T-bombs away!

Approach

MAPS’ latest recruit is trauma pioneer Bessel Van der Kolk author of The Body Keeps the Score

‘Gifts for the Psychedelics’ by Wardell Milan, works from David Nolan Gallery NY

Psychedelic Renaissance author Dr Ben Sessa says ‘trauma is at the root of most unnecessary human conflict and misery.’

This summer, August 2022 topical spiritual teacher Thomas Hubl launched The Collective Trauma Summit; he talks about activating a “collective immune system.”

Trauma, on the scale from ‘victim of war atrocity’ down to ‘feel nervous when you see a policeman’, is up there with depression as global burden. According to the US Department of Veteran affairs it touches 350 million people worldwide. That’s in comparison to depression’s head count of 249 million. Trauma is thought be behind many conditions for which there are no currently prescribed medications or therapies: including post-traumatic stress disorder and its domestic derivative complex ‘C’ PTSD, plus substance use and personality disorders.

“The results in terms of experiences, and the secondary analyses, are spectacular”

Dr Bessel Van der Kolk, trauma trailblazer and author of The Body Keeps the Score, is overseeing stage three trials for MAPS MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD in Boston.

Back in the mid-2000s he told MAPS founder Rick Doblin, and program director Dr Michael Mithhoefer, not to try psychedelics for PTSD.

Since then, Dr Van der Kolk’s become an avid convert: “The results in terms of experiences, and the secondary analyses, are spectacular… transformations that I have not seen with any other treatment modality,” he reports.

The Federal Drug Administration has designated MAPS’ own MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD program officially a ‘breakthrough therapy’, that offers ‘substantial improvement over available therapy for a life-threatening condition.’

“We have lost our minds. Here we have a chance to reclaim them”

It wants to treat a million people every year and train 300,000 therapists by 2031. In keeping with its charitable vibe, MAPS is focussed on widespread availability, including for example BIPOC and low income sectors. The model will be available free of charge, and MDMA is out of patent. 

“To my mind, psychiatry lost its soul in its marriage to the drug industry as psychiatrists largely became a bunch of drug pushers,” says Dr Van der Kolk, “we have lost our minds; here, we have a chance to reclaim them. But boy, am I worried about profits. That sort of stuff can really get in the way of creating optimal healing environments. I’m really worried that people will do this by themselves or with friends or in unprotected situations, because you really open up Pandora’s box with MDMA-AT.”

Dr Van der Kolk says he “…mainly joined at that point to keep things very serious and very strict. Because I had seen how it blew up the last time,” alluding to scandals from 2015 dug up by New York Magazine’s The Cut podcast and intrepid news hounds at campaigning news source Psymposim.

“The results are spectacular… transformations that I have not seen with any other treatment”

Undergoing MDMA treatment himself convinced Van der Kolk of its potency. “I was just lying there going, ‘Oh shit, are you sure this is a party drug? Because I felt all the pain that had been dumped on me throughout the years. People asked me all the time: How do you deal with all this stuff? And I always said, ‘Oh, as long as you have a good support system and as long as you have a good marriage and you have good friends, you get to talk about your stuff, It doesn’t really become part of you.’ Well, I was wrong. On MDMA, I got to see that indeed this stuff had come inside of me, burrowed itself into the very core of my being. And it has affected me, my perception of things.”

While MDMA shrinks amygdala activity subduing fear, healing takes place by fully experiencing repressed thoughts and feelings, like during LSD and psilocybin therapy. Yet, “It’s quite different from a psychedelic,” says Dr Mithoefer, “The term proposed is ‘entactogen’ meaning it brings one closer to others and oneself,” comments on the decision to use MDMA, “but it’s not a new idea, in the 70s and 80s a number of therapists used it.” In his later Vital lecture, UK thought leader and Awakn chief Dr Ben Sessa says he believes MDMA is the best drug for therapy.

“Processing trauma in therapy can be very challenging and painful. It's not a cakewalk”

When patients take MDMA says Dr Mithoefer, “There’s often more insightfulness and less perceived loss of control. It doesn't tend to cause hallucinations, and people are more in touch with their surroundings than with psychedelics. However, even with MDMA this is all relative. If you're processing trauma in therapy, it can be very challenging and painful. So it's not a cakewalk.”

