The paranoid phase of the psychedelic renaissance

'When are we gonna tell them about the bats?'

In 1971, Hunter S Thompson reflected on the 1960s:

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

By 1971, he felt the vibes had definitely shifted:

Now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

In the early 1970s, the US medical establishment turned against psychedelics, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 made psychedelic research very difficult to do. This was followed up by revelations that much of the psychedelic research and LSD counter-culture of the 1960s was funded by the CIA. This led to a massive surge of paranoia. Who was a CIA spook or a DEA snitch? Leary? Ginsberg? The Merry Pranksters?

The hippies made for the hills and locked the doors, swapped Jimi Hendrix for James Taylor, LSD for cocaine, Woodstock for car-key parties, revolutionary utopian schemes for private cults and lonely searches for the Real Me.

I have a sense the psychedelic renaissance might be in a similar historical moment.

Why did the FDA reject psychedelic therapy the first time around?

There’s been nothing like the MK Ultra revelations yet, but it’s clear the tide has turned. The high-water mark of millenarian hope was Psychedelic Science last year. Now, the FDA has rejected Lykos’ MDMA application and the DEA has started to crack down on ketamine clinics and retreats.  You can feel a swing from collective euphoria to paranoia.

Who can you trust, who is legit, where are people coming from, what skeletons are in the closet?

Katherine Maclean, who used to be a researcher at Johns Hopkins, says:

I think 2017 Psychedelic Science was the last moment of real unity, the last moment that everyone could stand to be in a room together, when we felt we all shared values and were working together towards a common goal.

Back in 2017, Psymposia and MAPS were friends, in fact, Psymposia ran a stage at MAPS’ Psychedelic Science in 2017. You can hear them chatting away here like old buddies.

Cut to 2024:

Meanwhile, that whistling you can hear in the background? That’s the sound of the wind going out of the psychedelic balloon. Over at Linkedin, I read this from a professional ‘psychedelic integration expert’:

Yesterday, I hosted my "Legal Psychedelics 101" webinar, expecting a room full of eager participants. While the attendance was... less than ideal, I decided to press on. After all, I had spent countless hours preparing, and I knew the information I shared was valuable. With my hair looking awesome and feeling confident, I delivered the presentation as if there were a hundred people in the audience. Even though no one attended live, I gave it my all.

On Instagram, I watched a hair-dresser who is going through a three-year psychedelic training course to become a shamanic healer, sobbing into the camera. 

I’m done with this. I am finished. I am no longer participating in this atrocity. This is not my reality. I am…Krishna, Vishnu, Jesus…I have many names. I’m the second coming of Christ. I said it!

He descends into maniacal giggles.

This is the flipside of all those pretty, tidy, easily-integrated Hopkins mystical experiences we were sold. As Jamie Wheal put it:

We talked up Veterans and war-torn PTSD cuz it plays well to the neocon politicians and mega-donors in the red states.

But we talked down mentioning the bats. (seriously, when are we gonna tell ‘em about the fucking bats????)

So we hyped these substances as safe, effective, almost instantaneous cure-alls. We neglected to mention their Tricksy effects, or the yowling terror of the Screaming Abyss.

Beneath the renaissance is this idea…we are on a healing journey, and the Medicine will help us heal and discover our authentic Self. It reminds one of the 1970s search for the Real Me. Erik Davis wrote in his classic High Weirdness:

The Real Me was, in this sense, a classic Hollywood McGuffin. Peeling the onion of self could generate amazing experiences and transpersonal insights, as well as the sort of traumatic theater that lets you know that something powerful was happening. But there was no guarantee that the heart of the self was not, in the end, a void. The flip side of self-realization was the somewhat disturbing possibility—supported by Buddhism, by high-dose psychedelia, and by constructivist psychological and sociological concepts—that there is no solid or real Me at all. The existential vertigo catalyzed by this suspicion is the dark secret of seventies narcissism, the Munch-like scream of the smiley face.

A similar point was made recently by writer Tyler Alterman:

In other words, your healing journey is never going to end, folks. Your mind will keep on generating new worlds for you to explore, because the game tries to keep you playing.

Seek the generator.

Another aspect of the paranoid moment – the current obsession with ‘entities’, is reminiscent of the 1970s slide into occultism.  Internal Family Systems, the therapy du jour, teaches you to work with your inner parts and remove any ‘Unattached Burdens’ until you become pure Self. Unattached burdens is IFS terminology for demonic entities.  

Doesn’t this sound a bit like…Scientology?

Internal Family Systems, Unattached Burdens, and spirit possession

I feel a radical scepticism creeping into me. I’m not sure what to believe or who to trust. Who are the adults in the room? Who is safe? If people ask us for help, who do we refer them to?

We could refer them to a therapist –  but if they’re IFS, they might tell them they have an entity within them.  Or there’s a good chance they’re a devotee of the cult of psychedelic spirituality, and they’ll tell a vulnerable person ‘you did it wrong, you didn’t respect the Medicine’.

Who is really a professional therapist these days? What qualifications do they have, what training, what license, what ethical requirements?

We’re lost in a dark forest of ‘healers’, coaches, integrative therapists, empaths, naturopaths, sound-bathers, lightworkers, bodyworkers, ball-slappers, sun-boofers, urine-drinkers and old-fashioned sorcerers.

It takes about 10 years to be a doctor, six years to be a therapist. But a healer?  Smoke this and you’re good to go! Instant initiation.

The less actual training healers have, the more confidence. Source is guiding you, so you don’t need training or ethics or supervision or any sort of evidence based testing of your methods. Do no harm? How could you possibly harm anyone when you are so aligned with Love and Light. Who needs clinical trials when you have 5-D downloads.

People have wondered what humanity might do if AI takes over all our jobs. Well now we know. We’re all going to become ‘healers’, start an Instagram channel and talk light language.  As AI becomes Superintelligent, homo sapiens will become…Superdumb.

And yet I know my scepticism can go too far. If we’re too sceptical, we actually become close-minded. I also know from friends and family that healers come in many shapes, and not all of them have medical qualifications.

So how can we tell the breakthrough from the bullshit?

To help me think through this question, I turned to a new book by clinical psychologist Jonathan Stea, called Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry. Stea is a professor at University of Calgary, public science communicator and a warrior against wellness bullshit. What does he make of psychedelic science?

Jonathan Stea went undercover with a man-bun

Therapy speak has become ubiquitous and many people now call themselves therapists when they’re actually coaches or ‘healers’ or whatever. Do you think the professional definition of ‘therapist’ has become inflated or degraded? 

My concern is that the public is largely unaware of the differences between various non-legally protected terms such as “therapist” or “wellness coach” from bonafide professions with regulatory bodies and legally-protected titles, such as “psychologist” or “social worker.” Anyone can hang a shingle on their lawn or Instagram page and call themselves a “therapist” because it’s not a protected title. And that means there’s no codes of ethics or legal standards or practice governing its use. And so people who use that title are able to avoid accountability to patient care. I draw significant attention to this issue in my new book, Mind the Science, because it’s an important part of improving health literacy skills.

You say you like to go slumming online at the weekend to check out what weird shit is bubbling up in the wacky world of wellness. What is the weirdest thing you’ve come across on these voyeuristic voyages into the wellness underworld? 

The rest of our interview is after the paywall. I am three subscribers away from 1000, so to celebrate, subscriptions are 15% off for the next week. Paid subscribers also get access to the video archive of all our Psychedelic Safety Seminars, and the concluding chapter of Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency.