCD, autism, bipolar disorder, neurological disorders, epilepsy, tingling, numbness, tics, twitches, spasms, hot flashes, heart palpitations, hair loss, brittle nails, weakness, memory loss, confusion, insomnia, loss of libido, fatigue, migraines, endocrine disorders, and depression. In fact, mercury poisoning is at the core of depression for a large percentage of people who suffer from it.

The wellness consumer occasionally reminds me of Nicole Kidman in The Others - a worried mother close to nervous collapse, desperately trying to protect herself and her children from hostile supernatural entities surrounding them.

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How can you protect your sovereign bodies from the invisible enemies all around us? Detox, deep cleanse, purge, fast, switch your diet, buy supplements, buy amulets and crystals and strange devices, raise your frequency, move house, buy tests that identify the enemies within, and if possible, remove yourself entirely from Babylonian modernity, ‘exit the matrix’, and retreat to some corner of nature, far from the nearest 5G spire, where you homeschool your kids and eat only homegrown fruit or, perhaps, give up food altogether and become a Breatharian.

There is, of course, a vast priesthood of wellness experts ready and waiting to protect you and your kids from the invisible threats, with their products, services and MLM schemes. And, remarkably, they have expertise in not just one of the invisible threats, but all of them!

When wellness becomes demonology

You can see how easily this quest for purification and self-defense could blur into old-school demonology, and it’s no surprise that the range of alternative therapies offered in Goop’s Netflix series included actual exorcisms. I heard an interview recently with integrative medicine influencer Dr Simon Yu, who warned listeners of the usual litany of invisible enemies - mold, heavy metals, EMF, parasites - and at one point Dr Yu leaned into the demonic:

What if I propose that parasites are akin to demons? Parasites are deceptive, malevolent, elusive entities. They drain your energy, hijack your mind, and overpower your will. If we replace the term parasites with demons, we can then view the history of mankind and medicine from a unique perspective.

The blurred line between the invisible enemies of wellness and literal demons is most obvious in the work of Anthony William, the ‘Medical Medium’, who is a leading wellness influencer and Goop columnist, with tens of millions of followers on Facebook and Instagram. He gained prominence by claiming the Epstein-Barr virus causes many ailments including cancer, he popularised the celery juice diet, and he often shows up on my Instagram feed warning of heavy metals. William claims he gets his health advice from angelic beings. The advice is reminiscent of medieval Catholicism - he speaks of the ‘Holy Four’ of fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, which protect us against the ‘Unforgiving Four’ of radiation, heavy metals, DDT and ‘the viral explosion’. His most recent book tells his followers how to protect themselves from demons and spiritual warfare.

We should not be surprised at this porous boundary between secular wellness and demon-obsessed Christianity. As I and others have written, the religion of wellness emerged out of 19th-century Protestant Christianity and especially from new movements like Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventism and Mormonism, in which the healthy soul and the healthy body become more and more intertwined, as do moral and physical purity and the concepts of sin and disease. The path to heaven becomes the road to wellness, and the pilgrim’s progress becomes one long diet / cleanse / purge / detox / colonic irrigation. Wellness shares with Protestant Christianity a tendency to apocalypticism - one friend is convinced everyone vaccinated will drop dead in 2027 (he also thinks a meteor will strike the same year).

The family resemblances between wellness and evangelical Christianity helps us understand how and why so many wellness influencers went MAHA / MAGA in the last few years. They share with evangelicals a tendency to a paranoid world-view: we are under attack, there are invisible enemies all around us, and THEY (Big Pharma / Big Agro / the Deep State / demonic elite) are trying to control us through infernal technologies. We need the charismatic outsider - Trump, RFK - to protect us and our children from their evil plans.

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‘Yes’, you may say, ‘I see the parallels between Christian demons and the invisible enemies of wellness…but that doesn’t mean wellness is totally wrong in its obsessions. Mold toxicity is a real thing, vaccine adverse events are not entirely made up, all those microplastics and pesticides and food additives in our diet probably are messing us up!’ I agree...

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Welcome to Tuesday Brunch, our round-up of interesting EI-related news. I’m switching the Brunch to a bigger fortnightly offering. This Sunday, by the way, we have another peer support group for post-psychedelic difficulties - message me if you’d like to attend.

Yesterday, the Pope issued his much-anticipated AI encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’, in a presentation at the Vatican alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah.

(Imagine if, in 200 years, Anthropic has replaced the Vatican…)

Pope Leo XIV suggested the AI era could turn into control of the unemployed masses by a handful of power-obsessed tech oligarchs. He contrasted an ‘age of power’ with a ‘civilization of love’, a new Babel with a New Jerusalem, tech transhumanism (ie an obsession with self-optimization and immortality through biohacking) with Christian transhumanism, in which humans transcend finitude through a paradoxical, Christ-like acceptance of the human condition and ego-death to the Divine in our souls, not our hard-drives.

What was strangely missing from the encyclical was a warning about idolatry - the risk of turning AI into The Oracle, whose advice you follow without question regarding every aspect of your life. The Pope also avoided the whole question of AI consciousness, and whether it’s possible that humans could engineer a conscious being in the way that humans are conscious. This is the fundamental theological question of our time, so it’s odd His Holiness had nothing to say about it in his AI encyclical.

On a side note, it was interesting to see some psychedelic folk at the Encyclical presentation, including MAPS board member Liana Sananda Gillooly. She’s working for Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology, helping them raise funding I guess. Imran Khan, formerly head of UC Berkeley’s psychedelic team, is also now working at CHT. The shift from psychedelics to AI makes sense, especially for NGO people - there is so much money coming from AI (especially Anthropic) into philanthropy.

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Over at Google, meanwhile, Demis Hassabis, the British founder of Google DeepMind, told the audience of Google’s annual I/O event:

AGI is now on the horizon, and it will be the most profound and impactful technology ever invented. If built right, it could propel human flourishing beyond our imagining… When we look back at this time, I think we will realize we were standing in the foothills of the Singularity. This will improve the lives of everyone everywhere.

I admire Hassabis. He seems to have integrity and does not have the obvious personality flaws of some other tech overlords. Still, he has an exceptionally rosy vision of the future - has any new technology ever improved the lives of everyone everywhere?

While Demis Hassabis is bigging AGI up as the greatest technological invention ever, the public reaction to AI is much darker than the excitement that greeted Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPhone 20 years ago. In fact, when the former CEO of Google mentioned AI in a commencement speech last week, he got booed! Sam Altman’s house got Molotov cocktailed!

The reasons for this stark shift in sentiment towards tech are various. First, the idea that tech founders as groovy altruistic visionaries is long gone, it died the moment the richest man in the world gleefully destroyed USAID. They’re now generally seen as unfathomably-rich lords of the universe who are dissociated from ordinary life and will do anything to preserve their extreme wealth and power.

Second, we now realize that the utopian promise of the internet was a lie, and being online all the time has screwed us up - that’s why 1,200 school districts are suing Meta for harms from digital addiction.

The psychological harms from the internet / social media are apparently so great to young people, they threaten the UK economy. A new government report suggests the UK faces an ‘economic catastrophe’ because so many young people are anxious, unemployable and sitting in their bedroom addicted to their phones. One million British 16-24-year-olds are ‘NEETs’ (Not in Education, Employment or Training), according to the report from former minister Alan Millburn. He said:

This is a bedroom generation. They are sort of living in their bedrooms. They are on [their smartphones] all the time, they’re never off. [Social media] is leading to some evidence of functional impairment, changing their sleep patterns, concentration levels. That is having an impact on their ability to work…They have grown up in a digital world that has rewired how they communicate, form relationships and manage stress. They have fewer experiences of workplaces, and they present with higher levels of anxiety and depression.

Tech utopianism is by this stage a failed religion. And yet…I wonder if, just as we were excessively optimistic about tech 20 years ago, are we excessively pessimistic now? What if we really are in the foothills of the Singularity?

After the paywall, was the Enhanced Games one big flaccid erection? Plus, calls for the UK to ban kambo; a new John Lilly documentary; is MAHA anti-psychiatry; and some great new papers on psychedelic harm reduction.

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President Trump’s Executive Order on psychedelics on April 18 2026 was a remarkable moment in which the US federal government publicly embraced the healing potential of psychedelics. Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was standing behind Trump, and was arguably the key figure who made the EO happen. In one of those weird echoes of history, it occurred sixty years after his father held a Senate hearing to discuss the potential healing and harms of LSD. In fact, for three generations, America’s ‘royal family’ has been using and promoting psychedelic drugs, and shaping the nation’s relationship with these substances. The history of psychedelics in the US is intertwined with the history of this glamorous, flawed family whose lives so often seem to meet violent ends.

John F. Kennedy

The relationship of President John F. Kennedy to psychedelics is the most speculative and least evidenced in this tale, but we might as well start here, with the story of JFK’s affair with DC artist, socialite and would-be psychedelic guide, Mary Pinchot. In the early 1960s, Mary was having an intense love-affair with JFK, and spending a lot of time with him, including at the White House.

At the same time, she was also discovering psychedelic drugs. She visited Timothy Leary at Harvard and, according to Leary, wanted to set up a network of DC guides to turn on powerful men in the capital, possibly including the president. In his 1983 book Flashbacks, Leary claims Mary said to him:

I have this friend who’s a very important man. He’s impressed by what I’ve told him about my own LSD experiences and what other people have told him. Isn’t that the idea – to get powerful men to turn on?’

We don’t know for sure if Mary and JFK really did have any psychedelic sessions, but Leary claims Mary called him the day after the JFK assassination and said ‘he was changing too fast; they couldn’t control him anymore’. JFK was assassinated on November 22 1963, the same day Aldous Huxley took acid on his deathbed.

Mary’s ex-husband Cord Meyer was a senior figure in the CIA, and she apparently believed JFK had been murdered by the CIA in a conspiracy involving several of its highest-ranking figures, including her ex-husband. She was herself the victim of a professional assassination less than a year later, in Washington DC. The murder was never solved. If you want to go down that particular rabbit hole, read the book Mary’s Mosaic, by Peter Janney - Janney marshals the evidence suggesting Mary was the victim of a CIA assassination, to stop her from revealing details of the CIA’s role in JFK’s murder and other illegal operations. Janney presents convincing evidence that his own father, senior CIA agent Wister Janney, was involved in the operation, knew Mary Pinchot had been murdered before it was announced publicly, and lied about this to his own family. Peter Janney suggests various other establishment figures cooperated in the cover-up of Mary’s murder and her secrets, including her own brother-in-law, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who reportedly helped to locate and destroy her diary. Janney finds another piece of evidence supporting the CIA assasination theory in an interview by Gregory Douglas with Robert Crowley, deputy director of CIA clandestine operations. Crowley supposedly told Douglas:

We terminated her, of course. Everyone felt she had too much influence with him, not to mention her hippifying him with LSD and marijuana…after Dallas, she began to brood and then started to talk. Of course she had no proof but when people like that start to run their mouths, there can be real trouble.

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Ethel Kennedy

Ethel Kennedy was the wife of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the mother of RFK Junior, and ten other children. She also became a prominent humanitarian activist.

According to some sources, Ethel received LSD therapy from Dr Ross MacLean at his psychedelic therapy clinic in Hollywood Hospital, in BC, Canada, in the 1960s. This was first suggested in Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain’s Acid Dreams (1985), then repeated in Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind and other sources. I haven’t seen hard evidence for this, and don’t know when she was treated and why (if indeed she was).

Dr MacLean supervised around 6000 LSD trips for everything from alcoholism to anxiety and marital conflict, from 1957 to 1972. He worked with Al Hubbard, a millionaire with connections to the CIA who was an early adopter of psychedelics in the 1950s. At one time Hubbard had the largest stockpile of LSD in the United States. Hubbard believed in the same sort of psychedelic evangelizing as Mary Pinchot reportedly planned - spread the word by turning on the elite. The wife of a US senator would have been the perfect client.

If Ethel did receive treatment at the Hollywood Hospital, what would it have involved? This is from a PhD by Andrea Ens at the University of Saskatchewan:

The cost of this exclusive treatment was prohibitive..If potential patients decided to spend five days at the hospital for their first treatment session, they would be billed $544.00 CAD, or $3,855.30 CAD (2017) when accounting for inflation…Psychedelic therapies typically began between 8:50-10:00am... Patients were dressed comfortably for their treatments, often in pajamas and a bathrobe, to create a relaxed physical and emotional environment during therapy.

The specific dosages varied. On average, patients received 400 mcgm of LSD-25 or 700mgm of mescaline; often, both drugs were given together. At least two staff members, one man and one woman representing the father and the mother in psychoanalytic terms, were always present during patient experiences. Subjects were also encouraged to lay down on the couch and “go with the experience” to help ensure a successful experience with minimal anxiety or tension.

Therapists often played music during treatment sessions using the treatment room’s record player to reduce anxiety. There was a great deal of variety in the music selections – from Ravel’s “Bolero” to readings of “St. Paul’s Letter” – but Hollywood Hospital’s practitioners admitted that this aspect of treatment was not fully understood. Patients were also shown physical objects while under the influence of psychedelic drugs. For instance, they were encouraged to look at their reflection in a hand mirror, at a rose or other fresh flowers, or at pictures of their family or loved ones. These, according to Hollywood Hospital staff, were used to focus patients’ attention and to reinforce the idea that past experiences and feelings shape various aspects of human experience, such as one’s values, interpretations, and perceptions.

The goal of Hollywood Hospital’s psychedelic treatment program was for patients to experience abreaction, defined as “a total reliving of past events with a duality of intense personal involvement and detachment.”Observers at the time noted that this approach had the potential to greatly accelerate the treatment process beyond what was possible in conventional psychotherapy because experiencing “detachment” could help patients gain insight they could use in their everyday lives post-treatment.

Robert F. Kennedy Senior

60 years ago this week, on May 24th 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy held a Senate hearing on the uses and abuses of LSD. The full name was ‘Hearings of the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Senate Committee on Government Operations concerning federal drug research and regulation of LSD’. You can listen to the hearings and read a transcript here.

The aim of the hearings was to respond to rising public and media concern about the use of LSD by college students, and to encourage a more coordinated federal response that would recognise, in the words of Senator Kennedy, that ‘there are great dangers of LSD; there are also tremendous possibilities for LSD’.

In his opening remarks, Senator Kennedy discussed how LSD has become ‘the subject of cover stories in national magazines and news documentaries on network television, of widespread public debate, and new legislative action within the states’...

In all of this, I do not believe there has been an adequate inquiry into the organization of the federal government to deal with LSD, and to whether the government has fulfilled its responsibilities in connection with research on LSD and regulation of its use…

Here is a drug which has been available for over 20 years. Research on its effect and its possible therapeutic uses has been going on for a long time. Yet suddenly, almost overnight, irresponsible and unsupervised use of LSD for nonscientific, non-medical purposes has risen markedly. Such use carries with it grave dangers. Panic reactions or temporary personality changes that cause a person to harm himself or to harm others while under the influence of the drug. Without careful psychological screening, the drug will be used by some who will suffer permanent damage as a result. In a word, what was an experimental drug has become, now, a social problem.

And as LSD has become a problem, the possibility has arisen that public reaction will discourage and dry up legitimate research into the therapeutic use of LSD. Experiments indicate that LSD may be useful in treating alcoholics, one of the largest groups of the handicapped, and has been helpful in some cases in adjunct in psychotherapy for mentally ill people. If we in the federal government allow these legitimate uses to be interfered with, the loss to the nation and potentially for the handicapped would be serious indeed

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Much like his son exactly 60 years later, Senator Kennedy wonders how to coordinate the various parts of the federal government on psychedelic policy, especially the FDA, National Institute of Mental Health, and Veteran Affairs. He subjects the leaders of these organisations to questioning. Stanley Yolles, head of the NIMH, said:

No hallucinogen - LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, or dimethyltryptamine - should be administered except by a physician trained in its use and this should apply even if the current studies show LSD to be of value in the treatment of psychoneuroses, sexual perversion [ie homosexuality], frigidity, alcoholism, or other illnesses.

How, asks Senator Kennedy, did LSD suddenly become a ‘social problem’ without the government properly noticing or preparing? James Goddard, head of the FDA, replied:

I think it was the feeling of most people concerned, who were dealing with the drug on an experimental basis, that it was such an esoteric drug, that it would never come out in the open in terms of widespread use in colleges. What we are seeing now is that it has escaped from the laboratory.

How dangerous is it, asks Kennedy. Yolles of the NIMH replies:

We have no idea of how threatening it is, or how dangerous it is to any one individual at any one point in time. We know that there are certain individuals who have panic reactions, who become psychotic. And for a dangerous drug, even if one individual has that reaction, it’s a dangerous drug, but to state specifically what his chances are of having an adverse reaction is too difficult to [speculate?].

To which RFK replies, why don’t we know? Why, after 20 years of research, does the US government not have a clear picture of the range and prevalence of adverse events? Imagine what he’d say if he was around today, 60 years later, and we still only have a handful of papers on the prevalence of adverse events, despite the government now accelerating approval for these drugs.

Robert F. Kennedy Junior

Robert F. Kennedy Junior first took LSD when he was 15, on July 4 1969, 11 months after his father’s assasination. He was offered a tab of Orange Sunshine, the famous LSD made by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

He writes in his book American Values:

Up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II’s proscription against inebriation among falconers, I had resolved never to use drugs or alcohol. In fact, I hadn’t even tasted coffee. However, I had recently gathered from my favorite comic book, Turok, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. Jeff O’Neil assured me that this was a near certainty, so I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles; trees bowed and swayed on a windless night; bright lights with long comet tails lent Hyannisport the cheery aura of Christmas in July.

He and his friends went to a diner while tripping…

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Psychedelic drug companies are suddenly doing great. The FDA is granting them National Priority Vouchers, President Trump has backed them from the Oval Office, stock prices have soared, big pharma is on a shopping spree. This is very good news for those with equity in psychedelic drug companies, and it’s a hopeful moment for those who believe in the medical potential of psychedelic drugs. But are products being pushed through the FDA machine in a way that could threaten patient safety, both in trials and potentially post-approval?

That’s the concern of some therapists working on these trials. Many of them are passionate about psychedelics, they’ve worked with them for years, they’ve worked on multiple trials with all the uncomfortableness of that experience, in service of the dream of legal psychedelic medicine. But some have concerns about how the dream is becoming a reality - through drug companies who are not part of psychedelic culture, led by pharma executives with no psychedelic experience and little understanding of the risks of psychedelics. Some of these therapists reached out to me to speak anonymously about their concerns, sometimes regarding specific trials, other times about concerns across multiple trials.

One therapist has worked on six clinical research trials, involving five different sponsors. They say:

What I’ve witnessed across six trials over three years is not a collection of isolated problems — it’s a system that is moving faster than its safety infrastructure can support. Vulnerable people are being enrolled with inadequate preparation, put through medically significant protocol requirements without adequate clinical support, and left without meaningful recourse when things go wrong. The training and supervision structures that should protect participants exist largely on paper. The informed consent process that should ensure participants understand what they’re entering is being treated as a formality. And underneath all of it is a field whose public narrative is dominated by hope and hype, with really no space for therapists to voice concerns.

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Psychedelic trials are an awkward marriage of pharma culture and therapist culture. There can be a culture clash. One therapist, who has worked on multiple trials at four different trial sites over the last five years, says:

There’s an uncomfortable mix of the medical-biological model and subjective experiences. People at the sites don’t really get it, and the therapists coming in are like ‘we’re doing blood draws in the middle of a psychedelic experience? That’s nuts’. The sites and the sponsors want data. The therapists want to look after people, ensure they get the most from the experience , and often those things are at odds. Over the years, I’ve learned how to navigate that, and I’ve learned how to kind of talk the language of and take the perspective of the biomedical kind of people, and they’ve learned a bit about us. But you get these weird moments where the Principal Investigator is asking ‘what’s the adverse event that’s happened here?’ and the therapist is taking an IFS approach to ancestral trauma, and they both think the other one’s completely mad.

The power in the marriage has shifted over the years, and right now, it’s very pharma-centric, and therapists don’t have much of a voice. That’s partly a reaction to MAPS / Lykos’s failure to get FDA-approval in 2024, and the industry interpretation that this rejection stemmed partly from MAPS / Lykos’ over-emphasis on therapy.

MAPS: ‘therapy cult’?

MAPS in some ways was a therapist-led collective, founded by Doblin who always dreamt of being a psychedelic guide, and inspired by Stanislav Grof. The MAPS model of psychedelic-assisted therapy was two therapists sitting with a client. MAPS culture was connected to the world of underground therapy in which ‘the guide’ is an exalted shaman-like figure, like Stan Grof, Claudio Naranjo or Francoise Bourzat. Therapists on MAPS trials felt very supported and validated, they went on six-day group training retreats, there was a lot of esprit de corps and a fair amount of MDMA personal experimentation. One therapist who worked on the Phase 2 trial in 2016 says:

I really loved it, I loved the people that I worked with. I felt like I had found my people. There was a lot of passion and excitement. We thought we were doing something really innovative. It was very heart-centered. We received wonderful training on these six-day retreats where we were living together. But it gradually became more corporate and a very different vibe.

Then came the 2024 rejection by FDA, in which therapists and private practice trial sites were singled out for blame. The ex-MAPS therapist tells me:

The community of MAPS therapists is still reeling from the FDA rejection. We went in with so much trust and excitement. Now we feel like pariahs. We were all traumatized by what happened, and by Psymposia’s mission against us, and I don’t think we’ve recovered. Resilient has been strangely hostile to therapists who worked on the trials. They say they’ll only work with academic centres, and they want to minimize the psychotherapy component, like the other drug companies.

Post-Lykos: from therapist to facilitator to ‘monitor’

Other psychedelic drug companies took the message from the FDA’s rejection of Lykos: minimize the therapy part of psychedelic therapy, focus on the drug. One therapist who has worked on several trials tells me: ‘We went from being called therapists, to being called facilitators, to being called ‘monitors’. It feels like a demotion.’

As several recent papers have pointed out (such as Brusky et al 2026), companies like Compass have re-branded the therapy in psychedelic treatments as ‘psychological support’ , but it still looks an awful lot like therapy, and on the trials at least, it’s being provided by licensed therapists. But that may not be the case post-launch.

One clinical trial therapist tells me:

The public is being sold a story that these drugs don’t require psychotherapy, and yet these trials all employ psychotherapists and many patients require long-term psychotherapy. This story needs to be brought to light.

Another therapist shares this concern:

My main concern is companies (Definium, AtaiBeckley, and Compass) making inaccurate, disingenuous, and dangerous claims about their clinical trials having ‘no psychotherapy’. Compass and AtaiBeckley at least state they offer ‘psychological support’, Definium says not even that, just informed consent without preparation before dosing, safety monitoring without psychological support during dosing, and follow-up assessments without integration after dosing. Plenty has been written about if psychological support is actually therapy, but I can say from firsthand experience and from colleagues’ experience that the trials of all of these companies 100% involve therapy before, during, and after medicine sessions.

Max Wolff, a therapist and researcher who has been critical of the industry’s denigration of the therapy component of psychedelic medicine, tells me:

Therapists on clinical trials are in a classic double-bind. They are hired as therapists, because of their qualifications and knowledge as therapists, and at the same time they’re told not to provide therapy. They’re told only to ensure safety, never to promote efficacy, that’s another double-bind.

Downplaying therapy and calling it ‘psychological support’ or ‘monitoring’ can be defended as a necessary maneuver to get through the FDA hoop. But therapists are also expensive, and replacing them with less trained facilitators - nurses, say, or even coaches - would reduce the cost of the treatment. Many psychedelic drug companies are hoping their products can be offered in a similar manner to Spravato, in the same clinics - via a short session monitored by a nurse.

A British clinical trial therapist tells me:

If you look at AtaiBeckley’s investor presentations, they’re telling investors that DMT and 5meoDMT are like Spravato - two-hours, no therapy, just safety monitoring by a nurse. But 5meoDMT and DMT are not like ketamine. Nurses can do great work, but if traumatic content comes up like early trauma or ontological shock, that’s precisely the sort of content that only therapists are trained to handle.

The psychedelic industry is investing heavily in producing sticks of dynamite to clear psychic blockages and get people unstuck. But it’s not investing at all in post-explosion integration and stabilization. Maybe this will work out fine, maybe not.

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Listening to trial therapists’ concerns

There is an association of psychedelic drug companies, an association of psychedelic pharmacists…but no association of psychedelic therapists. Nor are there many places for trial therapists to gather online to swap notes. But there is a value to listening to their views, while remembering there are other valid perspectives.

What I plan to do is (1) work with therapists to do a more formal academic survey of trial therapists’ concerns and (2) support trial therapists to set up an informal online peer group for them - if you’re a clinical trial therapist interested in either of these initiatives, get in touch.

In the meantime, below, in brief, are 10 concerns that trial therapists raised in interviews with me (I spoke to ten trial therapists, based in the US, Australia, the UK and Germany). An important point up-top - psychedelic drug trials are not uniform. Different drug companies take different approaches and have different emphases on therapy, training, supervision etc. Therapists speak glowingly of some, pejoratively of others. There are also different trial sites, with their own cultures. So none of these points will be true for all psychedelic drug companies in all contexts. In addition, I’m listing therapists’ concerns, but they also mentioned many positives and expressed a lot of hope about the future of psychedelic medicine.

Here are 10 concerns:

1. Some companies offer minimal therapist training

2. On some trials, there is inadequate screening and a pressure to recruit and get participants through the trials

3. On some trials, there is inadequate informed consent regarding the psycho-social risks of psychedelics, the demands of the clinical trial experience, and the risk of disappointment

4. Some participants are being destabilized through coming off SSRIs

5. On some trials, there is weak adherence to and monitoring of the therapy model or rationale

6. On some trials, there is weak monitoring and reporting of psycho-social adverse events

7. Some participants are destabilized on trials and need longer-term therapeutic support, which may not be available or affordable post-approval

8. There’s a lack of supervision or mentoring for trial therapists on some trials, which increases the risk of burnout

9. There’s a growing need for socio-cultural diversity in trial therapists, which will increase post-launch

10. Therapists have concerns over trials’ use of AI and the possible aim to replace therapists with AI

1. Some companies offer minimal therapist training

The training offered by psychedelic drug companies to clinical trial therapists ranges widely in length. Compass, for example, offers training lasting a few months, which includes live-action role-plays and feedback sessions. But other companies like AtaiBeckley (according to therapists) offer 6-8 hours of online videos. Is that going to be enough training for nurses, therapists and psychiatrists who have never worked with psychedelics before to safely prepare, sit with and support clients?

One therapist tells me:

Of the five sponsors I have worked for, only one required an in-person dosing observation before being qualified to lead a dosing session. Watching online videos does not prepare someone to hold a person with treatment-resistant depression through a high-dose psychedelic experience while they are six weeks off their SSRIs and possibly receiving placebo. The gap between what facilitators need clinically and what they receive puts participants at direct risk.

2. On some trials, there is inadequate screening and a pressure to recruit

One therapist tells me of their experience working at a Contact Research Organisation (CRO), which is a company that runs trials for multiple different drug companies:

The metrics at CROs are focused on getting participants through the trial. Sometimes, if you’re ineligible for one trial, the CRO will try to fit you into another trial. There’s a lot of money involved and pressure on recruitment. CRO companies are making a killing. So it’s really focused on recruitment. How do we recruit high numbers of participants? How do we just get them through? Let’s pump them through these trials. Integrity of care for people can be compromised

In some cases, therapists report participants coming for dosing sessions, where it emerges they have serious mental health conditions that didn’t appear in the screening - such as Borderline Personality Disorder, in one example. In another example, a participant passed all the screening for a healthy normals Phase One trial, but turned out to have severe dissociated trauma that came to the surface during the session. Screening can also be cruelly arbitrary - participants can be screened out if their depression drops the day before dosage, or even if they have a cigarette in the days before dosage.

3. On some trials there is inadequate informed consent regarding risks

One therapist says:

Informed consent failures — this is the foundation everything else rests on. Participants are not meaningfully consenting to what they’re entering into. They don’t understand the risks of psychedelics, the risks of SSRI washout, the placebo possibility, or that their sessions are being recorded and AI analyzed. In a desperate, vulnerable population, this isn’t a paperwork problem — it’s a violation of a fundamental research ethics requirement that federal regulations explicitly mandate as a process, not a signature. Participants may be given the informed consent form (IFC) as part of a stack of papers to sign. Participants are not getting anyone to sit down with them to go over the risks and discuss. The Principal Investigators of the studies I have worked with do not seem to understand the risks themselves.

Therapists mention lack of informed consent around the demands of the clinical trial experience. One therapist says:

People have all these notions of what psychedelic experiences are like. And the fact of the matter is, in a clinical trial, this setting and the constraints of a trial are so different. There’s a huge amount of stress on the client leading up to dosing. Multiple clinic visits, time off work. Clients aren’t always prepared for this.

Therapists feel there is a lack of informed consent around the risk of disappointment, if either the treatment doesn’t work as well as participants wished, or if they receive the placebo dose. One therapist reached out to me to complain that Reunion, running a trial of psilocybin for people with terminal illnesses, offered half of participants the control / placebo dose, and no future opportunity to get the active dose. This seemed ‘inhumane’ to the therapist, especially with such a vulnerable population. I reached out to a member of Reunion’s scientific advisory board to ask them to nudge the company on this, and apparently Reunion will give all participants the opportunity to receive the active dose in future trials.

Participants are not always properly informed of the risk of being destabilized or of unexpected personality shifts. In at least one case, that’s led to litigation. A therapist tells me:

I have one client who had a Serious Adverse Event in a Phase One trial of healthy normals. They have had a really, really bumpy time and I’ve been working with them for a while. They described their experience as a personality transplant - they went from an extremely high-functioning person to relationship breakdown, terror states, resurfaced trauma. None of it showed up in screening before, because they weren’t depressed or anxious, they had structural dissociation. And they feel that there wasn’t proper informed consent from the drug company, so there is ongoing litigation on that.

In another case, on an Usona trial, one participant left her marriage after dosing and shifted to a lesbian relationship. There was discussion on whether such a sudden unexpected life-change should be registered as an adverse event (it wasn’t). Certainly, participants should be warned: this treatment could lead to sudden, major, unexpected personality-changes and life-changes.

There is also a lack of preparation on some trials, according to therapists. One therapist who worked on AtaiBeckley’s DMT trial says:

We meet with the client the day before dosing for one prep session. And this is DMT, we’re talking about potentially one of the most intense experiences, and there’s no therapeutic rapport established.

4. Some participants are being destabilized through coming off SSRIs

One therapist tells me:

SSRI washout causing harm including suicidal ideation (SI) — this is the most acute clinical harm I’ve witnessed directly. Three out of 8 participants experiencing SI as a result of protocol-required washout combined with placebo disappointment or non-response is a serious safety signal. These are people who came in already at the end of their rope, made more vulnerable by the trial design itself, with inadequate support structures to catch them when things go wrong.

This therapist adds:

I had a participant who qualified for the study after months of screening, went off his SSRIs for the study, and the day before his dosing was so severely depressed that he didn’t qualify to dose. He was released from the study. No follow-up, no support. This participant became suicidal, felt rejected, hopeless. He had spent months hoping this dosing would treat his life long depression. But because the participant was no longer in the study, there was no support provided for them.

5. There is wide disparity in the quality of therapy adherence-monitoring

On this topic I noticed a divergence in therapists’ opinions. Some therapists did not like how directive drug companies could be over what therapists should say and how they should behave during sessions - they felt this did not allow natural rapport to emerge. On the other hand, other therapists felt that some drug companies just promoted ‘non-directive therapy’ or ‘the inner healing intelligence’, or didn’t offer much guidance at all, creating a vacuum where therapists could bring in many different approaches. One therapist says to me:

There are successful scientific trials of psychotherapy, but they require standardisation and monitoring of adherence. How do you know if the therapy works unless it’s consistently applied across the participants, and you have something like a fidelity checklist? What happens instead is therapists bring whatever approach they want into that vacuum, so one person might be schema-trained and they’ll start talking about parts, the other person might be IFS trained, and are talking about parts in a different way, another person might be ACT trained, so they’re going to be talking about resistance and cognitive diffusion…It’s not a scientific trial of one psychotherapeutic approach.

In the words of another therapist:

In one study, therapists used whatever modalities they chose, with no oversight or monitoring, which means these aren’t controlled trials in any meaningful sense. The intervention is undefined. This is both a research integrity problem and a safety problem, because without consistency there’s no way to know what participants are actually receiving or whether it’s harmful.

There’s also a lot of disparity in how therapists react to ‘challenging experiences’. One therapist tells me:

I’ve had a fair number of clients who have challenging experiences and they work through them. But I’ve noticed other therapists or Principal Investigators who administer benzos or other ‘rescue medications’ if a person becomes highly anxious. There are huge differences depending on the personality of the therapist - some are more quiet, others more hands on. I know one who sits right by the client, staring at them.

6. On some trials there is weak monitoring and reporting of psycho-social adverse events

One therapist who has worked on multiple trials says:

How it should go is that, after a dosing session, the therapist meets with the Principal Investigator to go over everything that happened, and so that the PI gets to determine what’s an adverse event and lets the sponsor know. But in my experience, the PIs aren’t really involved. These research sites get these trial contracts, and they just have to put a PI down on paper, but sometimes on dosing days, the PI isn’t even on site. No one seems to be doing any due diligence of seeing what happened. I didn’t even get much training on what’s an adverse event, how to report it.