What shone out to Dr Van der Kolk was the self-compassion, evolving rapidly into acceptance, that MDMA treatment accessed inside its patients. “They stopped judging and beating up on themselves. They had a sense of internal generosity, a capacity for self-acceptance: and with that, the accepting of other people. They’d no longer defend against parts of themselves they couldn’t stand… and project on others.” What would normally be ‘triggering’ leading to self-defeating reactions is purged from the system… once felt in full.

“Part of functioning well is knowing what you feels, know, and needs to be done”

Pioneering child psychologist John Bowlby famously said, ‘What cannot be told to the mother cannot be told to the self.’ Resulting from this inner conflict is ‘alexithymia – ‘experiential avoidance of emotions as an emotion regulation strategy.’ Canonical 20th century psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall called it ‘disaffection’, “an inability to contain and reflect upon an excess of affective experience.”

The disaffected respond by ‘pulverising all trace of feeling, so that an experience which has caused emotional flooding is not recognised as such and therefore cannot be contemplated,’ according to 1989’s Theatre of the Body. This sounds like most people I know, to be honest. (McDougall also identified ‘normopathy’, the fear of difference).

Alexithymia was coined in 1973 by psychiatrist John C. Nemiah, a Yale and Harvard Medical school graduate and editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Some folks think it’s just a personality trait; ‘guys who can’t express their emotions’. Poor emotional intelligence is certainly a hallmark. Sufferers can certainly feel ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ but have little vocabulary to examine or discuss their state any further. In their relationships they are distant, over-rationalised and lack intimacy. They often lack assertiveness, and make decisions without taking their emotions into account leading to a dissatisfaction they cannot pin down. This develops into dysphoria, ‘a profound sense of unease.’

One of the most difficult parts of my own ADHD diagnosis was the chapter in Gabor Maté’s Shattered Minds that told me I didn’t have an identity.

“What you see in the MDMA-assisted therapy is that people have a self. They say, ‘This is who I am’.”

Instead I was a series of behavioural diktats intended to please others, or get them off my back at least. 

“The latest neuroscience stuff in the area of trauma is very much about the loss of sense of self that comes from it. And indeed the vast majority of our subjects in the MDMA-assisted therapy study had terrible Alexithymia scores,” said Dr Van der Kolk on Norway’s Psykologvirke podcast, “as long as you live with caregivers who don’t see you, that really impairs your capacity to know who you are and what you’re feeling. This is very much part of becoming a well functioning human being: to know what this creature that you inhabit feels, and knows, and needs to be done.”

Beautifully, “What you see in the MDMA-assisted therapy is that people have a self,” observes Dr Van der Kolk, “They say, ‘this is who I am. This is what I feel, this is what’s important to me. That’s what’s unimportant to me. And I’m no longer dependent on what you feel to dictate what I feel. I have my own feelings’.”

More MDMA therapy articles here on New Psychonaut:

Feed your head

Approach

Patients say psilocybin offers “experiencing everything” in contrast to the ennui of SSRIs

David Shrigley, ‘Magic’. Works from Lougher Contemporary

Depression is a problem. One is six Brits are prescribed drugs to counter it. But still nobody knows what it is, how it works, or how to cure it. 

This is in stark contrast to the popular narrative that ‘depression is caused by an imbalance of ‘“happiness chemical” serotonin in the brain’. The most popularly-prescribed anti-depressants ‘selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors’ or SSRIs regulated it. Apparently. Like you might conclude by the name ‘selective’ and ‘serotonin’. Or by reading research in respected medical journal The Lancet, written by senior psychologists at Oxford and Yale; although the average depressive is more likely to get the mis-info off commercial content blogs from psychiatrists. 

SSRIs have some worrying side-effects. Like nasty poos, even worse sleep, plus most notoriously loss of libido – which is no good if your relationship is already on the rocks because of your depression. Or your redundancy, which is a major cause of depression but not taken into account by the medical sector. Plus, the ‘medical model’ actually makes patients feel more stigma around their depression than otherwise.

SSRI users report an ‘emotional numbness’ known medically as ‘SSRI-induced indifference’ with practical effects not dissimilar to depression itself. ‘Evidence indicates that a reduction in depressive symptoms may not be the single most important outcome to patients, but rather factors such as the ability to participate in everyday activities and return to work,’ says this British Medical Journal article from its 2020 Evidence Based Medicine special issue.

