Here at the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, we’re trying to help weave a better safety net for psychedelic culture and whatever industry emerges. We have a three-pronged strategy:
Learn more about psychedelic harms and harm reduction
Communicate that information better to the field and wider society
Support those who get into difficulties
We’re trying to work on all those fronts. For example:
Learn more about psychedelic harms and harm reduction
We produce academic research on extended difficulties after psychedelics and what helps people cope with them. We’re finishing off a paper on existential confusion after psychedelic experiences and just beginning a study on post-psychedelic online support groups. But there are a lot of research gaps – for example there is no published article on post-psychedelic derealization or what helps people cope with it (as far as I’m aware) , nor on post-psychedelic trauma, or post-psychedelic social disconnection. And there is barely any empirical research on what works for integration, including integrating difficult trips.
Nor is there even much empirical research on psychedelics, suggestibility and the risk of manipulation. We’re doing quite a lot of work on psychedelics and cults at the moment – come to our free event tomorrow at 1pm EST with cult expert Steve Hassan.
There are now several researchers working on psychedelic harms and harm reduction around the world, so we would love to see more coordination between these groups and funding for them. One of our goals for this year is to try and help set up a working group for psychedelic harm and harm reduction research, to help academic researchers find partners and funding.
Communicate that information better to the field and wider society
We try to encourage better media balance in coverage of psychedelic drugs, to mention not just the benefits but the harms as well. There’s a lot to be done. There are some hopeful signs the culture and industry are taking risk-education more seriously. Here is a new video from the Johns Hopkins psychedelic research centre, and it talks about the risk of extended difficulties. That’s a step in the right direction. Though how does one then get this message out to the tens of millions of people taking psychedelics far beyond academia?
There are groups thinking about this, and someone (I’m not sure who) has hired PR firm Rally to create better talking points for the psychedelic industry. I would just say – if you hire a PR company to do communications they are going to try and spin your product as well as they can, like Edward Bernays (the inventor of PR) spinning cigarettes as ‘torches of freedom’. That is not the same as responsibly communicating benefits and risks. Really, one needs government bodies like SAMHSA and CDC to get involved - I don’t think you can leave public education to industry bodies like the Healing Advocacy Fund.
Support those in difficulties
We’ve argued there should be specialist clinics in multiple countries for the 10% or so of people who experience extended difficulties after taking psychedelic drugs, similar to what Cheetah House does for people who experience post-meditation difficulties. Such a clinic would ideally do consultations and then refer people to psychiatrists, psychotherapists, spiritual chaplains or peer support groups depending on where they’re coming from, where they are, and what they need.
We are looking to start up our own peer support group for people who have experienced extended post-psychedeic difficulties at the end of this month, probably on Sunday April 28th at 6pm UK time / 1pm EST. If you are interested in attending email me – jules.evans@mac.com. It will be 90 minutes, with 15 people just for this first pilot one, and then we’ll run it monthly. It’s peer support, not therapy.
We think there needs to be more peer support groups, and they should become more common for trial participants (who often say they would like access to such groups) and for other groups like veterans for example.
Finally, another important aspect of providing better support for people in post-psychedelic difficulties is training. We need better training for psychedelic guides, therapists and integration coaches, to make sure that training programmes include accurate information about extended difficulties. We also need to provide information to the wider GP, therapist and psychiatrist industries, as the chances are someone dealing with post-psychedelic difficulties will go to their GP or to a therapist who is not in psychedelic culture and has no idea what they’re talking about.
The Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project is beginning to try and engage with training programmes. We wrote this piece looking at various psychedelic training programmes and seeing what they taught about adverse events and extended difficulties.
We also gave a webinar at Fluence, one of the biggest psychedelic therapy training schools, last week. And we’re teaching a module on extended difficulties on Clerkenwell Health’s new Foundations course starting in May (sign up here). You can hear Iain Jordan of Clerkenwell Health talk about the course in a free webinar tomorrow.
The bigger challenge is engaging with the non-psychedelic medical community to communicate the risks of psychedelics (as well as the benefits) and to educate the health community about the kinds of difficulties people can sometimes experience after psychedelics, so they get the best support possible. We’ve started writing articles for industry magazines like Therapy Today but it’s just the beginning of this process.
So that’s where I’ve got to as far as weaving a better safety net for psychedelic industry and culture. Next month we’re going to send out a survey asking leaders in the culture and industry what they think should be done to weave a better safety net. I’ll be interested to know what you think.
After the paywall, some links for Tuesday brunch, including some notes from today’s important European Medicines Agency summit on psychedelics (which continues online tomorrow, you can watch), and a devastating account from a child survivor of Betty Eisner’s psychedelic therapy cult in the 1960s.
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