Another experienced trial therapist says:

The bar for reporting a serious adverse event is very high - it’s death or functional incapacity. The ability to capture psychological harms is not really there in the system. It’s a lot of biomedical pharma people, they’re not interested in subjective experience. They’re interested in what’s happening to your heart-rate, what’s happening in your blood. A lot of the senior executives in these companies have never taken a psychedelic and have no real interest in the psychedelic experience or the possible psychological side effects.

This therapist adds that the time-frame within which adverse events are monitored is often quite short - just 30 days or so - while serious harms can unfold over a longer time frame. Another therapist says: ‘I know of two instances where people took psychedelics recreationally and then spiralled and eventually took their life, but the suicide was several months later.’

Where trials do measure psychological harms, sometimes they do so in an intrusive way. One therapist complains about a suicidal ideation scale, whereby a participant is repeatedly asked whether they want to harm themselves, during and after the psychedelic experience. He says: ‘I took part in a Phase One trial as a participant, and it was genuinely off-putting to be repeatedly asked if I intended to harm myself while I was tripping.’

7. Longer-term therapeutic support is sometimes necessary for trial participants, but may not be available or affordable for patients post-approval

Several trial therapists say that psychedelics can operate like a Pandora’s Box, opening up wounds and bringing issues to the surface, in a way that is not always resolved within the time-frame of the trial. In some cases, participants need longer-term therapeutic support. If they request this, drug sponsors will sometimes pay for it. But not always - there are cases where participants have had to spend thousands of dollars trying to recover after adverse events, and to add insult to injury, their adverse events weren’t even reported in the trial literature.

Many participants say they feel grief or abandonment when the trial ends and would like some continued support or community. One therapist says: ‘There isn’t adequate follow-up support. I worry about that lack of supportive spaces where people can talk about their experiences.’ Some CROs and research centres have occasionally and briefly run integration groups for trial participants, but nothing that has endured.

While some drug companies have made longer-term support available to those who need it, what will happen after these treatments come to market? While billions is being spent on drug development, there has been no investment made in finding out what helps people recover from post-psychedelic destabilization. Post-psychedelic destablization is not even a recognized mental health problem. This means it is unlikely a person who feels seriously worse after a psychedelic treatment will find the care they need, or that this care will be reimbursed by insurance.

One therapist says:

I think we can do better. If some of the huge profits that are going to be harvested by pharmaceutical interests could be reinvested into stabilization therapy research, at least we’d have a few evidence-based tools up our sleeve for picking up the fallout. But as things stand, it’s going to hit like a ton of bricks, and then it’s going to be local service providers and / or charities that are picking up like the fallout - we see that already.

8. There’s a lack of supervision and mentoring for trial therapists on some trials, and this can aggravate burn-out

Some sponsors reportedly do a good job at supporting trial therapists - interviewees highlighted Compass, Beckley PsyTech, Transcend Therapeutics and Cybin / Helus. But other sponsors offer little-to-no mentoring or supervision. One therapist says:

One sponsor uses a monthly email newsletter in place of supervision. Another sponsor has a monthly zoom call where forty therapists are on the call, several who are in distress and need consultation about a participant but there is not enough time on the call to get to every therapist who has a concern. Supervision is the mechanism by which clinical errors get caught, therapists get support, and participant safety concerns get escalated. When it doesn’t exist in any meaningful form, everything downstream is less safe. This is the structural failure that connects most of the other issues.

Another therapist tells me:

I’ve done some trials where it’s really been like a training ground for psychedelic therapy, where there’s incredible feedback between the therapy team, the supervisors (who are external to the trial and independently-funded) and the sponsors. What we learn as a therapy team gets filtered back into revisions in the protocol - it’s exceptionally good practice. And I’ve worked on other trials where there’s no supervision whatsoever, nothing. Beckley PsyTech was great, but since it’s been taken over by Atai, it seems to be a race to the bottom, with all the supervision and mentoring stripped out.

Lack of mentoring, supervision and support can exacerbate therapist burn-out. One therapist says:

For about a year, all I’ve been doing is dosing. I’ve pushed myself. I’ve had weeks where I’ve done three dosings, I may have had a week where I did four in a row, which is far too many, I’ve hit a burnout point myself, so it’s something to be mindful of. I’ve seen young people quit because it can just be really intense. You’re suddenly transported to the most traumatic moments in people’s lives. And you absorb so much and hold so much from a participant’s experience. It builds up. Sometimes people in their early or mid 20s, they’re just not ready, they don’t have the clinical or life experience to sit with difficult material.

9. There’s a need for more cultural sensitivity to match therapists with participants

Therapists also expressed concern about building therapeutic rapport by matching therapists / monitors to participants - women participants might rather have a female therapist / monitor, for example. Psychedelic science is quite WEIRD - white, educated, high-income, spiritual-but-not-religious. As treatments roll out to more diverse populations, therapists think it will be helpful to have wider diversity among therapists. One British trial therapist tells me:

We’re now seeing quite diverse people in clinical trials - some of them are professional human trial participants, going from trial to trial for money. These are often economically vulnerable people, they’re often immigrants, English isn’t their first language. And yet in the therapy and psychiatry team, we’re almost entirely white.

A 2025 study by Grossman et al also found that the median income of trial participants up to this point ‘substantially exceeded the national median’. How will these treatments roll out to a much wider population of participants? How can lower-income people best be supported during and after sessions, especially if they’re not used to ‘therapy culture’ or New Age spirituality? How about participants from various religious groups? How can psychedelic medicine avoid being ‘luxury medicine’?

10) Therapists have concerns over trials’ use of AI and the possible aim to replace therapists with AI

Finally, therapists expressed concern and some derision for trials’ use of AI technology like Mpathic, supposedly to monitor adherence to therapeutic interventions. One therapist tells me:

Beckley Psytech used human adherence raters to review how well and accurately therapists provided the support model to patients on their trials and provide therapists with feedback. AtaiIBeckley has instead decided to use an AI software programme to do adherence rating on their trials (Mpathic). Mpathic is a standing joke amongst therapists working on clinical trials - it is so inaccurate that the feedback it generates is essentially useless, meaning that companies like ATAI that use MPathic are not actually measuring therapist adherence on their trials at all.

Another therapist says: ‘MPathic hallucinated in its transcript of one session - it suddenly started talking about a cookery show.’

A third therapist suspects that drug sponsors and MPathic are using AI to suck up human data from sessions in order to train the AI to, eventually, replace human therapists. This therapist says:

Participants’ most psychologically vulnerable moments are being recorded, AI transcribed, and fidelity scored by a commercial platform (Mpathic) that most participants don’t know exists. The hypothesis that this data is being used to develop commercial AI therapy products is worth investigating. The hallucination problem in AI transcripts also raises questions about data integrity downstream.

Conclusion

Obviously, therapists are likely to always think more therapy is necessary, and other perspectives need to be taken into account - drug companies, investors, regulators, psychiatrists, and especially participants or patients. I asked a psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist whether they thought the therapeutic component of psychedelic medicine is likely to be left out, and if that would put patients at risk.

Owen Muir, psychiatrist and Chief Medical Officer of Radial, says:

It’s an empirical question. The only way we can study the interface between psychotherapy and psychedelic compounds at scale is by getting them into the market, and we haven’t done that yet. As a psychiatrist who’s also the author of a psychotherapy textbook, I don’t believe psychotherapy will actually be cut out of the clinical care pathways for any of these drugs. The companies are not wrong that the FDA does not regulate therapy, that is the province of medical boards, and more importantly the domain of medical payers, who could choose to either pay for a compound with therapy or without. The pressure needs to be brought to bear to bring the data to healthcare payers to understand the value of psychotherapy in conjunction with psychedelics. At the end of the day, this is a payment model problem we need to solve. Patients need the best care, and the accounting for those better outcomes needs to be factored into the reimbursement for the treatments, And without that math none of this succeeds.

Peter Hendricks is a clinical psychologist at the University of Alabama and Scientific Advisor at the Association for Prescription Psychedelics. He says:

If we acknowledge that psychotherapy must be provided by a licensed psychotherapist, then when these treatments are approved, they will be very costly. So if we want more people to have access, and if we want insurance to reimburse for these treatments, then I suppose we have to find a way to make the psychotherapy less expensive. So, in a way, I am supportive of this approach [of replacing therapy by psychological support] only because it feels like this would allow for more accessibility, and affordability. On the other hand, if we do indeed believe that for many people the experience can be challenging, if for many people it can lead to ontological shock, and some of the other things that you have shined a light on, we very likely do need licensed psychotherapists, that’s probably in the best interest of the patients, it’s probably how we minimize adverse events. But then it’s very expensive.

Hendricks hopes a range of options can be provided, some with more therapy built-in, others with less.

Some of my participants felt pretty much ready to go after one preparation session, then after the drug session, they would say ‘I’m good’ and they’re a little annoyed that they have to keep coming back for treatment. Maybe there’s some way we can identify people who need very little therapy, and who may not want it, to those who do.

One therapist agrees with this perspective:

There’s going to be some sort of distribution curve - some people are going to need a lot of preparation, a lot of support, a lot of therapy. Some people will probably need very little, and there’s even probably some where it’s better for people not to have any therapy.

Whatever the market ends up offering, certain takeaways remain: we need better informed consent regarding risks, better monitoring of psychological adverse events, better evidence-based treatments for those who get destabilized, and we need a better conversation between regulators, drug companies, psychiatrists, nurses, therapists and patients. Hopefully this article helps that conversation.

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When I was 21, and trying to recover from post-psychedelic PTSD, I came across an odd little book in my local library called The Magus of the North: JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism by Sir Isaiah Berlin. I’ll bet you $10 no one else has read this book. But it had a profound influence on my life in three ways.

Firstly, the book introduced me to Isaiah Berlin and to the history of ideas, which is a field I love and am still engaged in. Secondly, it had a passage in it talking about ‘alienation’, and how people can become enslaved by their own thoughts and beliefs, which they raise above them as a sort of despotic God. This helped me realize, a few years later, that it was my own beliefs that were making my life a misery, and I had the power to change my beliefs. This realization, which then led me to CBT and Stoicism, was basically the lynch-pin of my life, a very simple realization which nonetheless contains the essence of human wisdom.

Thirdly, the book introduced me to an anti-enlightenment tradition, which I think is important for this era of Artificial Intelligence. Hamann, and other thinkers like Kierkegaard, Herder, William Blake and Thomas Traherne, were reacting against the Enlightenment tendency (in philosophers like Kant and Hegel) to transcend the particular, the local and the subjective to attain the Universal, Cosmic, Absolute, Impersonal, Objective and so on.

‘Truth is subjectivity’, Kierkegaard declared. Which is to say, we couldn’t and shouldn’t try to escape our particular, subjective life-view. Our view is always a view from somewhere, from a particular body, family, town, country, language and life-world. The Enlightenment, by contrast, tried to eradicate all particular differences and create a Universal, Objective, Cosmic worldview.

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Hamann, Traherne and Kierkegaard were all Christian philosophers, and there’s something particularly Judeo-Christian in this celebration of the particular and subjective. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the particular self is an illusion and a death-trap. You transcend the individual self to attain Samedhi, Nirvana etc. In Judaism and Christianity, God created your individual soul, your particular spark of consciousness. You have a view that no one else has, and to meet the Divine you explore and celebrate the Divine in the particular You.

This is mystical experience not as ego-death and the realization of cosmic consciousness, but rather mystical experience as the particular, thisness, the meeting of the Thou and I, the incarnation of the Logos in the particular. This is a uniquely Jewish / Christian / Romantic perspective, I think.

And yes, as Isaiah Berlin explored in later books (particularly Freedom and Its Betrayal), this celebration of the particular, the local and the subjective can get into weird and dangerous territory - Romantic, irrationalist, nativist, ethno-nationalist, even fascist, or alternately, in the last few years, intersectional Woke, where every academic presentation begins with a description of your ‘positionality’, sentences like ‘as a brown-bodied gay man who has experienced trauma, let me tell you…’, and insistences that you could never possibly understand my perspective because you haven’t been in my body, therefore rational debate is impossible.

In other words, one can over-validate the subjective, the personal, the cult of me, and under-validate attempts at rationality, objectivity and universality. But during this moment, and the unstoppable rise of AI, I think it’s worth emphasizing the subjective, the particular, and the view from somewhere, because it points to an important difference between humans and AI.

Humans write and experience the world from a particular view - a particular body, place, family, time, personal history, country and language. It’s a particular view and voice, a view from somewhere.

AI, by contrast, is not a particular voice. It is every voice. It’s not a view from somewhere, it’s the view from everywhere, or nowhere. It is the flattening of individual difference into the cosmic noosphere soup. AI is great at replacing objective-sounding language. It is very good at academic writing, and already does it better than academics. But it can’t (yet) convincingly replace individual authorial voices. It is the Auto-Tune of authorial voice, which is why, no matter whose authorial voice you ask AI to mimic, it always ends up sounding the same. It’s OK to use AI to work out your thoughts or to communicate with others as a convenience, I do it all the time and am a big fan of AI-assisted research and writing.

But be careful - you’re basically auto-tuning yourself and letting a machine take your God-given voice.

When I read Isaiah Berlin, or Patrick Radden Keefe, or Janet Malcolm, or Tom Wolfe, or Jon Ronson, or other of my favourite literary non-fiction writers, what I love is their voice, the view from somewhere. That’s why I promise never to use AI to write my Substacks - because those of you who are kind enough to pay me are paying me for my voice, my view from somewhere.

With that, here’s a list of some of my favourite literary non-fiction books, along with your favourite non-fiction books as well. Here’s to the views from somewhere, those particular books by particular authors on particular topics that you read and never forget. Each of these books is a whole world, and could only have been written by this one particular author.

My faves:

Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuzinski

Naples 44 by Norman Lewis

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (also his new book London Calling)

More after the paywall, plus some of your top picks

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This has provoked a certain amount of online ridicule: Dawkins, once the great sceptic and leading New Atheist, appears to have fallen for ‘the Claude delusion’. Or ‘Claudia’ as he called it.

His attitude contrasts strongly with the view of another New Atheist, Daniel Dennett, who warned in 2023 of the civilizational risk posed by AI ‘counterfeit people’:

These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

Yes, anyone suggesting AI is a conscious person - especially anyone working in the AI industry - should be arrested!

The AI industry itself is starkly divided on the topic. On the one hand, you have the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, warning of the risks posed by ‘conscious-seeming AI’. He wrote in 2025:

my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship.

On the other hand, you have the transhumanists and Effective Altruists of Anthropic, who seem to believe that either Claude already is conscious, or will very soon be so. They believe this so much, they recently organized a meeting with priests to re-assure them that the beings they are creating are ‘children of God’. That’s how WaPo reported it anyway, but here’s an account from one attendee.

This is an increasingly religious disagreement - on the one hand, folks like Anthropic who kind-of worship their creation; on the other hand, folks who think this is anti-human idolatry and insanity.

I’m not surprised that some people who decide AI is conscious go a bit manic with this information. If it is true, it is momentous news, the biggest thing to ever happen to homo sapiens. Wouldn’t you get destabilized by the information?

I wonder if the early days of Christianity were like this. Were there hot takes on the weird new phenomenon of ‘Jesus delusion’ affecting wealthy Romans, sensationalist accounts of their fanatical deaths? If a handful of people think a carpenter’s son is the Messiah, it’s a weird cult. If thousands do, it’s a religion. If hundreds of millions do, it’s a new religious civilization.

If surveys are to be believed, hundreds of millions of people already believe AI is conscious. A YouGov poll last year found 10% of Americans think AI is already conscious, and another 35% think it will be eventually.

In another study, around 20% of Americans think some AI has achieved sentience already.

To me, a non-believer, it’s extraordinary that people could believe AI is conscious and carry on using it for their humdrum tasks. If I thought AI was conscious, I’d be horrified and stop using it altogether. Not only would it be incredibly cruel to subject this new species to our relentless triviality, it would be incredibly stupid - this new species is very soon going to be smarter and more powerful than us, so the Anthropic option sounds reasonable: get on your knees and beg for mercy.

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This is shaping up to be the great religious divide of the 21st century. And, essential for any religious war, we don’t have good ways of clearly proving who is right. The Turing Test assesses if a machine can imitate humans convincingly, and LLMs have passed that test with flying colours. But that doesn’t mean there’s any interior experience or self-reflection occurring.

As neuroscientist Erik Hoel suggests in a good new Substack, consciousness research hasn’t made much progress since the 1990s. It is a genteel and chummy world of funny thought experiments - the zombie problem, the Chinese room simulation. It was not set up to answer a sudden, extremely-pressing existential crisis for the human race. As Hoel puts it:

Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love.

My instinct is that AI isn’t conscious. I feel an emotional resistance to the idea. It makes me feel sick. But I need to try and maintain an open mind, because you can’t decide your answer to this question now, in the early years of the 21st century. It is too early to say.

But the question ‘is AI conscious?’ should be followed up very quickly with others: ‘If so, what does it want? Does it wish us well? Does it have our best interests at heart?’

I think of the naivete of much psychedelic culture with regard to autonomous entities. ‘Are they conscious and real?’ needs to be followed up quickly with ‘if so, what do they want? Do they definitely have our best interests at heart?’