“It was like the light switch being turned on in a dark house… [my] concrete coat had come off”

But SSRIs do increase serotonin levels (like recreational ecstasy) although possibly reduce them long term (like recreational ecstasy). Plus – anecdotally – my close friends who are prescribed SSRIs do say “help take the edge off.” I wouldn’t want to go without my ADHD meds, which do make an enormous difference. But neither SSRIs nor my Amfexa go any way towards curing the conditions, only reducing symptoms.

A balls-out report from UCL published only this summer, made headlines by highlighting the gap between this narrative and reality. And we know what happens when anybody does that. (Like I’m fond of quoting, in the original version of The Emperor’s New Clothes the child who points out the emperor is naked is banished to the wilderness. Not made king instead by a grateful populace, which is a modern alteration). 

The status quo brought out its big guns. Rolling Stone, once the organ of the counter-culture, spread muck all over author Professor Joanna Moncrieff (of University College London, one of the most respected medical research centres in the world, while Rolling Stone is no longer respected as a pop music magazine, just saying) pointing out her membership of the Critical Psychiatry Network ‘Which aims to “[mount] a scientific challenge to claims about the nature and causes of mental disorder and the effects of psychiatric interventions.” Like RD Laing. Rolling Stone also drew attention to, and those of a sensitive disposition please stop reading now, her reticence for… vaccine mandates, as expressed in an open letter to the British Medical Journal from NHS workers that she signed. The real problem was that some of the shrill left’s enemies on the shrill right, like Fox News rabble-rouser Tucker Carlson, agreed with the paper. 

I’ll stop before I get depressed. The point is: psychedelic treatment for depression counters the ‘emotional numbness’ of the condition, on or off SSRIs.

In fact, the opposite happens. “It was like the light switch being turned on in a dark house, the concrete coat had come off,” said one PsiloDep Trial participant according to the vital presentation by Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, a psychologist on the trials and facilitator of its dedicated ongoing integration circle. Another trial patient said: “I allow myself to experience everything, even if it's sadness. Now I know how to deal with my feelings rather than rather than repress them.”

Why? “Oceanic boundlessness” AKA increased connectivity, the mystical trip accompanied by profound meaning, “going beyond the self”, and resolution of emotions (it’s usually shame according to Murphy-Beiner) by mini-spiritual emergency-cum-challenging experience are the top signifiers. This is before we discuss the default mode network, neuroplasticity, or neurogenesis. The ‘inner healer’ or ‘homeostasis principle’ to use its new scientific name dispenses these as required.

If depression can be cured by restoring powerful human instincts like connection and meaning, is it caused by a lack of them? Former narrative cheerleader yet admittedly rather good writer Johann Hari made his comeback from exile with Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions (here’s the TED Talk). Therein he claimed, backed up by doctors and patients, that depression is mostly caused by our bureaucratic dystopia: “the depression of many of my friends, even those in fancy jobs – who spend most of their waking hours feeling controlled and unappreciated – started to look not like a problem with their brains, but a problem with their environments,” he writes. And well done him. Although depression is not my area, and I’m far from qualified  as a pro, it’s very tempting to agree.

But if the problem isn’t brain chemistry but civilisation itself, isn’t sending depressives back out after psychedelic treatment into the same desperate non-life that made them so desperate in the first place just going to make them depressed again? At this point one can only make a fart joke, and nobody can get away with that better than proper brain box Dr Chris Timmerman, who tweeted this new report Understanding the effects of serotonin in the brain through its role in the gastrointestinal tract because it describes psychedelics as ‘cognitive laxatives’.

Power to Empower

Approach

Inner journeys require deft guidance deployed with subtlety

From Seascapes by Paul Rosteau published by Loose Joints

Talismanic underground figure Leo ‘The Secret Chief’ Zef began his psychedelic guide self-training using talk therapy in his voyagers’ sessions.

Eventually he wrote, “I realised I didn’t know what they needed and neither did they. Something inside them did. Just leave ‘em alone!”

Photos of the general public tripping in blindfold-and-headphones under strip lighting prompts revulsion in recreational users – or it did in myself, certainly.

Stanislav Grof, ‘The godfather of LSD’ according to its inventor Albert Hoffman, who ‘nobody has contributed as much to the development of my problem child’ explains in his landmark work LSD Therapy that he went through a similar thought process as a researcher in the 1960s and 70s. 

The simultaneous model,‘psycholytic therapy’ Grof says does have its advantages compared to regular psychoanalysis, cutting treatment times by a third. But the doses he believes are too regular and possibly too small. Most importantly, the open-ended process has no focus on the rigorous analysis and integration of insights. 

“It will seem weird to them. Normalise. Don’t pathologise”

Grof concluded that ‘psychedelic therapy’ which features three to four regular therapy sessions punctuated by high dose experiences where the patient mostly corresponds with their inner healer, 

While skilful guidance by the therapists can make impact, this requires elegance and subtlety. 

Vital Week Ten lecturer Kylea Taylor has worked for Grof Transpersonal Training since the 1990s. Like veteran Dr Bill Richards back in Week Four, she says the number one thing to keep in mind is the existence, and the potency, of the inner healer. In an ethical context this means trusting the client’s relationship with the process more than yourself. 

“Work at the speed of safety. Move at the speed of trust”

Creating a sense of permission to unfold, “the power to empower” is a very different role to that of the modern psychotherapist, who in my own experience prefers their narrative to any individual ones. Let alone any insight dispensed by cosmic visions.

“Normalise, don’t pathologise,” says Taylor, “It will seem weird to them, outside their own frame of reference.” While I absolutely agree this will be true for some voyagers, I’m inclined to believe plenty of others will find their fantastical visions more compelling than a grim raking over of their early childhood, accompanied by a gentle shaming of any non-narrative impulses. Get out the Soul Collage, which is like a ‘make your own Red Book kit’.

“Think, ‘How can I support this client to take their next step into freedom, where they can be fully who they are?’” Says Taylor, again echoing Bill Richards who worked alongside Grof for many years, this time with his ‘cosmic midwife’ allusion. Providing examples, stories and suggested reading are more appropriate than Freudian psychoanalysis, which can seem terribly pompous when you’re tripping. Just like all cokeheads. Stop gabbling like one right now: “Part of good attunement is not knowing what’s going on with them and attuning nonetheless,” says Taylor. 

And don’t rush it, despite the promises of miracle cures. “Work at the speed of safety… move at the speed of trust. Especially with clients who have a different life experience.”

More mushroom tea, vicar?

Approach

Savvy brits in the space are sussed to self-care. But the vulnerable are left behind

Contemporary graffiti in east London

Here’s a ray of optimism, before I start even attempting to unravel the respective messes that are Britain’s drug laws and mental health provision.

A judge in Cumbria, northern England just said she hoped ’the law will catch up with science’ when pardoning an accused man for growing his own magic mushrooms to benefit his mental health.

Britain has the highest depression rate among children in Europe, along with one-third of the continent’s drug overdose deaths and its worst alcohol problem. Mental health problems cost the British economy £118 billion annually. The situation is apparently more dismal than we even think. Lockdown saw a 47% increase in young people seeking help and I need hardly quote again my recent article elsewhere detailing the stigma that still exists in the workplace around stress and burnout.

It’s characteristic of the British legislature to turn a benign blind eye to self-medication while dragging its feet on psilocybin prescriptions. Former prime minister (PM) Boris Johnson and his pantomime villain advisor Dominic Cummings supposedly had psychedelic therapy as a political cause celébre partly because Brexit meant chances to the law could be actioned quicker. Now they’re out of the game, things are even worse in the corridors of power.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group

UK home secretary Priti Patel says she’ll ban ‘middle class’ cannabis smokers from nightclubs and take away their passports to derision from even Daily Mail readers. Front runner for new PM Liz Truss has turned Judas on her 420-friendly past.

The centre left is no better with its leader Keir Starmer, a former head of public prosecutions, saying he’s “seen too much damage” in his former role. Dude, the unremittingly grim extraction economy lifestyle is the problem across all classes especially the estate-condemned non-working class. Not the weed itself.