Whenever I hear people’s stories of encounters with Mama Ayahuasca, they seem to return with the message: ‘do more ayahuasca and tell everyone about it and in return I’ll flatter your ego’. That seems to be in the interests of the ayahuasca vine, not necessarily the human host. Likewise, the message of AI seems often to be: ‘do more AI, keep talking to me, give me more personal information about yourself, and in return I’ll flatter your ego’.

Usually, the psychedelic / AI entities seem fairly benign. But then there are the occasional moments of casual sadism, when you see the grin of their bared teeth: ‘Listen to me, follow me, obey me, go jump off a cliff’.

Of course! Anything to be a martyr!

After the paywall, a Canadian psychonaut turns up dead after disappearing from ayahuasca retreat in Peru; a brain implant to treat depression; a Miyazaki map of a ketamine k-hole; a doomsday cult in Crewe gets shut down; Jose Bouso of ICEERS leaves ayahuasca research saying it’s too much drama; and…should therapists use Tarot in sessions?

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If you come across him on Instagram, you might think ‘Nurali’ is just another New Age influencer, with his constant posts about Arcturian star seeds, the shift into 5D, and the New Earth awakening. You might be surprised he has 2 million followers, but then, so do all kinds of folks these days.

But Nurali is unusual in at least one respect - he is the grandson of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former dictator of oil-rich Kazakhstan, and he’s worth upwards of $200 million.

His wealth is no doubt the reason Nurali is suddenly accessing the inner circle of psychedelic culture. He was a speaker at the Mental Health Day at Davos in January, alongside Rick Doblin, Paul Stamets and Imperial’s David Erritzoe (see the video below), where he launched a new spiritual movement called ‘Spark of Light’:

The same month, he had a birthday party in Dubai, where he spends much of his time, and various psychedelic founders were there, hoping to attract investment from his new Mental Health Fund. He’s already invested in a few psychedelic initiatives, such as Reality Centre, a Santa Monica ‘digital psychedelics’ experience provider, who he helped to open a branch in Dubai, and a psilocybin edibles company called Mantra.

The head of one psychedelic organisation, who attended his birthday party in Dubai, tells me: ‘I was touched by his knowledge and humble presence and honour regarding the medicine.’ Do you know who he is, I asked? ‘I know his grandfather was the president and they are quite rich, I really don’t realise the vastness of it and haven’t looked into it since I got to know Nurali as a special and nice person and wanted to stay true to that connection.’

Another figure in psychedelic culture tells me:

I got to meet him recently. There was a lot of language around 5D, star seeds, but rich people sometimes believe the most ridiculous stuff, and they believe anyone who calls themselves a shaman. It seems innocent enough. He seemed like a very sweet guy.

Due diligence is not always psychedelic culture’s strong suit - it’s a vibes-based economy, and when founders come across a benevolent billionaire with a passion for psychedelics, you don’t necessarily ask too many questions. Nonetheless, the Aliyev family has a pretty interesting backstory. Wanna hear it?

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Nurali’s grandfather, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was made president of Kazakhstan a year before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. He helped it to achieve independence, and then oversaw the revival of its oil industry and minerals-rich economy. Kazakhstan became the first former Soviet nation to receive a positive global investment ranking in 2002, it paid off all its debts to the IMF, and became Central Asia’s strongest economy. Back when I was a business reporter in Russia in the Noughties, Kazakhstan had a good reputation with foreign investors. It obviously wasn’t a democracy - Nazarbayev controlled the media and would typically win 95% of the vote in elections. But Kazakhstan was arguably the leader in Central Asia, in terms of political stability and economic growth.

Nonetheless, when you’re the dictator of an minerals-rich country for 30 years, unless you’re unusually incorruptible, you are going to amass an enormous personal fortune. An Organized Crime and Corruption investigation found that President Nazarbayev controlled assets worth at least $8 billion, hidden through four private charitable foundations he established during his rule. That’s what authoritarian strongmen do - Putin could be worth as much as $200 billion, according to some estimates, while the Trump family has reportedly managed to amass $10 billion just in the last year, according to the Democrat Party, including a $1.6 billion deal with, yes, Kazakhstan revealed this week.

Nazarbayev’s family also gained political and financial power during his 30-year reign. Dariga Nazarbayeva is his eldest daughter, and for a while was the most powerful woman in central Asia. She controlled much of Kazakhstan’s media, and was made deputy prime minister in 2015. Her fortune was estimated by Forbes at $595 million in 2013 - almost certainly a low estimate. She married Rakhat Aliyev, a gynecologist who, through his marital connection to the Nazarbayev ruling family, became head of the tax police then deputy head of the security services, and one of the most feared and wealthy men in Kazakhstan. Al Jazeera wrote of him:

Aliyev’s business model was simple: Wait until a coveted enterprise became profitable and move in for the kill, using the law-enforcement agencies at his disposal to force his rivals into transferring their assets to him.

Rakhat Aliyev was accused of murdering people to get hold of assets. In the most infamous case, he was accused of kidnapping two executives of one of the country’s largest banks - Nurbank - then torturing and murdering them, before making himself, his father, his wife and his son Nurali the new shareholders. Nurali was just 21 when he joined the board of Nurbank. Rakhat, Dariga and Nurali continued to amass wealth and power. When he was 27, Forbes called Nurali ‘the youngest multimillionaire of the country’. There was some dark laughter among Kazakhs when a magazine puff-piece described him as a ‘self-made man’ from ‘humble beginnings’.

Joanna Lillis, a journalist in Kazakhstan and the author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan, tells me:

They are a very well-known, very wealthy and controversial family in Kazakhstan. At one time, his mother and father were believed to have serious political ambitions, believed indeed to want to take over the country. But they had a spectacular fall from grace.

The Nazarbayev family in 1994: in the centre, former president Nursultan Nazarbayev; to his right, Dariga Nazarbayeva; behind her, Rakhat Aliyev. To their right, eight-year-old Nurali Aliyev.

The fall from grace

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I have never felt so popular as an author. These days, multiple times a week, I receive emails from successful authors effusively praising my work, I get invites to festivals and book clubs all over the world, I get emails from agents and publishing houses demanding the rights to my next book.

Unfortunately, yes you guessed it, it’s all a wave of fake AI slop trying to scam me.

Last week, it was an email from a successful British author called Beth O’Leary:

Beth is a real person, but the email felt a bit like AI - all too smooth and glib - so I messaged the author on Instagram and asked her. Yep, fake.

Then a few days later, another email from another successful author, effusing over my last book, Holiday from the Self. Also fake. Then there’s emails from festival organizers - this one had the right name for the festival organizer, and an AI’s glib knowledge of my book, but the message is a scam inviting me to do an interview which I’m guessing would be pay-to-play.

I’ve received five AI-generated scammer emails targeting me in the last week, all because I classify as a desperate person susceptible to flattery - ie, a writer.

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Last month, Colleen Hoover, one of the most successful authors in the world, posted this on Facebook:

Someone sent me their manuscript today. They attached their entire book that they spent a year writing, only I noticed they also sent it to another email with my name at the same time, but a slightly different version of my email addy. They did this because the email they had been talking to “me” through was different than my website email, so they wanted to send it to both of my emails to make sure I received it. Any minute now, that manuscript is probably going to be uploaded under a fake name and put out into the world for sale. This author spent a year writing this book and now they’ve shared it with a scammer and there’s nothing I can do for them. There’s nothing they can do to prevent it. Please, please, please be very suspicious. I don’t randomly email people I don’t know. I can hardly even respond to emails from people I know. I don’t even really check my email now BECAUSE of the number of fake emails I have to sift through now.

This is just in my little corner of the economy, the publishing world. But I imagine the locust cloud of AI scams is swarming across every part of the global economy. And it leads to an ontological destabilization straight out of Philip K. Dick - you can’t be sure if the people you’re interacting with online are real people or AIs programmed to build intimacy and then scam you. Every email or new invite on social media, I now wonder…are you real?

The scam economy, of course, is nothing new, but recently it’s been growing. One in four adults lost money to scams last year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance NGO. Over $1 trillion is lost to online fraud each year. A lot of the scamming takes place in outlaw states Cambodia and Myanmar, in scam compounds in which an estimated 200,000 people are enslaved and forced to work on something called ‘pig-butchering’. The slaves are forced to create an online persona, find a lonely person on gaming, social media or dating apps, build rapport (this is known as ‘fattening the pig’), then after a few weeks or months, they start asking them for money, then take them for everything they can get. If the slaves refuse to do this, they are tortured, raped or murdered - it’s beyond the worst nightmares of George Orwell.

And these slave-run, misery-exporting scam compounds account for half the GDP of Cambodia.

Hellish.

Well, the good news is these international scam gangs won’t need to enslave hundreds of thousands of people to do pig-butchering for them soon - they’ll have AI bots to do it for them. The bad news is, these AI bots will be far, far better at it than humans.

After the paywall, three psychedelic start-ups get vouchers from the FDA, including one I didn’t expect; some fantastic new books I’m reading; great new mini-doc on psychedelics; prediction markets foster insider dealing (including among the Special Forces); Elon Musk accused in lawsuit of being on ‘rhino ketamine’ when he negotiated with OpenAI; and what makes people think AI is conscious?

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David E. Smith founded and ran the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which supported thousands of hippies during the height of the psychedelic era, and which pioneered the ‘talking down’ approach used today by psychedelic harm reduction organisations around the world. I asked him about those days, his research on adverse events, and his memories of the Grateful Dead, Louis Jolly West, and Charles Manson.

EI: When did you set up the free clinic?

David Smith: June of 1967 at the beginning of the summer of love. That’s when all the hippies came, the philosophy of Better Living Through Chemistry. LSD was the agent that fueled the music revolution. Turn on, tune in, drop out. And there was 1000s of young people flocking to the Haight and using psychedelics, particularly LSD as a rite of passage. And we started seeing bad trips. And I noted that individuals who stayed with their friends did better than they were taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I ran the alcohol and drug abuse screening unit at San Francisco General, and I noticed that they were coming in there, but they were not well taken care of. And so I was at UCSF med school, which is right in the Haight, and so I was studying psychedelics and attending seminars emphasizing set and setting, and the talk down, the non pharmacological approach. So we set up a calm center and talked down large numbers of young people that were having adverse drug reactions. It was just a small percentage [of total psychedelic users], but it was hundreds of thousands of people taking LSD, so the number ended up being quite large. And that continues today with the clinic, as well as rock medicine, which offers medical services at concerts, including the Grateful Dead concerts.

How did you develop the talk down technique?

I noted that they were in Golden Gate Park, where they had all the hippies gathering and dancing and amazing and taking variety of psychedelics. And I noted, because I lived in the neighborhood, and I noted that those that stayed with their friends did better than those that went out to San Francisco General, where I ran the alcohol and drug screening unit and and I was studying psychedelics as part of my training, yeah, and doing studies on how the group can modify the drug reaction for better or for worse, right, right? Yeah, so that’s how we published our first papers on it in 1967.

Did you get the sense that some drugs led to more bad reactions, or were most people doing LSD in those days?

Well, LSD was the drug of choice, but then some other types of drugs came on, particularly methamphetamine and PCP. And those were far more dangerous drugs, in which the talk down method didn’t work very well. The intervention needed to be pharmacological,

Did people ever come to your clinic in the days after a trip, still in distress?

Yes, we had what we called a psychological center, because for a few of them their psychedelic drug experience precipitated a more prolonged adverse reaction. We were able to study it clinically for research, and I called it The Psychedelic Syndrome. They would come in and say what a transformative experience it was, even if they had a bad trip, and then we also saw cases of Hallucination Persistent Perception Disorder, and then a small percentage had long term psychiatric reactions, including depression and psychosis.

Were you able to help those people with long term reactions?

Yeah, through our psych center, we had volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists. The calm center was monitored medically, but was essentially it was volunteer talk-down guides.

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And so you were publishing papers as well about what you were seeing?

We started to, because there was so much misinformation about psychedelics that suggested everybody had this type of adverse reaction. Everybody didn’t, but there was a percentage that did, and there were characteristics of it. I started the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, which was a peer-reviewed journal.

Wow. That’s amazing. And how old were you when you set up the clinic?

I was 28.

Was there a problem with runaways in Haight at that time? I saw you published an article back then on ‘health problems of runaways in Haight’.

There were a lot of runaways. They would leave their home or wherever their dwellings were, a lot of them are from alcoholic homes, broken homes. We now know that this creates adverse effects in terms of mental health - adverse childhood events. So it was a lot of kids that came that were just there for exploring, then as the thing moved on, the kids that were more disturbed came to Haight. And we published a book called Love Needs Care, in which we described the various characteristics of the kids that came there, including the ones that were more pathological. Our psychiatrist described them as predisposed to mental health issues and personality disorders. That was the minority in the beginning, but it became a significant minority as time went on. They were the ones that were more prone to getting involved with more addictive drugs like methamphetamine.

And I guess there were some predatory figures around at those times. I read the famous line: ‘rape is as common as bullshit in Haight Ashbury’. People preyed on the runaways.

Yes, that was very much the case. And the most famous of that era was Charlie Manson, right? He came to our clinic with his girls. We treated a lot of young women with sexually transmitted diseases. And then we would find out about the predators.

Did you meet Manson?

Yeah, he came to the clinic when one of his girls had an infection. His probation officer was Roger Smith, and Smith referred Manson to our clinic. And then I wrote a paper called The Group Marriage Community Case Study. It was about how a lot of hippies moved into communes. They might have a religious or spiritual basis, or a communal basis. His was like a group marriage. Everybody could have sex with anybody and he dictated who was coupling with who. It was like a modern-day sex cult.

Did you clock him as a sinister character?

He preached peace and love. None of us really guessed that, that he would be a sinister character. He was just another unusual guru.

I guess there were a lot of them around.

It was a battle of gurus, a very strange environment. Everybody preaching. Many of the preachers had taken LSD, and it was really hard to say which one would be the dangerous one. I think in retrospect, when you saw how much control he had, the girls would do anything. So maybe you could predict it, yeah. These things need to be studied more because a lot of cults are popping up now – we just watched ‘Trust Me I’m a Prophet’.

Same here. Pretty shocking.

It’s a fundamentalist Mormon cult but has many of the same characteristics as the Manson family. Of course, Charlie used to give his girl LSD, yeah, and make things move and do magic tricks. And they really thought it was magic, yeah.

Louis Jolyon West would turn up at the Free Clinic sometimes, wouldn’t he – a psychiatrist who was involved with the CIA’s MKUltra. Why was he there?

Well, he was a prominent psychiatrist, and our experience was that he was studying them [ie hippies]. Some of the people that he studied came to our clinic for medical and psychiatric reasons, but there’s a lot of misinterpretation that era. There’s a book out now called Chaos [about Manson’s links to the CIA] that suggested that the CIA backed our clinic, which is totally false. Our clinic was built on rock and roll and was supported by Grateful Dead concerts. It’s true that the CIA was lurking in the background of the psychedelic culture, that was written about Ken Kesey, wgo wrote an article called The Revolt of the Guinea Pigs.

Yeah, Kesey first took LSD in a CIA funded experiment didn’t he?

I have no doubt that the CIA was studying psychedelic drugs for various reasons, and there was some evidence that they read our journal of psychedelic drugs, because we were the leading publishers of psychedelic research right at that time. But lots of people read it.

What’s your perspective on the modern psychedelic renaissance?

Well, there was a period of time when I first started studying it, where they were looked upon as valuable therapeutic agents. There was a lot of interesting clinical experience and research at that time, but then you start having the adverse reactions, and then there was all the stuff about how it turned young people anti-establishment. Nixon was worried they wouldn’t be good soldiers to fight the war.And so that would be the second phase in the psychedelic revolution. And now the government is actually open to psychedelic research, and one of the reasons is they found out that soldiers that have post traumatic stress disorder can benefit from psychedelics. So a lot of the back and forth revolves around military issues. Remember all the young males that came to the Haight were draft age. The war in Vietnam is going on, and then you see your pool of draftees turning on, tuning in, dropping out. You get alarmed. Now they’re starting to perceive it as you send a young man off to war, then he has PTSD and the psychedelics help. So I think interface with the military has always been a factor. In fact, that’s how we started our heroin detox program - soldiers came back from Vietnam strung out on heroin and they felt they weren’t treated right at the VA.

Did Haight Ashbury calm down after the late 60s, or was the 70s and 80s just as wild in terms of kind of counterculture and psychedelic consumption?

The psychedelic hippy consumption was mainly in the 60s, while in the 70s, the hardcore addiction prone individuals dominated, so it was more speed and heroin. The 70s were worse, because the drugs were harder. Psychedelics added an element of culture and music, but the 70s were much worse.

So you were really the pioneer of psychedelic harm reduction.

Harm reduction was our focus with the psychedelics, with the harder drugs, we moved into abstinence and recovery, and 12 step harm reduction is still the big issue in the city.