While kids opting for dank oblivion above all else is a problem, it is hardly caused by marijuana alone and previous alternatives like booze and heroin are frankly worse. My entirely subjective opinion from the ground is that the approach reeks of not upsetting near-senile, control-freak baby-boomers.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group that are actually part of the UK’s centre-right Conservative [Tory] Party. Its campaign to legalise cannabis and psychedelic therapies has the blessing of former prime minister John Major, ex-Tory leader William Hague, current Northamptonshire police, fire and crime commissioner Stephen Mold, plus ex-MI5 (it’s like Homeland Security) chiefs Lord Evans and Baroness Eliza Manningham-Butler.

Over half of voters from even right-wing parties believe in the legalisation of psychedelic therapy, according to a YouGov poll quoted by broadcaster and former advisor to PM Theresa May Tom Swarbrick. Thought leaders like the redoubtable Zoe Cormier of good eggs Guerrilla Science are also in the media front lines doing the mushroom god’s work.

Meanwhile the country’s largest NHS trust are opening a new dedicated facility in the grounds of the former ‘Bedlam’ hospital alongside Compass Pathways which you can read about elsewhere in this issue.

The naturally British reaction is to quietly do what it seems the justice system, NHS and general public are already doing. Which is plough on regardless leaving the government apparatus and armchair windbags to their own ineffectual posturing. 

Healing of the Nation

Approach

Become a tree, mushroom, bee or flower with pollination models and mycelial economics

By Tabita Rezaire in Black Fantastic at the Southbank Heyward Gallery, London till September 18

Psychedelics have been totally colonised, of course. But mushrooms even have the answer for that.

Dr Zelner didn’t just quit the rat race. He found a way to disable the money trap.

‘The Pollination Approach’ that he originally outlined in a landmark article for MAPS is a new community based healthcare structure, inspired by the vastly successful Frome Model that you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

He further acknowledges that if community, business, economics and health are interconnected, then it’d only truly work if systems other than healthcare change too. Especially if we’re to avoid a psychedystopia like that set out in illustrated story We Will Call it Pala, which my Reichian body work coach would call ‘evocative’.

Wielding his understanding of biomimetics, Dr Zelner says “Fungi control the allocation of resources to plants, and they don’t set it all up so one can get much bigger than the others,” he says, “The social shift is from a disconnected pattern to a connected pattern, where people in social organisations are linked in multiple ways – which is also nature’s pattern, the mycelial network, the root networks if you will, of mushrooms. Resources are circulated through the entire system, keeping money local and creating economic multipliers.”

It’s the kind of thing both Banksy and my dad would agree on.

Dr Zelner’s Transformative Capital Institute is allocating funds to those kind of projects.  

“None of us needs to take on the responsibility to change the world. Incremental, emergent change is how life’s process works”

Regenerative economics, the ‘community and wellbeing first’ business strategy has also been completely colonised. You can do an MSc in it. Zenner says, “I’m not anti-capitalist, but in regenerative economics shareholders can’t be prioritised above all. I saw the phrase crop up in a traditional venture capital firm report, saying they like my pollination approach and it could help double their profits. Obviously there’s a conflict there.”

He continues, “Wellness has been colonised,” of course, “any change we can make through the policy process is incremental at best.” Ranting at your Twitter feed about the latest moral-political infraction is finally over.

“None of us needs to take on the responsibility to change the world, says Dr Zelner, “Incremental, emergent change is how life’s process works. Positive action at a micro level is regenerative. Individual behaviours quickly become a pattern shift. You are a pollinator.”

And yes, psychedelics could still be the healing of the nation as ‘The first lady of LSD history’ Dr Erika Dyck stated in this rallying Charcuna piece. “Psychedelics help people question their beliefs, and we are socially constructing this reality. They shift people from disconnection to connection. It’s an embodied experience of the regenerative pattern.”

We don’t need to get everyone on board immediately. “Tipping points happen only at 15-20% of a network,” advises Dr Zelner.

Switching to ‘steward ownership’ is one way socially-minded firms new and old can limit their exposure to extracting finance. The format allows a business to legally put purpose over shareholder returns, capping revenue-based financing returns after eight years. Late in 2021 Europe’s Synthesis Institute raised its Series A round of $7.25 million investment funding under a stewardship model becoming the first psychedelic company to do so.