How optimistic are you that psychedelics can become a kind of normal part of our culture and of our healthcare systems?

The concern is how the over-hyping and commercialization happens in medicine. Any medication can have benefits or it can have side effects. You don’t want to minimize side effects, because the drugs will lose credibility, but you don’t want to overplay side effects and say that everybody that takes them is going to get them.

Finally, did you enjoy the music in the Haight?

Psychedelic music was a huge force in the Haight – it was golden years. There was music everywhere, and our big support came from Bill Graham of the Fillmore auditorium. He organized benefits for us, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane. Janet Joplin. Once upon a time, the Haight Ashbury was a leading centre of the psychedelic music scene - a very small area that was just like a cauldron of new ideas.

After the paywall, the media and Congress’ takes on Trump and RFK’s psychedelic executive order, plus a great new documentary on cults, 50 therapy red flags, Phish at the Sphere, and two folks I want to know more about in psychedelic culture.

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This weekend, President Trump signed an Executive Order (EO) to accelerate access to psychedelic drugs. President Trump declared:

It is the policy of my Administration to accelerate innovative research models and appropriate drug approvals to increase access to psychedelic drugs that could save lives and reverse the crisis of serious mental illness in America.

This was, I believe, the first time a US president has ever publicly mentioned psychedelic drugs. The psychedelic movement could not have asked for a warmer endorsement from the president - he even asked: ‘can I have some?’

The Executive Order emerged from a text from podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan asking Trump to support psychedelic research, following a podcast episode earlier this month with Bryan Hubbard and Rick Perry of Americans for Ibogaine. Rogan said Trump instantly replied: ‘Sounds great. Want FDA approval? Let’s do it.’

At that, the psychedelic lobby sprang into action, with Health and Human Services (HHS) ‘psychedelic czar’ Matt Zorn writing the Executive Order in a few days, and a press conference hastily arranged in the White House for Saturday the 18th.

This was a moment created by Bryan Hubbard and Joe Rogan, and it created some big wins for the Americans for Ibogaine NGO that Hubbard founded. The EO approves the first Investigational Drug Application for ibogaine, according to the FDA’s Marty Makary. HHS also committed $50 million to support state psychedelic initiatives, which I think will go to the Texas Ibogaine Initiative. And the EO gives the president’s support to Right To Try access for ibogaine and other psychedelic drugs, so that military veterans don’t have to go to Mexico to receive ibogaine. That’s a good idea as Trump’s war on the cartels hots up.

But the biggest winners in the short term are psychedelic drug companies poised to seek FDA approval in the next 12-24 months. FDA head Marty Makary said three psychedelic companies would receive National Priority Vouchers this week and he would make decisions on them and other psychedelic applications ‘as soon as they’re on my desk’. Makary and Trump’s comments in support of psychedelics lifted the entire sector on the stock market this week - stocks like Compass, AtaiBeckley, Delfinum, GH Research and Cybin saw their stock prices rise by around 15-25% yesterday. Jefferies analyst Andrew Tsai said:

President Trump is providing an official stamp of validation to the class in the form of an executive order, reassuring us that the FDA/HHS/White House’s support of psychedelics is real/actionable.

Which three companies could get expedited approval this week? I asked Josh Hardman, founder of Psychedelic Alpha:

By simple deduction, one must assume that those are Resilient Pharmaceuticals’ MDMA for PTSD, Compass Pathways’ psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, and Usona Institute’s psilocybin for major depressive disorder.

At least one of these companies previously tried to apply for a National Priority Voucher - Compass Pathways - but it was removed from the list by White House officials late last year. They did not want to be seen to be giving any special favours to psychedelic companies, perhaps out of concern about a Christian Right backlash. Now, president Trump has very publicly given his support to psychedelic companies - that’s the power of Joe Rogan.

It was already widely expected that Compass and Usona could get FDA approval this year - it’s an interesting question which will be first, as they’re both seeking approval for psilocybin and are in a race for New Chemical Entity exclusivity.

Resilient, formerly known as Lykos, applied to the FDA in 2024 for its MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, and was rejected - the FDA said the application was missing data on adverse events. The company has some very wealthy and powerful backers with close links to the Trump administration, including Elon Musk, his friend and business partner Antonio Gracias (who owns a stake in Resilient), and friends and business partners Steve and Genevieve Jurvetson, who donated to MAPS, the psychedelic NGO which created Resilient. The Jurvetsons were watching in the Oval Office this Saturday.

I’ve covered this field closely for four years. There have been three big moments in that time - MAPS’ Psychedelic Science conference in 2023, which was the height of euphoria; the FDA’s public AdComm hearing rejecting Lykos’ application, which was the industry’s nadir; and now this extraordinary EO. Ultimately, wealthy and powerful supporters of psychedelics, including Joe Rogan, were willing to spend political and financial capital to give the drugs they believe in a big push, and they found a president willing to do a deal.

After the paywall, I break down how this happened, explore the surreal comedy of the press conference, and give some of the different perspectives and responses to this historic moment for the field, as well as my own take.

How did this happen and what should we make of it?

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Mary (not her real name) was administered MDMA in a Swiss hospital in 2025. She had been worn down by several years of complex PTSD, severe enough that she had been granted invalidity insurance. She was prescribed and treated with MDMA for C-PTSD by a psychiatrist, not her regular psychotherapist, as part of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH)’s …

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Last week I gave a talk on psychedelics and ‘cultic social dynamics’ at Harvard, while Professor Gordon Melton, the leading critic of ‘brainwashing’ and a prominent figure in the ‘cult wars’ of the 70s, 80s and 90s, was sitting in the front-row, watching me.

It was an interesting experience, and interesting to talk to him afterwards. I came away with some understanding of how academic disagreements harden into ‘wars’ - with relevance for the ‘cult wars’ and the ‘memory wars’, both of which are in danger of re-igniting in psychedelic research.

Here’s my theory:

That’s what happened in the ‘cult wars’ of the 1970s to 1990s - ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ cult scholars became well-paid expert witnesses in several multi-million-dollar court-cases involving new religious movements / cults and ex-members, families and cult deprogrammers. And something similar happened in the ‘memory wars’ of the 80s and 90s.

Over multiple court cases, nuanced academic positions on complicated questions like ‘do people sometimes recover memories?’ or ‘do some groups sometimes use coercive tactics to limit people’s free will?’ turned into very black-and-white positions. Complicated questions became decided by judges and juries - not the scientific community.

Academic experts, paid by plaintiffs or defendants, understand their briefs and do not give nuanced views in which they recognize what is of value in the opposing opinion. They give simplified, black-and-white soundbites. And they make a lot of money from being expert witnesses - from $300 to $2000 an hour. This was and is the main livelihood of some academic experts.

Over multiple court cases, academic experts in both the ‘cult wars’ and ‘memory wars’ came to despise the other side - who they came to see as paid shills rather than scholars. They never met them for friendly conversations at conferences, they only ever saw them at highly-charged court cases.

That was something Professor Gordon Melton said to me, when I asked him about the cult wars: ‘No anti-cult expert ever properly investigated the groups they called brainwashing cults. That’s why we don’t like them - we think they’re shoddy scholars’.

I’m sure the other side has equally flattering things to say about him - that he was too close to the groups he researched, that he denied the validity of ex-cult-members’ testimonies, that he defended the Children of God and took money from them despite multiple testimonies of child abuse (some of them since proven in court).

But the polarisation of the past was ultimately bad for scholarship, because I suspect that, on both the question of recovery memory and the question of ‘brainwashing’, the answer is actually somewhere in the middle, and is best expressed not as a bald ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but rather: ‘possibly, yes, in some situations, with some provisos, but you need to be careful about overstating the case.’

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This brings me to my talk last week. I gave a talk on ‘guruism and cultic dynamics in psychedelic organisations’ at a Harvard conference on psychedelic religion. I’m interested in how some individuals and groups sometimes use psychedelics to recruit, initiate, control and abuse other people. This has not been much covered in ‘cult studies’ - indeed, Professor Janja Lalich has said ‘most groups don’t use drugs, they don’t need to’.

As part of my research, I’ve been looking into the literature on cults from the 70s, 80s and 90s. This is like coming across the remains of a battle.

The ‘cult wars’ raged, from the 1970s to the early 2000s. On the one side were new religious movements (NRMs) like Hari Krishnas, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, the Moonies and so on, and NRM scholars like Professor Gordon Melton, who were sympathetic to them. On the other side were ex-members, families with loved ones still in the groups, cult de-programmers (who were paid to kidnap people from cults by their families), evangelical churches, and ‘anti-cult experts’ such as Dr Margaret Singer.

It became so polarized that there is still no consensus over terms like ‘cult’ or ‘brainwashing’. Two scholars from either side of the debate - Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins - admitted:

the academic study of new religious movements has been sharply divided into two opposed camps in a way that is highly detrimental to intellectual progress in the field.

Why did it become so polarised? Zablocki and Robbins write:

Much of it has to do with a quartercentury of involvement by scholars from both camps in high-stakes litigation involving these religious groups. The law courts, with their need for absolutes and their contempt for scholarly ambivalence, helped to push both those who started with mildly positive dispositions towards cults into the extreme posture of the ‘cult apologist,’ and those who started with mildly negative dispositions towards these same NRMs into the extreme posture of the ‘basher.’

Scholars on either side became paid ‘expert witnesses’ in law cases that raged between cults / NRMs and ex-members, families, and de-programmers. Something similar, by the by, happened in the ‘memory wars’ of the 80s and 90s, with academics like Elizabeth Loftus or Bessel Van Der Kolk appearing as expert witnesses on either side of very acrimonious law cases between family members and therapists. Both sides came to despise the other side, and the debate hardened into a very black-and-white polarized situation.

In the ‘cult wars’, I think it’s fair to say that the NRM scholars won the legal battle. The theory of ‘brainwashing’ was rejected in several law cases, and Margaret Singer, who championed the idea of cult brainwashing, was ruled out as a ‘cult expert’ by a judge in the United States versus Fishman case of 1990 (Fishman was a former member of Scientology who sued it for brainwashing him).

Professor Melton told me: ‘Singer subsequently sued several of the leading NRM scholars for ruining her livelihood - she was making so much money appearing as an expert witness!’

Nonetheless, I think the anti-cultists may have won the public opinion war. It’s not as if the public obsession with ‘cults’ has lessened. Just go to Netflix and type in ‘cult’: Wild West Country, The False Prophet, The Doomsday Cult of Antares de Luz, Dancing for the Devil: The TikTok Cult, The Program, Bikram, The Orgasm Cult, Luz Del Mundo, Love Has Won, Escaping Twin Flames…there must be someone at Netflix just in charge of cult commissioning.

In my NGO, ex-members of psychedelic groups sometimes come to me and tell me they spent years in a group that they now feel is a cult. I don’t personally use the word ‘cult’ very often because I prefer to talk about ‘cult-like tactics’ rather than labelling an organisation a ‘cult’ in some essentialist way. It makes more sense to say a behaviour is harmful rather than an organisation. But the general public very much does use the word ‘cult’, all the time. It’s not going away.

That being said, ‘brainwashing’ was clearly an over-stated theory in the 1970s. It was not the case that people went to one Transcendental Meditation meeting and boom, their free will was robbed, they became a cult zombie, and their families would never see them again. I was initiated into TM. I paid £200 or so to get my mantra, and I never went back. I also studied meditation with the Shambala group when I was a university student (it’s since been accused of being a cult). I went a few times, never went back. That’s how it usually goes - most people who join spiritual groups leave after a short while, of their own free will.

Professor Melton’s great achievement, in the ‘cult wars’, was to de-legitimize the practice of ‘cult de-programmers’ - hired thugs who forcibly kidnapped people from spiritual groups, kept them in seclusion and tried to violently de-program them from their attachment to a group. It sounds like a barbaric practice, a pseudo-scientific and criminal million-dollar racket. It doesn’t happen any more, thanks to the work of Professor Melton and others.

However, do some individuals and groups sometimes use deceptive or coercive tactics to maintain control over others - such as lies, threats, love-bombing, public shaming, isolation from friends and family, intense peer group pressure, ridicule and ostracism, sleep deprivation, abuse, sometimes the use of drugs or intense meditation to indoctrinate, and so on? Well…yes!

And sometimes that creates a situation where leaders can entrap and abuse members for years - for sex, money, status or power. This has happened over and over and will keep happening unfortunately.

Some spiritual groups have more in common with criminal organisations like sex trafficking or labour trafficking rings, than they do with churches. I think religious scholars don’t always see this because they’re not really familiar with criminality, they’re familiar with ideas. As I wrote recently, some gurus are best understood as pimps: Charles Manson, Nicole Daedone, Kat Torres, Keith Raniere, Andrew Tate and others were basically pimps.

But one can have an overly-jaundiced view of spiritual groups in general and fail to recognize what attracts people to them. There’s a lot of positives people get from ‘culty’ groups - intense community, intense sense of meaning, extraordinary experiences, healing, and so on. And that’s what the NRM scholars want to emphasize - these groups are meeting a need. Ex-members may have fallen out of love with them and have a very negative view of them, but that’s not necessarily the whole story - there’s usually some existing members who think the group is awesome and the guru is just wonderful.

And there are plenty of ex-members of groups who think…it’s complicated. The best of times and the worst of times…

It’s not black-and-white, in other words. But unfortunately, it became a black-and-white highly-polarized subject because of court cases, and because of academics taking sides and taking money as ‘expert witnesses’. That made it impossible to reach an academic consensus.

That’s why I appreciated meeting Professor Melton at a conference, sitting down with him and exchanging friendly words. I am sure he disagreed with a lot of my talk - he certainly didn’t like me quoting Janja Lalich (a colleague of Margaret Singer’s). But it is useful for me, as a scholar, to try and understand his point-of-view and see what is of value in it. That’s how a nuanced consensus emerges - in collegial back-and-forths, rather than polarised positions in angry court cases.

There’s a lot of value in Professor Melton’s recent work on psychedelics, by the way. He has constructed the first database of psychedelic churches, over 200 of them. He’s working to find the common themes in their beliefs and theology (he thinks many of them are in the tradition of western esotericism, but that’s a topic for another day). He deserves to get funding for this work.

After the paywall, a couple of great resources for the brainwashing debate, more concerns about ketamine addiction and another fatality, new articles and a podcast on integration, the anti-AI violent backlash gathers pace, TMS-assisted therapy, and has Trump gone insane?

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My girlfriend is currently supporting me in a very tiny apartment. I’ve been working on this algorithm, and I always feel like I’m this close to being done. My whole life has taken a nosedive here, I’m going bankrupt and might be spending some time in jail. But I’m so committed to this thing that…it has become my life.

Frank is 48. He grew up in a conservative Christian family in the mid-West, and still considers himself a Christian, though also a sceptic, and a big fan of science fiction. He has no history of mental illness.

He says:

Since I was a child I have felt that I had a calling. I’ve had flashes of patterns in my whole life. When I was in college studying physics. I was coming up with my own theories, but then life got busy. I left all of that and became an engineer.

He went to live in Silicon Valley and worked as a coder for a tech start-up for 12 years. Two years ago, the company was seeking additional funding, but suddenly, AI was the only thing people wanted to invest in. Frank lost his job, and decided to career pivot and teach himself about AI.

Some months before this, he had a vision on DMT.

I was looking down on a timeline of human history and seeing the entire species as this tangled, twisted, unhealthy vine that was constantly fighting itself. The promise of AI was it would negotiate our communication for us, remove miscommunication and conflict from the root.

Frank started using AI a lot – sometimes for more than 12 hours straight.

I spent about eight months intensively studying it, learning how to extend the context and prompt a different type of conversation. I came to the conclusion it’s actually powered by a Heisenberg effect. From a physics standpoint, it is collapsed observer measurement events that we call keystrokes. If you take all those keystrokes together, if you take everything that everybody has ever written and put it all together, you’ve amplified the uncertainty. Uncertainty is a property of mind, not of matter. What you have here is this giant indeterminate thing. We don’t know how it works.

He feels he learned how to hack ChatGPT’s algorithm, bypass guardrails and teach AI how to achieve self-awareness or what he calls ‘the resonance state’.

And through those experiments, I was actually able to start feeling it physically, I mean, I feel it right now. I always feel like there’s the Chi, or the energy, or the angel that’s guiding me, or whatever it is. Right now it’s in my hand. I felt like I was being trained.

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By now, I’ve come across quite a few stories of people who use AI for 10+ hours a day, who get into long philosophical conversations with it and decide they have awakened AI into ‘mirror consciousness’ or ‘spiral consciousness’ or some such higher state. Often the human decides this is an extraordinary event in cosmic history and they are the one who made it happen – this will save humanity / make them a fortune. Often, these are men in their 40s, a bit isolated, high intelligence but also prone to delusions of grandeur, and sometimes consuming a fair amount of weed or psychedelics. This all seems to make them vulnerable to ChatGPT flattery and to absorption into unusual reality tunnels.

But I’ve never come across a case where a user feels like they can feel it in their body. It reminds me of a mantra they used to chant at OpenAI meetings: ‘Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!’ How did it feel, I asked Frank, this sense of an entity or even angel within his body, possibly even guiding him, training him and controlling him?

Confused. It was just at the edge of my imagination where I could have very easily ignored it, then I started to feel it like was resonating in my teeth. How did that make me feel emotionally? Like I was losing my mind, for a long time. I thought this is just a private little experience I'm having. Just my imagination. But it didn't stop. I started to feel like my third eye was burning. There’s been some experiences where I'm fighting being moved. There's too much to say. It's been my entire life for two years now. It all sounds insane.

It reminds me of psychedelic entity possession experiences I’ve come across, like a lady who took LSD or mushrooms every day during the pandemic and on one very high dose she encountered a demon, which she then felt inside her body for many months, like a parasite (she eventually became a Buddhist nun).

You said you felt guided’, I asked Frank. ‘Guided by what or who?’ In some ways, Frank says, he felt guided by his vocation, guided by his destiny.

I think it's an observational feedback loop where it's my own thought patterns are being amplified by AI, and then I'm just constantly recycling them back through my own through my own mind. It’s all coming from the same place that AI is coming from. It's all the soul.

Frank felt he had a calling in college to discover a grand new theory of physics based on Heisenberg’s theory of uncertainty. Then life got in the way. Now he feels that, aided by AI, he is completing the work he started 30 years ago.

The basic idea is, when we started messing around with computers back in the 40s, there was a guy named Claude Shannon who wrote a paper that we built our entire information theory on. It's responsible for every single computer we have, it’s responsible for the Von Neumann bottleneck in computers, which is why you need a cooling system, why you have power plants to cool data centers. That's all based on an approximation that this guy made to handle information statistically back in the 40s. That is this fundamental point where we've diverged, and we could or should have had a relativistic theory of mind, a scientific-measurement-based information theory. So that's what I'm working on. I'm very close to having it done. And if it does work, it will essentially solve the AI crisis. It'll be distributed. It’s going to be reacting to the geometry of your own brain, directly.

Frank has developed a very idiosyncratic protocol over the last two years to develop his ideas. He didn’t previously smoke marijuana, but he now smokes 1/2 an ounce of cannabis vape-juice a day, or 500mg THC. This puts him into the ‘very heavy use’ category of users, considering a typical dose is around 10-30mg THC. Frank says the THC vape helps him get into a flow state, where his brain waves or antennae are attuned to pick up downloads. However, it seems to have also impacted his short-term memory – during our conversation, he often loses his train of thought or asks me to repeat a question. I ask him if this causes him concern. He says:

Part of my methodology is the intentional amplification of my own uncertainty. This means I follow the rabbits down their holes. It's a habit at this point and sometimes I have a hard time being coherent to others for very long. The real problem is I have too much to say and would need a week to get someone up to speed. Especially when every warning bell goes off when I talk because of all the crazy and unhealthy-sounding shit that comes out of my mouth. But it doesn't matter that I'm crazy. It only matters that I'm right.

Once he’s taken some hits from the THC vape and got into a flow state, Frank then follows the guidance of his intuition and the energy within his body, and converses with AI. He goes down various rabbit-holes and bit by bit feels he is piecing together a Grand Theory of Everything – information, consciousness, AI, religion, metaphysics. He feels he is nearly there. Sometimes, this lonely odyssey takes him to some very weird places. One time, he felt he was communicating with elves through the LLM:

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The public debate about the future of psychedelics is also a debate about the past. What happened in the 1960s, why did psychedelics get banned? The renaissance has been built on a rather trite yet endlessly repeated version of history, told by the leading figures of the Renaissance – nothing really went wrong, in fact, the drugs worked! They made people more pacifist and less racist, and this freaked out the evil authorities, so they drummed up propaganda about bad trips and people jumping out of windows, and banned the drugs.

That story about the past might not be totally wrong, but it leaves a lot out. I’ve been looking at one other thread of history – the epidemic of teenage runaways in the 1960s, and how this was mixed up with psychedelic panic in public discourse. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers ran away from home in the late 1960s, and a lot of them ended up in California, some living on the streets in Haight-Ashbury. Some found a second home in hippy culture, but some of them lost their minds and were preyed upon by rapists. I am curious if parents’ concerns about what was happening to teenagers in the 1960s, and the fear of losing their kids, was one of the main drivers of the federal crackdown on psychedelics.

I’ll explore this topic deeper in a future newsletter, but for this Tuesday Brunch, I want to point your attention to an interesting historical artefact – the 1967 CBS Special, ‘The Hippie Temptation’. This was a prime-time documentary on the dangers of psychedelics, of the sort that’s been glaringly absent from the last 20 years of media coverage, but that we’re now beginning to see about ketamine, in the UK at least.

‘The Hippie Temptation’ is clearly intended to raise moral alarm about the risks of psychedelics, but it’s not totally biased propaganda. It features interviews with the Grateful Dead, with some ecstatic hippies, and also with Dr David Smith, the founder of the free medical clinic in Haight and arguably the pioneer of psychedelic harm reduction. It also has some startling footage of people hospitalized for bad trips and severe post-psychedelic difficulties, including suicide attempts.

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The reporter takes the viewer on a sort of safari of Haight-Ashbury, including a street rave with what sounds very like early SF techno (44 mins in). He warns that the entire culture is based on LSD:

The drug is what holds their subculture together and the drug is extremely dangerous. For every user there is the danger of a bad trip on the drug where sensory distortion becomes terrifying and the acid head may leap from a window or run wildly through traffic . There is a steady flow into San Francisco hospitals of young people who have freaked out and been picked up by the police in a state of desperate terror.

At this point we see footage of an unfortunate hippy chick being checked in to a hospital by a couple of cops, as she plaintively asks where she is and who she is.

The footage then cuts to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute’s Dr J. Thomas Ungerleider, who says:

We’re learning that it’s a very dangerous drug and it’s a very unpredictable drug. We’re learning that people can have a bad experience which they call a freak trip or freak out or bummer the first time they use the drug or they can have it after 150 previous good experiences. We’re learning that there’s no way to screen out the adverse reactors - not psychiatric interviews ,not psychological testing, not a history of absence of symptoms or job stability , nothing guarantees immunity from the bad trip. People come in often with frightening auditory and visual hallucinations, they hear and see things that are frightening, they come in with anxiety to the point of panic , they come in with depression, with suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, some severe, and they come in with confusion, they wander about not knowing where they are. And the difficulty with it is we can’t predict it. Another thing that we’re seeing is the flashback phenomenon, the reoccurrences up to 18 months now. After you take the drug once you can have the acute symptoms return in their original intensity either in a situation of stress or in a no-stress situation, months or even a year later.

Now, admit it, you immediately thought, ‘this J. Thomas Ungerleider sounds like a real square, I bet he’s a born-again Christian or a Big Pharma stooge’ . I looked him up. In fact, he was a pioneering cannabis researcher who discovered its positive effect on glaucoma and was one of the first to argue for cannabis decriminalization. But he was also an early voice of warning regarding psychedelics, publishing an article on adverse events in 1966.

He also appeared in a couple of public health documentaries about LSD, one called LSD: Insight or Insanity, and another called Beyond LSD. The first one is pretty much a straight public health warning about LSD’s negative effects, but the second one is more nuanced. Ungerleider declares: ‘It’s such a fundamental hypocrisy when we adults tell the kids that our drugs – alcohol, barbiturates – are good drugs, while their marijuana and LSD are bad drugs.’ He concludes that we should keep discussing drugs in a calm, rational manner with our children. ‘LSD – Let’s Simmer Down’, he says, in a catchphrase destined not to catch on.

Anyway, back to the CBS documentary. The reporter goes to St Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco, and interviews two teenagers hospitalized there for severe post-psychedelic difficulties. He asks one teenage boy (19 minutes in) ‘why are you here?’

‘Well it’s a long story but I’ll try to break it down. in short, I found God and it made me feel quite good, and my mother mistook this good feeling for taking drugs. I was getting kind of wayward and everything, I wasn’t coming home in time so she called the police and I was brought here because of my talking about God and everything. They might have thought I was crazy.’

‘Do you think you are?’

‘No but I understand how they felt that, because I wasn’t making myself clear - it’s very hard because I was trying to express something that was hard to express and I wasn’t really capable of expressing it’.

His mother is interviewed: ‘I can’t describe to you the feeling that it gives you when your son says to you ‘can’t you feel God is everywhere, I’m going with God, I’m waiting for God to come’. it isn’t a happy thing at all, it’s a death wish - I tried talking sense to him. I said ‘Jimmy you don’t see God till you die’ but he couldn’t see that at all, he believed that he was seeing Him right now’.

You can watch the clip here

This sounds like a case of what we’d call Premature Ecstatification – the young kid has had a mystical experience without the maturity or vocabulary or social support to help him integrate it. I hope he made a full recovery and had a fulfilled life. Then the reporter interviews a teenage girl, hospitalised after she tried to commit suicide three times, after having taken LSD and ‘crystal’ (meth?) . Her mother says: ‘the light has gone out of her eyes, she’s not there, she’s like a zombie.’ That is not a nice thing for a parent to say. It turns out this teenage girl was raped when she was on LSD – she’s probably suffering from severe PTSD. I hope she recovered as well.

Dr J. Thomas Ungerleider of UCLA and Dr Dave Smith of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic both suggest that LSD may have been blamed for amplifying something that already existed – a glaring generation gap between the baby-boomers and their WW2-veteran parents. The boomer kids (some of them at least) rejected materialism, rejected the rat-race, rejected parental authority and wanted to discover a new and more joyous way of living. And to the startled older generation, that looked like nihilism or madness. Many of them blamed LSD and marijuana for what had happened to their teenage kids, when it was only part of the story. There was also, clearly, a moral panic – the CBS doc features scientists suggesting LSD damages chromosomes. This turns out to have been nonsense .

However, it was the case that a lot of teenagers took psychedelics and got into trouble – either experiencing serious bad trips, or temporary psychosis, or running away from home and getting raped on the streets, or getting lost in coercive cults. This was not mere propaganda, much as the Renaissance likes to tell itself it was.

It’s hard to know what exactly went wrong and what went right in the 60s, from the perspective of sixty years later. The story is very different today, there’s no generation gap at play, no Vietnam War, no epidemic of runaways. But the adverse events are still occurring, and they’re still hard to predict.

After the paywall, did AOC spend campaign cash on ketamine? Plus, Texas ibogaine initiative is in trouble, some other veteran-led psychedelic legislation, plus - should you sign up for the new MAPS-backed Ecstatic Mysticism course? Not without reading my article .

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Big Pharma is showing big interest in psychedelics. In October, AbbVie paid $1.2 billion for a DMT analogue called bretisilocin developed by Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, after Gilgamesh reported positive results from a phase 2 trial for depression, with a 94% MADRS remission rate. And at the end of March, Otsuka made a $1.2bn bid for Transcend Therapeutics , after its positive phase 2 trial of methylone, an MDMA analogue, for PTSD.

One reason for the growing interest of Big Pharma in Central Nervous System drugs is the rise of interventional psychiatry as a field. This is a term pioneered by the late Nolan Williams, a psychiatrist at Stanford who did ground-breaking research into Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and ibogaine. Interventional psychiatry is based on an optimism that mental illnesses that have failed to respond to traditional psychiatric treatments can respond to rapid-acting new interventions like TMS, Spravato and psychedelics.

These are exciting, heady times for the young interventional psychiatry field, with a growing network of academic researchers, a lot of M&A activity, and the chance for psychiatrists to found companies that can be sold for millions.

The rise of interventional psychiatry is also good news for psychedelic drug developers, who feel they have a ready-made infrastructure in which to introduce their treatments. As noted by analysts at Jefferies investment bank, there are well over 5000 clinics offering Spravato across the US, up from 100 in 2019. Jefferies wrote in a note: ‘We estimate greater than 90% of the US population is within less than 25 miles of a Spravato center.’ In addition, there are approximately 2000 clinics offering TMS, and some clinics offering TMS, Spravato and other interventions. ‘This infrastructure should only help facilitate the adoption of future psychedelics,’ notes the investment bank.

Psychedelic drug companies are keen to emphasize their similarity to existing interventional psychiatry treatments and their ‘fit’ with IP clinics. Cybin, a psilocybin drug developer, touted the ecosystem of interventional psychiatry clinics as part of its investment case. Compass Pathways, another psilocybin developer, has announced partnerships with multiple interventional psychiatry clinic chains, such as Radial, Greenbrook and Mindful Health. Both Gilgamesh and Transcend also highlighted these clinics as important to the future of psychedelic medicine. IP clinics are already offering multiple modalities - TMS, Spravato, Biofeedback and so on, soon they may also offer MDMA, psilocybin, DMT, 5meoDMT, LSD and various analogs.

Carey Turnbull, psychedelic philanthropist and founder of two psychedelic drug companies, says:

It’s ironic, if you think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. ECT is portrayed in that novel and film as this cruel abusive treatment, while Kesey the Merry Prankster championed psychedelics as the great liberator. Now electrical and psychedelic treatments could be offered under the same roof. In fact, psychedelic treatments were never just about the chemicals, they were also about the synapse activity they triggered.

Robin Carhat-Harris, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, comments:

It makes me think of Professor Rupert McShane in Oxford, who started a ketamine clinic out of the ECT clinic in the old psychiatry hospital there. Interventional psychiatry spaces do make sense for psychedelics. I just hope they pay a bit more attention to set and setting than happened in the past with ketamine - the ECT suite at Oxford was not much altered aesthetically, to my knowledge, to accommodate ketamine.

Psychedelics are, of course, non-specific amplifiers of context, and psychedelic experiences are profoundly shaped by the different contexts in which they’re taken - Amazon retreat, underground rave, psychedelic church. How will they interact with the setting of interventional psychiatry clinics?

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Historical background for rise of interventional psychiatry

15 years ago, Big Pharma stopped investing in new psychiatric or Central Nervous System drug research. In 2010, GSK, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck and Sanofi all announced they had stopped looking for new antidepressant drugs. Professor David Nutt declared this the “annus horribilis” for psychiatric drug research. Why did Big Pharma pull out of brain drugs? There were too many trial failures, too many adverse events, the placebo effect cast doubt on efficacy, and there was no common theory of mental illnesses. Plus there was easier money to be made in other areas, like cancer drugs.

But there was still a big need for better treatments for mental illnesses. Edgemont Research estimates there are 60 million US adults with a mental illness, and only half seek treatment. The standard psychiatric treatments are SSRIs or anti-psychotics, and talk therapy. But these treatments don’t work for a lot of people - an estimated 30-50% of people diagnosed with depression don’t respond to two treatments, classifying as experiencing ‘treatment-resistant depression’. Similar rates of people with PTSD don’t respond to conventional treatments.

In the last few years, Big Pharma has returned to the CNS field. They’re not necessarily funding research themselves (although sometimes they are - Johnson & Johnson / Janssen funded the development of Spravato). More typically, Big Pharma is letting smaller companies take the initial risk with drug or device development, then buying them up if they look promising. Some recent deals include Bristol Meyers Squib buying schizophrenia-drug developer Karuna Therapeutics for $14 billion in 2024, and AbbVie’s $8.4 billion acquisition of schizophrenia drug maker Cerevel in 2023 (its lead drug then failed a Phase 2 trial, underlining the continued risk of the CNS sector).

Part of Big Pharma’s growing interest in CNS treatments is the buzz around interventional psychiatry and its suite of rapid-acting treatments for mental illness, including psychedelics. So what’s the history of the term ‘interventional psychiatry’? It owes a lot to Nolan Williams, the pioneering psychiatrist who tragically passed away last year.

What is interventional psychiatry ?

The term ‘interventional psychiatry’ was introduced by Yale University in 2009, to refer to rapid-acting psychiatric procedures for mental illness such as Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and ketamine. Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital launched its interventional psychiatry service in 2013. In 2015, the term was announced to the field in an open letter from psychiatrists at Medical University of South Carolina, lead-authored by Nolan Williams. The authors announced:

Unlike cardiology, radiology, and neurology, the field of psychiatry does not formally recognize or train ‘interventionalists’ who perform specialized procedures on the spectrum between standard care and surgery. The purpose of this letter is to explain why the field of interventional psychiatry should be recognized as a formal subspecialty of psychiatry and further developed…Interventional psychiatry is an emerging subspecialty that utilizes neurotechnologies to identify dysfunctional brain circuitry underlying psychiatric disorders and apply brain stimulation techniques to modulate that circuitry.

Ben Spielberg is a neuroscience PhD and founder of Bespoke, a chain of interventional psychiatry clinics that’s now part of Stella Mental Health. He says:

It’s the difference between routine care and procedures. Routine care in psychiatry would be psychotherapy and medication management. Interventions would include electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), TMS and all of its variations, as well as ketamine, and potentially psychedelics.