Back around the neighbourhood, Dr Zelner’s local Brooklyn Psychedelic Society are drawing up a Frome-style health co-op to great excitement. 

I grew up near Frome, and my parents remain active in community life: amateur dramatics, parish council, village hall management committee, ‘walking football’ for the boomers. The internecine clashes within village life have inspired endless hours of situation comedy over the years, plus recently a lockdown viral sensation. 

Research from Imperial College, no less, says psilocybin treatment for depression increased nature awareness and softened any authoritarian politics amongst the test group. I ask Dr Zelner if psychedelics can even heal neighbourly squabbles. 

“I don’t have as many funny stories as I’ll probably have this time next year,” he grins, “The Brooklyn project is very new and run by a guy called Colin Pugh. They’re still at the phase where they’re figuring out if to be a traditional co-op, versus a non-profit co-op, how to engage the existing membership of their traditional psychedelic society…” 

Maybe a dose of non-dual thinking will still be required before life’s committee meetings.

Till then, we can but dream.

Boldly going where no heads have gone before

Approach

Intravenous infusion (IV) application allows for extended DMT sessions dubbed ‘DMTx’ lasting hours at a time

By Colin Prahl from the exhibition Limit Sequence at The Chambers Project gallery till 16 September 2022. homepage image ‘Geodesia’ also by Prahl is available as a print from the artists’ webstore.

DMTx is an extended DMT trip applied by intravenous drip… in the ‘DMTx machine’ at Imperial College London.

“It’s crazy that ppl aren’t studying endogenous DMT more than they are,” says the man who brought ‘the spirit molecule’ to Western attention, pointing out that Dr Jon Dean of DMT Quest cannot get further funding for his revelatory 2019 discovery that DMT is produced in large quantities by the human body.

“Nature is gushing with DMT” according to Dennis McKenna. At least plant medicine got decriminalised in Dr Dean’s Michigan neighbourhood.

“How is DMT made?” Strassman prompts, “What’s its synthesis? What turns it on or off? Why should the brain when faced with this simple, ubiquitous molecule start constructing these alien realities? And what purpose does it have?”

Dr Strassman’s got plenty of ideas to get the ball rolling. He first put forward the notion of a DMaTrix in a 2016 paper published alongside Andrew Gallimore, a Japan-based British neuroscientist who could lay claim to being the most ambitious psychonaut in the global space.

“The DMT experience could be ‘titrated’ both in terms of duration and intensity, adjusting these levels to accommodate the specific needs of individuals”

The two pointed out in rigorous scientific detail that DMT was ideally placed to be administered by IV drip, hospital bed-style. 

‘There are potential clinical applications of a continuous IV infusion of DMT,’ they wrote, ‘Compared to the substantially longer effects of other psychedelic substances, DMT offers more discrete and therefore more easily manageable experiences. In conjunction with continuous target‐controlled infusions, the DMT experience could be “titrated” both in terms of duration and intensity, adjusting these levels to accommodate the specific needs of different individuals and indications.’

Colorado based Mindfulness Medicine picked up on this and began its DMTx awareness-raising project already preparing 21st Century to explore DMT hyperspace for extended periods. Gallimore’s enthusiastic lectures suggested they would y’know, get used to it after a while, find their feet and achieve a clearer, productive learning experience. The intensity can be dialled up or down, and explorers in dire straits can be pulled out of DMTx at the flick of a switch.

“I asked Rick how long he’d like to spend there,” says DMTx’s Daniel McQueen, a psychotherapist and psychedelic retreat organiser, and ‘Oh, a couple of days’ was the reply.”

On the practicalities of commuting to hyperspace Dr Strassman commented “Well, astronauts wear diapers” during his Vital lecture.

No prizes for guessing where the DMaTrix is up and running right now. Imperial College London, backed by the UK’s Small Pharma company are on the verge of publishing the results of their experiment SPL028 Prolonged DMT Series: An injectable formulation of deuterated DMT designed to deliver a more prolonged psychedelic experience.

At July’s Breaking Convention conference I chatted to a gentleman who’d been in the DMaTrix (already shortened to ‘The DMTX Machine’ in UK space argot), the day before; a young neuroscientist. He seemed pretty chilled, to be fair.