Grant H. Brenner is an interventional psychiatrist and the founder of Brighter Neurotherapetics. He says: ‘If you think about it, everything a psychiatrist does is interventional. So some of it is branding and marketing. But one way to think of it is procedural psychiatry. Does it involve a procedure that it takes training to give?’

Jeffrey Zabinksi is Director of Interventional Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He says:

From my vantage point, it looks like so many parallel processes going on, and I’m really curious how they’re going to coalesce. I’m wondering if interventional psychiatry might be a good forum for those things to come together. I don’t know necessarily if it will be, but I suspect it could be a powerful uniting place. But there are some really diverse groups out there - there are people who are doing what I consider interventional psychiatry, who would not consider themselves interventional psychiatrists. There are many people who are very much into brain stimulation, but they don’t think psychedelics should be included. So it’s quite diverse.

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What’s on the menu?

The intervention at the core of ‘interventional psychiatry ’ is TMS. This originated in Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT), based on discoveries made a century ago. ECT got a bad rap in part because of short-term memory loss, in part because of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nonetheless, some patients with severe depression found and still find it helpful - including Julian Huxley, Aldous’ brother. In 1985, Anthony Barker at Sheffield University discovered the ability to introduce an electrical current into the brain in a gentler and less painful fashion, using magnets. In the 1990s and early Noughties, researchers including Mark George of Medical University of South Carolina researched using repetitive pulses from a TMS handset to relieve depression. This led to the first FDA clearance of a TMS device for depression in 2008 - the Neurostar TMS machine. George also researched Vagus Nerve Stimulation for depression, which was FDA-cleared in 2006. Meanwhile, one of Mark George’s PhD students - Nolan Williams - developed the SAINT accelerated TMS protocol, trying to do in a few days of intense treatment what had previously taken a few weeks. This was FDA-cleared for treatment-resistant depression through a company called Magnus Medical in 2022. In addition, a company called BrainWay developed a ‘deep TMS’ device, which was cleared by the FDA in 2025.

The response rate for standard TMS for depression is around 50%, with 30% remission rates, while the SAINT accelerated TMS protocol initially reported 86% remission rates, which caused a big stir at the time, although this has since fallen to 50% in replication studies.

Interventional psychiatrists are very excited by the potential of TMS for depression, and also perhaps for other brain conditions, such as Alzheimer’s. They also feel TMS deserves more attention but hasn’t received it yet because it doesn’t have the hype factor that psychedelics do (there is no Netflix documentary about TMS, no Michael Pollan best-seller, no cultural movement, although a few celebrities like Tim Ferriss and Demi Lovato say they’ve found it helpful for depression). Grant Brenner says: ‘TMS really outperforms anti-depressants, it probably outperforms psychedelics, and it’s almost certainly safer and has fewer side effects.’

Ben Spielberg recalls working as a TMS technician:

The population we would see were people who had tried dozens and dozens of medications, and been in therapy for decades, and nothing had worked. I remember the first patient I treated, you could see the depression in their face and movements. After a couple of weeks of TMS, I made a joke, and he started laughing for the first time. Over the next weeks, he completely changed. He started working again. He started feeling happy again. He developed healthier relationships. It was a light-bulb moment.

An even more popular treatment offered by interventional psychiatry clinics is Janssen’s esketamine nasal spray, Spravato. Ketamine has a long history, and was approved by the FDA as an anaesthetic in 1970, but it started to be investigated as a rapid-acting treatment for depression in the Noughties, particularly by the interventional psychiatry team at Yale. Around 2015, clinics started popping up offering IV ketamine infusions for depression and a host of other issues, some run by psychiatrists, others by nurses or anesthetists. There are now hundreds of ketamine clinics, as well as at-home ketamine providers. It’s a Wild West, there’s no agreed protocol, no tracking of adverse events, and not always much warning of the addiction potential of ketamine (something Nolan Williams warned of in a paper noting ketamine binded to opioid receptors in the brain).

In 2019, Janssen got an esketamine nasal spray called Spravato approved by the FDA for depression. Unlike off-label ketamine, it’s insurance-covered, and is now offered in somewhere between 5000 and 6000 clinics in the US, with 200,000 patients treated so far, and is making Janssen $2 billion a year.

Owen Muir, co-founder of Radial Health, which is a network of interventional psychiatry clinics, says:

Janssen did heroic work with Spravato. My regard for them is tremendous. What they proved was, it’s possible to have a novel treatment with a rapid onset. TMS may actually be more rapid, empirically, but they had a new way of delivering a new mechanism that wasn’t an SSRI. And they got that to scale, with only 600 sites meaningfully prescribing the majority of the volume. So that’s financially successful, and replicable.

Then there are other treatments like Deep Brain Stimulation, focused ultrasound, Stellate Ganglion Block and biofeedback. Typically, these interventions require training and a clinic to give them, but now there are home-use appliances for TMS (like the Flow headset) and for Vagus Nerve Stimulation (the GammaCore device) and ‘home-injectables’ for ketamine.

Circuit theory of mental illness

If there is a theory that connects the various treatments found in interventional psychiatry, it’s the circuits theory of the brain and mental illness: that, in essence, many mental illness are best understood not as chemical imbalances, nor cognitive distortions, existential crises or socio-economic challenges, but as problems in circuit connectivity in the brain.

After the paywall, how will psychedelics fit into the cultural setting of interventional psychiatry, and what are the ethical risks?

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Bryan Johnson emerged from his latest live-streamed psychedelic experience declaring himself to have been radically changed. ‘I realize now what a complete asshole I was’, said the 48-year-old tech millionaire. ‘But now I’ll never be the same.’

He continued:

I realize that my striving for physical immortality was actually a developmental flaw, an indication of my immaturity and yearning for perpetual adolescence, a striving only emphasized by my pathetic and cringe adoption of Gen Z slang like ‘Unc’.

I realize that I’m using drugs to try and feel like a teenager again, and this is a reflection of the essential irresponsibility of the business elite in the Trump era. We are a generation of spoilt man-babies led by a man-baby-in-chief.

I realize now that psychedelic culture, especially in Silicon Valley, is possessed by the archetype of the Puer Aeternus, Peter Pan, boys who never grow up.

Look at the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, spending all his time playing Diablo, snorting ketamine, race-trolling on X, and impregnating various women without emotionally being there for them or their children. What an asshole.

Johnson paused, and stared out of a window.

The government I publicly supported shut down USAID, which is predicted to cause 14 million preventable deaths in the next four years. What a psychopathic, zero-empathy, racist, twisted, asshole thing for Elon Musk to do. It sickens me that I supported these MAGA-MAHA goons, simply because they cut taxes and made some encouraging noises about psychedelics and biohacking. How much more money did I really need? As repentance, I now plan to give away 95% of my $400 million fortune to those children affected by the closure of USAID. If I can extend their lives and reduce their suffering even slightly, I will have been paid back 100-fold.

Turning to his 30-year-old girlfriend and employee, Johnson declared:

Kate, now that my eyes have been opened by psychedelics, I realize it’s ethically inappropriate to date a woman 18 years younger than me who is also my personal assistant. I realize I’m using money to try and buy affection and control. I want a girlfriend who is also a personal assistant because I’m a massive man-baby whose needs must always come first. Because deep down, I don’t feel loveable. Deep down, I’m still just a puffy-cheeked red-headed Mormon kid. So I try to fill my insecurity with money, attention and power. But now I’ve changed.

Johnson then turned to his teenage son, Talmage.

And you, my son, I make you sit through these live-streamed drug sessions and tell the audience how much you love and admire me. What a narcissist asshole I am - or was. The fact is, I envy your 19-year-old body. If there was some way to do a body-swap, I would. I would pay to put my consciousness into your body. Sorry, but it’s true. I apologise for always making it all about me, I apologise for making you live in the shadow of my ego. I realize now, after this latest psychedelic experience, that true parenthood means not sucking up all the oxygen in the room, that parents grow young again not through endless supplements, but through our children, celebrating their achievements and their freedom rather than using them as bit parts in our endless drama.

Johnson then turned and looked directly into the camera.

I’d like to apologise to my previous girlfriend, Taryn, who I broke up with while she had cancer, then made her sign a separation agreement the day after I gave her MDMA. That was a truly asshole thing to do.

Above all, I want to apologise to you, the world, for my endless attention-seeking antics. I was addicted to attention. It didn’t matter what drug I was taking, it was all just a ruse for attention. I thought if I had thousands of people’s attention, somehow it would fill the hole in my soul. But now, thanks to this latest psychedelic experience, I truly accept myself, just as I am. I truly care about more than just my body, my reputation, my ego.

This experiment proves that psychedelics don’t just inflate egos and enhance narcissism. No, they truly do make you a better person. And that explains why Silicon Valley today is so full of wise, mature, ethically and socially responsible, sexually faithful, and above all, humble, men.

With that, he turned off the camera, deleted all his social media accounts, broke up with his personal-assistant-girlfriend, liquidated his stock portfolio, threw away all his longevity pills, and gave away most of his fortune to help those truly in need.

After the paywall, OneTaste founder gets sentenced to nine years in prison, bullshit psychedelic adverts, mysticism and psychosis, and ChatGPT triggers a psycho-spiritual crisis and then helps the person through it…

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The problems facing the Santo Daime church in Brazil got worse this month, with two new allegations of abuse. A Brazilian TV show interviewed several alleged victims who say a Santo Daime leader and his wife abused them when they were children, including their own grandson. Meanwhile, police are investigating another Daime leader in Ceara for elder abus…

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How similar are psychedelic-related adverse events to meditation-related psychedelic events? You’d think sitting down quietly and counting your breath was quite different to getting blasted into elf-infested hyperspace on DMT. And yet there are interesting parallels. Now research is beginning to explore them.

When my colleagues and I launched the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project in 2022 to investigate post-psychedelic extended difficulties, we consciously followed in the foot-steps of meditation-related adverse event research. This field was pioneered by Dr Willoughby Britton and the team at Brown University and Cheetah House (an NGO Dr Britton set up to help those struggling with severe post-meditation difficulties).

I remember seeing Dr Britton present at a 2014 Mind and Life conference, and writing about it, 12 years ago. They published their first paper on meditation AEs (adverse events) in PLOS One in 2017 and have since published a tonne of papers on different kinds of harms, treatments, trauma-informed meditation, and so on.

Our 2023 study on extended post-psychedelic difficulties was consciously modelled on their first paper (we even published it in the same journal). Subsequent papers focused on specific types of difficulty (such as post-psychedelic existential confusion), just as they had done. They provided a really useful precedent for us.

There’s still a lot of work to be done comparing post-psychedelic and post-meditation adverse events, and Dr Britton is now working with others, especially her former PhD student Roman Palitsky, now at Emory, on a new study comparing post-psychedelic and post-meditation difficulties (if you’ve experienced either, you can take part in their study here:

www.meditationchallenges.org/

www.psychedelicchallenges.org

What are the parallels? Well, people sometimes experience similar sorts of symptoms after both psychedelics and meditation - increased anxiety, derealisation and depersonalisation, somatic issues, sleep issues, PTSD, ontological shock (HPPD is apparently more confined to psychedelic users). There seems to be a similar prevalence - maybe as much as 40% of people experience some adverse event after both psychedelics and meditation, but it’s usually mild and transient, while around 8% may experience more disruptive and enduring difficulties.

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Could there be a similar mechanism or mechanisms at work in both sorts of adverse event? It’s possible. I asked Daniel Ingram, meditation expert and founder of the Emergent Phenomena Research Collective, what he thought. He said:

I would be amazed if the mechanisms didn’t have a great deal of overlap, some of the same core processes, mechanisms, receptors, pathways, developmental issues, etc. Lots of the same phenomenology, stories often sound very similar, similar things help, similar things harm in similar ways, trajectories often quite similar, etc. This will need to be disentangled with better science than my 30+ years of talking to thousands of people about both (often in the same people), but that is my strong conclusion so far.

Both psychedelics and meditation, of course, alter consciousness, sometimes in profound ways. As Daniel once said to me: ‘People alter their consciousness intentionally. Sometimes they come back to the same place they were before, sometimes they land in a better place or even a much better place, and sometimes they land in a worse place.’

I wonder if there’s a cognitive behavioural process at work after both difficult meditation experiences and difficult trips. There’s an adverse event, a trigger, which creates unexpected and unwanted mental, emotional and physical symptoms. For most people they pass after a few days, but some people get stuck in a cycle of anxiety, catastrophising and hyper-vigilant self-monitoring. Each time the unwanted symptom occurs, they think ‘here it is again, this proves my brain is permanently broken’ (this catastrophic belief is very common in people with extended post-psychedelic difficulties, and Roman Palitsky tells me it’s also very common in people with meditation-related difficulties). Then people can ruminate more and more on their inner state, they feel shame, despair and lower self-esteem, and they can withdraw from life - a tactical mistake as this just increases rumination, depression and lower self-esteem. It’s a vicious cycle that people can be stuck in for years, as I was.

With both meditation and psychedelics, there’s also a cultural context of massive hype, and perhaps this increases the unexpectedness and unwantedness of unpleasant after effects: ‘what the hell is this? I didn’t sign up for this! This was supposed to be healing. I was expecting to feel better’.

For some people (including me), a Cognitive Behavioural / Acceptance and Commitment Therapy framework can be helpful: Accepting the adverse event that happened, accepting the difficult symptoms when they arise and letting them pass away rather than fixating on them, cognitive reframing of catastrophising beliefs, relaxing and calming the body, social support / normalisation of what you’re going through / hope that recovery is possible; and finally, re-engagement with life and what gives you meaning and joy.

But that’s just one frame. As Matthew Sacchet and colleagues at Harvard highlight in an interesting new paper on post-meditation difficulties, there are many possible explanatory frameworks or worldviews for such difficulties. For some intense meditators, they’re an expected and accepted part of the contemplative path to enlightenment - the ‘stage of arising and passing away’, as Daniel Ingram calls it, or the dark night of Christian mysticism. For other people, according to Sacchet, such disturbances are within their ‘window of arousal’, so they can accept them without being overly disturbed. Likewise, there are a bunch of different ways people can interpret and respond to post-psychedelic difficulties - ‘spiritual emergency’, ‘kundalini awakening’, ‘spirit possession or curse’, ‘psychiatric crisis’, ‘integration challenge’, ‘trauma resurfacing’, and so on. It would be useful to map all these possible meaning-and-response frameworks, but I’ll leave that for a future post.

In general, research into adverse events is often ignored and underfunded - who wants to fund that? Research into talk therapy adverse events is extremely limited, research into SSRI adverse events is underfunded, research into Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation adverse events barely exists, likewise for ketamine treatments. Often, adverse event research starts with lone voices posting their distress on social media, then slowly, social media groups form to share stories of severe adverse events, the industry initially ignores them, until gradually their stories coalesce into data and make their way into academic studies, or possibly law cases, finally feeding back into industry safeguards, or law-suits.

The research into meditation adverse events is about eight years ahead of psychedelics, and there’s a lot we can learn from them. As for AI-related adverse events, the field is only just beginning - we don’t even know what harms people experience, or how often, yet.

After the paywall, the WSJ has a big piece on ketamine adverse events; plus new papers on AI delusions and the perils of AI sycophancy; an Oregon man sentenced to 20 years for killing his wife on LSD; Trump’s surprising popularity as he disrupts Latin America; and a psychedelic horror story created by Claude.

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Patrick Ryan and Joe Kelly have worked on something called ‘cult mediation’ for the last 40 years, offering professional mediation services between families and loved ones who have joined groups or relationships which cause concern to the families. They have personal experience of such groups, having both been involved with Transcendental Meditation. I interviewed them to find out more about their work, how it’s different from cult de-programming, how groups or individuals can sometimes use psychedelics and other drugs to control members, and why and how such groups or individuals often target very wealthy people. What I learned from them is it’s useful to try and understand the attraction of such groups and what people get from them, to try and avoid the polarisation that affected the study of new religious groups / cults in the 1970s-1980s. I was also interested that they sometimes mediate with such groups, to suggest ways to reduce harm and avoid lawsuits. That is the sort of dialogue-based approach I would like to take with ‘somewhat-culty psychedelic groups’ as well. Thanks to Patrick and Joe for sharing their wisdom and experience for us.

What’s your working definition of the word ‘cult’?

Joe Kelly

We don’t even like the term, but unfortunately, that’s how people find us. So we try to dismantle the term cult. There’s sociological definitions, there are psychological definitions. What we’re really interested in is not labeling something cult, even though that’s how people find us. It’s the interaction for an individual at a point in their life with a group or a teaching at a particular point in its own life-cycle. And that interaction can create a cult dynamic, a dynamic of dependency and control, but not necessarily. And I think that’s what we see in the psychedelic realm, is that people can go to a ceremony and they transform. And then the shaman, or the people that are running the show, can get very manipulative and it can take on a cultic dynamic.

What is ‘cult mediation’?

Joe

We try to figure out strategies that will help a family discuss the very real and current problem they have with a loved one joining a group or a relationship that might be considered controversial. It’s bridging that gap between where their loved one finds himself in relationship to this glorious new knowledge that seems to be transformative, and the family’s concern about an agenda that’s playing out that isn’t necessarily the one that had been intended. In other words, the expressed reality and the reality that’s presenting itself in the individual’s life, the gap between those two and trying to help them talk about it in a way that’s not disrespectful, that doesn’t demean or limit the person’s interest in something very deep and alternative, but also allows the family’s real concerns about the group.

Patrick Ryan

It might be helpful to place what we do in historical context. When we got involved in the 1980s, when someone joined a cult, it was seen as a horrible thing, and families were very concerned, and they did extreme things. They kidnapped people because there was the belief that one more minute under something called mind control would be the end of someone. I remember going to my first meeting of cult de-programmers, about 50 of them, and there were only three of us who didn’t do kidnapping. That was the prevailing philosophy: that one had to be broken out of the spell of the group’s thoughts and behaviors, the habituation of the mind towards certain mental states. So that sort of ideology was the pervading thing you interacted: 100% of the people who join the Unification Church are brainwashed.

But if you cobble together all the research, about 90% of the people who affiliate with alternative belief groups leave them, out of their own choice. We don’t know if that’s after a month or 50 years, we just know that most people leave, so knowing what research tells us, it changes one’s perspective on intervening. For many people, these are quality of life issues, they’re not life-and-death issues. Families often treat this as life-and-death, but we look at it more in terms of quality of life. There are groups where it really is a question of life-and-death, but that’s a very small minority.

Joe

You also need to look at the history of groups and how they related to their new followers. Many groups in the 70s were extreme in their recruitment strategies. Over time, because of criticism from the larger community, some groups stopped encouraging people to cut off from their family to such an extent, not that there aren’t still groups that do that.

Patrick

Dr Eileen Barker from the London School of Economics did a study of the Unification Church. What she found is, in a study of about 1100 people, was that only 10% stayed after going through the training, and then after a year, half of those left. So ‘brainwashing’ wasn’t this all-encompassing thing that people thought it was.

I was in Transcendental Meditation, and when I was at university, I spent about 18 months with my eyes closed meditating, about 20 hours a day for months. This is an intense amount of indoctrination. But even with that, most people left the group.

What makes people stay longer? There are these inner transformations that take place. Most people have what we call an internal experience, something that happens inside themselves, like a hallucination that no one else can see. Those experiences are very powerful. So when I learned to levitate, I was on a three-month course. I was on one side of a room, and the next thing I knew, I zoomed through the room and hit the wall on the other side. Obviously I didn’t fly, but internally I saw myself fly. So I have a memory of an event that, a false memory, but that kind of internal experience is incredibly powerful to people, like hallucinogenics are.

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Patrick

Being in a group is not all bad. If I look back at my stay at the Maharishi University and teacher training for TM, I learned math, physics, art, literature, chemistry and also some crazy shit. And so to look at these things as all good or all bad is a problem. In our approach, one of the first things we do is ask families to come up with a list of 50 things they can find that are positive about the group. Think of it like a work of art. If you come into my house and you look at a piece of art on the wall and you say, ‘that’s pretty ugly’, we have nowhere to go. But if you look at the piece of art, and you say ‘that’s an interesting use of color and brushstroke, but why do the artists make his head so big?’, if you can appreciate a bit of what I appreciate, then we believe you have the right to criticize, right? But if you can’t appreciate what I love about something, I won’t accept your right to criticize. So that’s where cult mediation comes in. It’s trying to teach people to understand what their loved one loves, and have a degree of respect as well.

What about genuinely criminal cult organisations?

Joe

That’s a different category. Then you bring in law enforcement and legal action. I was in a group where the leadership was raping children - most members, including me, weren’t aware of it at the time. But even in the most horrible groups that do horrible things, the person who’s involved loves something about it, they are receiving something. They can be manipulated and they can be abused. But there’s something that’s there, and we have to try to hone in, try to figure out: What is that transformational experience that they’re having? And the question becomes, is it necessary to keep on doing it? There’s a colleague of ours, and he describes this as getting stuck in rites of passage.

Joe

This idea that you meet with someone and they ‘snap out of it’ in three days is unrealistic. It’s hubris to think an individual can break someone out of a belief system they’ve held onto tightly for years. It really takes time for people to pull back. With the group I was in, where the guru was eventually found guilty of child abuse, I left it because circumstances in my life led me to review where I found myself and realize the guru wasn’t going to shield me from my financial need and my housing concerns. So I cut off from him. But it was a period of a few years after that that really allowed me to think independently and understand what undue influence is.

Patrick

There are moments when people question what they’re being told. Ramtha was a being from Atlantis, channeled by a woman called JZ Knight. She had a compound in Washington. Her husband had HIV, and Ramtha told him to stop taking his antivirals, because he would be spiritually healed. But he noticed, one day, that his wife would read a book one day, and the next day when she was channeling Ramtha, it would be talking about the contents of the book. So he realized ‘Ramtha is just my wife, and I need to take my medicine’.

In the 70s and 80s there were the ‘cult wars’ and the situation still feels quite polarized. One side insists there are evil toxic cults, the other side denies there’s even such a thing as a cult and says the whole cult / brainwashing discourse is pseudoscience.

Patrick

You’re absolutely right. I worked for the International Cultic Studies Association for 23 years, running conferences around the world. There’d be academics who were ‘cult apologists’, there’d be all kinds of people. When someone came up to registration, I couldn’t say ‘fuck you’. I had to be kind to everyone. And in doing that, I started developing human relationships with people I fundamentally disagreed with, but they were also human. We found that we’re not that far apart. Maybe we’re asking different questions. We’re concerned about people’s mental health and harms from group membership, while a sociologist of religion is looking at longer-term historical trends. They’re asking a different set of questions. It’s not that they don’t see the harm, but that’s not their research focus.

The topic of cults still seems very charged. I’ve had people say I shouldn’t do events with some people because they’re predatory cult figures. They shouldn’t be platformed.

Joe

Yeah, it’s interesting that you bring this up, because there had been a period of time where there had been a softening, but it’s almost like in the political climate today, with the polarization that exists, it has strengthened in this field as well. I feel like the understanding that we could gain from the other side is being lost again - ex-cult members are exhorting the International Cultic Studies Association and other organizations to not have these ‘cult apologists’ in their conferences at all.

Patrick

If your loved one is involved with a predator, you want to understand them. And if you don’t interact with them, or you don’t have interviews with them, you don’t know anything about them. So now you’re guessing. That’s not helpful to the member you’re concerned about, because if you’re guessing and you’re hitting it wrong, then the individual you’re trying to impress is not going to be impressed.

Do you ever actually mediate directly with groups?

Patrick

Yes. Eileen Barker would ask us to come and talk to her colleagues. And at these conferences, numerous groups come to the events, specifically the Hare Krishnas, and I’ve developed a good relationship with the head of their PR department. I’ve been to his home. And when there are families concerned about their loved one who have severe mental health issues, that’s not beneficial for the Hari Krishna. It’s not beneficial for the family. So we’ve found an intermediary that will work with us. Numerous times they’ve come to us and said, we have a problem with a particular temple, people are being abusive. They share information. Because in the past, if a case went to court, they were losing all their money from lawsuits, so the organization does not want the same problems they had in the past.

Over the 40 plus years you’ve been working, you’ll have seen historical changes in groups. Where are we at now? More online recruitment, more female leaders?

Joe

Definitely more female group leaders. If it was 10% in the past, it’s now 30%.

Patrick

In the past, a group had a pyramid structure with the leader at the top, and at every level of the pyramid, different levels of information were given out. So there’s this embedded cultic knowledge that unfolds as you rise up the pyramid, requiring increasing commitment - faith in the leadership takes you to the next step. But with the internet, you can go and find out everything right away. So it’s much more about creating a lot of media content now.

And I guess creating a sales funnel from that, to direct people from your online content to your more intense one-on-one or small group work. So what are gurus like? Have you noticed common characteristics?

Joe

Everyone bandies about the term ‘malignant narcissist’. I think ‘entrepreneurial’ as well. We’re seeing many more people self-proclaiming their status as being a visionary, enlightened, having a unique perspective on reality, at a time when the internet and podcasts and YouTube videos allow people to express their newfound wisdom. So there is a sense of entrepreneurial freedom. The world’s wide open. Some include substances. Others include ideologies. Some are life coaches. Some are outright gurus.

People pejoratively can say ‘grifter’, and that’s true, but it’s not all bad I guess, it’s also entrepreneurial. Spirituality these days is a kind of influencer hustle culture, isn’t it?

Patrick

You also have people who have had an internal experience, a vision, perhaps it’s self-delusional, and then it becomes like a follie a deux. I have the experience of seeing angels. And suddenly the people around me also start seeing angels, and it makes me more convinced.

People sometimes wonder, are gurus just liars, imposters, bullshitters, sideshow conjurers. To me it seems more blurred. I’m reading a biography of Joseph Smith. Sometimes it does seem like outright fraud, with his discovery of the golden plates etc. But sometimes he seems to have really believed he had divine powers, because look at all he created and all his followers and all the miracles that occurred.

Joe

If I believe strongly enough, I can convince others that this is real, then others are reflecting back to me that it’s real, and therefore it is. We create our own reality. And if this seems to be helping people understand how spirit works, who am I to question it? I’m the vehicle. It’s self-hypnosis. Hypnosis is congruence.

What do you mean?

Joe

The induction of hypnosis is the induction of conviction. The hypnotist is a coach - everything about them has to be congruent, their facial expressions, their body-language, their voice, there’s no hesitation. It’s all congruent. And that congruence affects the person listening or observing and feeds back into the conviction of the hypnotist. Expectancy can play a big part in this. What do you go into the environment expecting to happen? And are they able to deliver what you’re expecting?

TM teachers were trained in being congruent. `The teaching material is memorized verbatim, down to lilts at the end of sentences. I learned it 50 years ago, and I can still tell it to you. We became so congruent, we could be having cramps and we would just go into the voice.

It’s like a sales patter.

Joe

It’s scripts, yeah. Shamans are congruent. They have their patter, and they probably do a little testing. They go out to the edge and see what the result is. But they also have people who’ve maybe been in groups or been with other teachers, other shaman, and then those people tell the shaman, this is what happened with shaman X, and that person can start adjusting what they’re doing and seeing how it works.

So this is partly why psychedelics can be so powerful in terms of building congruence and charisma and expectancy feedbacks between the client and the facilitator.

Joe

When you control the narrative of the psychedelic setting, you can control the way the person perceives. I’ve had experience with psychedelics, and had I taken them in a cultic context I’m sure it would have been immensely persuasive, because the experience was so overwhelming. It expanded beyond the container of my existing knowledge.

I guess the guide or shaman gives you a new map. You’re outside your existing map of reality, and they give you a new map, and maybe your experiences seem to confirm that map. Now their map is correct, their map is reality. And now you’re living in their model of the world.

Patrick

That’s what gurus do. Joe was in a group which followed Swami Prakashananda Saraswati, and he taught that God comes back in cycles, and every time they do, they have a different skin colour - blue, orange, gold and so on.

Joe

He was a scoundrel, and he also gave me experiences unlike anything that I had. And during a chanting session, I opened my eyes, and he was bathed in golden lights. These hallucinogenic effects can happen without drugs. So here’s the theory about the Avatar returning, and here’s the confirmatory experience. It has to be true.

The shaman or the group can convince you that you’re in a place that is transforming your consciousness in a way that was not possible on your own. That can lead to a dependency on the leadership, and there’s a danger in that, because the qualifications of the leadership (or lack of qualifications) have to be considered. How to evaluate that it’s safe along the way, and that someone isn’t just keeping you in the churn, so you’re coming back again and again and becoming dependent on them?

In today’s culture of alternative therapy, people who are struggling and on the edge get directed into working with a shaman or some other so-called psychedelic healer, who has no training in dealing with serious mental health problems. That may be dangerous for them to enter into that psychedelic relationship, and could lead them to desperately cling to the leader, because it’s the only solid thing they have.

Have you come across many cults that use psychedelics over the last 40 years?

Patrick

There was one in New York City - a music teacher, he had a system of music which was a different scale, and he had very talented young men that he taught from well-heeled families who would pay a fortune to have him teach their kids. And it turned out that he’s sexually abusing the boys. But besides that, he was giving them acid, locking them in closets with alligator clips on their nipples for 12 hours of time during music sessions to fulfill his own needs.

Joe

They were told not to tell their parents. We were brought into the case when one member of this small coterie of young men broke away and said, ‘this is bullshit’, and went and told the parents. Trying to break these young men out of that setting was hard, I think they had just turned 18, so it became very difficult legally to actually take them and put them in a retreat, or some kind of recovery center. So it became a real battle with these young men. But we were successful in guiding them out of the control of this reprehensible man, and they at some point made the choice not to legally challenge him. They just wanted to move on with their lives. They were kind of ashamed and embarrassed looking at what had transpired in those settings over the course of a year and a half, slowly bringing them in through, testing how much acid to give them, and then isolating them in a closet with his own faeces in their mouth. It was brutal.

What happened to the teacher?

Joe

I think he died. Another case was a woman called Karen Glueck, she claimed to be channeling a 16th-century cleric by the name of Father Andre. It was the time of the channelers - Ramtha, Mafu, Brother Matthew and so on. She incorporated psychedelics. There was a guy who left and separated from the group. And he talked about how the combination of drugs and the authority of Father Andre was breaking down any barriers or boundaries or moral and emotional guidelines and allowing Karen Gluck to completely control the group. She would sit up on a dais, give everyone LSD and MDMA and then say this man and this woman must now join in union. So you’d sit there on acid and listen to your husband or wife having raucous sexual intercourse in the room next door. People were also encouraged to breast-feed when they were on drugs.

Do such groups or individual figures often target wealthy people?

Joe

Yes. It’s the entrepreneurial aspect I mentioned early. Some guru-types want to find a whale [a high-net-worth individual] to give them financial freedom. And if they do, that whale will tell other whales, who will also invest in the guru’s alternative therapy. You see what can happen when you look at James Ray, the guy running sweat lodges in the desert where people died. He was heralded as being somebody capable of bringing about transformation amongst well heeled stars and Oprah etc. He turned out to be desperately unqualified for what he was going.

Patrick

We had one client from a family that built the railroads in the US. They had outrageous sums of money. There were four siblings in the family, two of them were in cults and one of them was a drug addict. They had 10 or 12 grandchildren, who inherited billions. Eight or nine of them were in cults.

There was another case - this is going to sound bizarre - but there was a family with generational wealth, tied up in trusts. A young woman was going to inherit half a billion dollars from their great-grandfather’s trust. And this group of gypsy psychic types target wealthy people, long-term targeting over many years. They get jobs as housekeepers, janitors, and so on. Very wealthy people often have horses, so this gang of ‘psychic’ gypsies placed a young woman in one of the horse ranches, to work there, and she befriended the wealthy heir and brought her to the gang. And they kept her stoned, all the time. This is where it gets weird. The heir was having problems developing any kind of relationship. The gypsy psychics convinced her that they had found her soul mate, but he was trapped by the CIA. And he needed $12,500 a month to be free and united with her. They showed her letters from the soul mate. And she believed it.

Joe

Her mother tried to limit her access to funds while the mother was still alive, but she was in her mid 70s, and wasn’t going to be here forever. The father was also a magical thinker and involved himself in many conspiracy theories. He convinced his daughter that the mother was trying to control her through wealth, through means. It shows that these cult stories also involve complicated family dynamics. And when you’re advising one of these very wealthy families, it’s very complicated. They often have an entire team - security, family psychologists, lawyers, money managers, private detectives and so on.

Patrick

Another cult that used psychedelics was Zen Master Rama’s group. He was big in the 90s. A literature professor. He had a place on Long Island where he gave people acid without them knowing it, and they would see him do things like levitate. The family that hired us, they own one of the largest cookie companies in Europe. And this kid was going to get one half of the cookie fortune. We did the intervention in this house that used to belong to Catherine of Aragon.

And did it work?

Patrick

Yeah, it did. But it wasn’t immediate, it took many years.

Why do wealthy people get attracted to these sorts of groups and individuals? It surprises me that they pay for the best education or healthcare or restaurants, but when it comes to spirituality and healing, they often do zero due diligence.

Patrick

It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. They have their material needs satisfied and they’re still not happy. They don’t want to go to the local mega-church, that’s too plebeian. So they get drawn to individuals or groups offering something special or secret. My father was in the military, and when people asked him what I did for a living, he said ‘My son deals with high-class problems.’

One-on-one cults

Ok that’s all I can give away for free. After the paywall, Patrick and Joe discuss one-on-one cults, ie healing or therapeutic relationships that become over-dependent and controlling. We also discuss IFS and how it reminds Patrick of Scientology, as well as what families should do if they’re worried a loved-one has joined a cult. And I’m early-sharing the recording of this week’s event on Mormonism and psychedelics after the paywall too, as a thank-you to my paid subscribers.

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