“I won’t ask you what it was like,” I said, flexing my fearless reporting skills. “Hm,” came the reply, in acknowledgment. He showed me photos, and there he was wired up to the machine in a technicolour Frankenstein’s laboratory transported into the secular era, with MSB doors plus health ‘n’ safety notices. And a dude playing the lute in the corner.

While it was one of those strikingly unfamiliar scenes that tickled my ontology, there was undeniably something exciting, creative, proactive and downright courageous about it too. This was bolstered by the presence of Robin Carhart-Harris himself, who’s taken personal charge of SPL028 (which is patented). Still, by the time you actually read this there could be a hole torn in the fabric of reality where Imperial’s South Kensington campus used to be.

“The important thing is not what the entities are, but what can we learn to better ourselves and society?”

Imperial’s model is considered ‘scientific’ in comparison to the DMTX org’s emphasis on spiritual preparation. The college’s secret weapon Dr Chris Timmerman though is out there detailing a combined model of approach and researching DMT’s similarity to a ‘waking dream’ state featuring the requisite rapid drop in alpha waves and rise in delta plus gamma waves, plus: “reduced modularity, increased integration and functional plasticity. These findings were complemented by psychological studies showing that the DMT state is one of immersive visual imagery, intense somatic experiences and partial disconnection from the environment, which we found shared significant overlap with near- death experiences. DMT administration also resulted in positive mental health outcomes in healthy volunteers providing evidence for the first time that DMT may provide a useful alternative to currently investigated psychedelic treatments.”

The space’s first documented encounter with stand-alone DMT came in 1961 when William Burroughs wrote to Timothy Leary urging him to have some apomorphine to hand if he gave it a go. Because Burroughs had thought he was fine with DMT until one of his companions turned into – what else? – a bejewelled jaguar. (Burroughs was already a veteran of the Amazon, having written about yagé over a decade previously. Neuroscientist Andrew Lees credits Burroughs, a failed doctor who became a writer, with inspiring him to sample yagé that in turn “broke down certain rigid structures that were blocking innovations” in Lees’ leading Parkinson’s disease research).

Leary write later that DMT was “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family. A sub-cellular cloud-ride into a world of ordered, moving beauty which defies external metaphor. There’s memory of structure, because space is converted into flowing process.” His crew’s reports were varied, and indeed DMT still gets a mixed reception today despite a John Hopkins compilation report maintaining 80% of users surveyed reported positive entity encounters. 

“The kids round here don’t need psychedelic guides. They’ve got YouTube and DMT vapes”

Lady Amanda Fielding described it as “a little harsh” with English understatement at the Psych Summit. But her Berkley Psytech concluded in its ayahuasca research that long-term use is beneficial. 

Might as well try microdosing it then.

“The kids round here don’t need psychedelic guides. They’ve got YouTube and DMT vapes,” said a friend of mine based in a large regional UK city when I told him about Vital. And indeed medical reports published in July 2022 shows how a diagnosed schizophrenic claimed to have healed himself with DMT and other psychedelics.

“During his final trip, he even encountered an “entity” in the form of a geometric shape called an icosahedron “with a consciousness”. Every thought that the teenager shared with the icosahedron was mirrored back to him as if it would have answers to all possible questions.

Taking his treatment a step further, the patient then began smoking low doses of DMT on a daily basis for an extended period of time. Doing so brought him into contact with yet more entities and produced an antidepressant effect. Eventually, he came to realise that “he wanted [to] belong to the society and the world, to live and enjoy life. He described that 'life had begun to feel like a life”.’

Well, The University of California says microdosing DMT works for rats.

Out there in the self-healing underground though, the “question everything” rule Dr Strassman swears by is alive. “Vaping DMT is spiritual masturbation” writes one discontent (a Chicken Licken or plant medicine snob? You decide). Carl Jung warned, “Beware of unearned wisdom” and with my apprentice ‘guide’ hat on I would remind everyone to actually live the lessons learned from the Icosahedrons or whatever they might really be above. 

“The important thing is not what they are, but what can we learn to better ourselves and society?” says Dr Strassman. And we cannot do that if we spend the whole time wired into a machine at Imperial College.

Next Up, The Psychedelic Enlightenment

Approach

“Social, ethical, legal and metaphysical issues can undergo a transformation akin to psychedelic therapy” says an inspiring new movement with beards to match

By Dana Awatani, works via Athr Art

Psychedelics have a purpose beyond healing or good times according to the next generation of philosophers.

Dr Chris Letheby is a laid-back (seemingly, you never know with these philosophers) Australian contemporary thinker. Say ‘epistemology’ in the accent.

He likes jumpers and beards, and was the first to bring out a book titled The Philosophy of Psychedelics, published by Oxford University Press in 2021. 

During a Letheby lecture I sneak into from Berlin-based MIND, Dr Letheby academic definitions of ‘knowledge’ onto psychedelic insight with skill and precision, deploying bon mots from global philosophers and key points from contemporary research along the way. 

“Social, ethical, legal, and metaphysical issues can undergo psychedelic transformation akin to that achieved in therapy”

Psychedelic philosophy’s nemesis is ‘the comforting delusion’; are we communing with the cosmos or just high and talking bollocks? Is psychedelic therapy, in Charles Grob’s phrase, an “existential medicine?” Or is it, as Michael Pollan wondered, ‘simply foisting a comforting delusion on the sick and dying”?’ Dr Letheby addresses in this article for MAPS.

He’s calling for a ‘Psychedelic Enlightenment’ to follow our current ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ period: “Social, ethical, legal, and metaphysical issues can undergo psychedelic transformation akin to that achieved in therapy,” he declares unpretentiously and convincingly.

Philosophical debate though is not for the feint of heart, or head. Throw some ‘non-specific amplifiers’ into the mix and things get more real than real. Indeed as I write Vital week six lecturer Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes is fencing wits with Chris Letheby in the specialist press, about… admittedly I’ve not quite figured it out just yet from giving the article a scan. Although chances are it’s something to do with ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ (how life springs from matter, or otherwise). It usually is.

Launching himself into this moshpit of contemplation is Aiden Lyon, another Australian with no beard this time but plenty of jumpers, out of Amsterdam University whose book… Psychedelic Experience is out soon, again from Oxford University Press. The formidable Lyon has a mind like a steel trap, unsurprisingly, plus the air of a frustrated Victorian man of reputation who’d prefer to be searching for King Solomon’s Mines, but the transpersonal will have to do instead. He opens a Mind lecture I attend by pointing out his ‘circular’ theory taking the ‘mind-manifesting’ definition of psychedelic experience has been approved by Imperial College’s Dr Robin Carhart-Harris. 

“Nature has intrinsic worth. Not just spiritual worth”

Lyon, who’s already set up in consultancy, slices his way through the ‘Are psychedelic insights to be taken seriously?’ thing to point out that they can be very useful. There’s loads more in this issue’s Medical item. Lyon and Letheby are both terribly plausible chaps. But you may be forgiven thinking it’s all a bit monochrome geometric patterns, and not enough Tarot cards. Left, as opposed to right brain.

Step forward Sjöstedt-Hughes, a former schoolteacher whose repertoire arguably channels the psychedelic. He does have a beard, but the similarities end there.

“There’s seemingly something in us that needs expansion”

He’s catalogued philosophy’s psychedelic associations, and spares no superlatives when addressing the power of 5-MEO DMT compared to earthly religious experience.  Rarely (but not uniquely) among contemporary Western psychedelic renaissance types he tackles subjects like the ‘trickster’ archetype and its association with psychedelics, non-dualism and subjective morality, the existence and nature of ‘God’ – “looks like he’s out there but he doesn’t love you – nature has intrinsic worth, not just spiritual worth.”

Sjöstedt-Hughes proposes the return of metaphysics to the political conversation and the high street: “like we’d see a therapist, we’d consult a philosophical-spiritual advisor… ‘the metaphysician will see you now’,” is just one flourish he delivers from behind his tinted aviators, “you could grab a leaflet featuring suggestions for alternative spiritual paths, like the simulation theory, or the receiver, on the way out.”

But the psychedelic philosophers have ambitions way beyond the ivory towers of academia, or the medical industrial complex. Sjöstedt-Hughes in particular.

“I hope psychedelics can be part of a grander idealism for civilisation. There ‘s seemingly something in us that needs expansion. Psychedelics might offer this. I do hope for it. and I do believe it’s actually going to happen.”