History
Psychedelic assisted therapy is a psychotherapy technique that involves psychedelic medicine to aid in the therapeutic process. Psychedelic medicine and hallucinogenic substances have been used in holistic medicine by various cultures for thousands of years.
In the 1950s and 60s, psychedelic treatments had a major impact in psychiatry, and many considered it a new frontier for mental health treatment. However, due to political reasons, psychedelic research and therapy were effectively shut down from the 1970s. Over the past decade, that research has finally begun again. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is currently being tested in many countries, and has demonstrated remarkable promise in treating various mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma.
In rigorous and well-controlled trials with appropriate clinical support, psychedelic treatments are safe, and frequently lead to remission after a short program of psychotherapy. Even when current treatments have failed, subjects often experience significant symptom reduction after 1-3 medicinal doses of psychedelics such as ketamine, psilocybin or MDMA.
One of the most striking findings is that subjects who took dosages within a therapeutic context experienced significantly better outcomes than those who ingested psychedelics without psychotherapy.
The results have been so compelling that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have designated ketamine, psilocybin- and MDMA-assisted psychotherapies as ‘breakthrough therapies’, expediting their research and development.
The Psychedelic Experience
Classical psychedelics appear to produce many of their effects through the activation of a specific Serotonin receptor (5HT2A) in the brain. Numerous complex changes in brain activity occur following ingestion of a psychedelic, from reductions in activity in some areas (for example, changes in the Default Mode Network, which is associated with mind-wandering, thinking about the past or future, and thinking about self/others), to alterations to the way different areas connect to each other (for example, areas of the brain that typically don’t interact much begin to work together). What psychedelics do to the mind is also of central relevance to clinical research.
The ‘psychedelic experience’ is certainly not consistent across different people and the range of experiences and responses is wide. However, with specific constraints on ‘set’ and ‘setting’ – as is the case within modern clinical trials – certain subjective features occur for many people in a surprisingly reliable way. These include increased empathy for others; increased compassion for oneself; profound and novel insights about one’s character or life or the world; feelings of deep connectedness with other people or other things; a sense of meaningfulness; a reduced sense of one’s Self, its permanence, and its boundaries; and in some cases, a completely other-worldly experience often referred to as ‘mystical’.
Psychedelic experiences entail an ‘altered state of consciousness’, a shift in the fundamental nature of one’s experience that is often startling, and difficult to imagine, much less describe. A common feature of these experiences is that the accompanying insights and perspectives are felt to be more reliable, more ‘true’ or ‘wise’, than one’s usual understanding. Further, the ‘authority’ of these novel perspectives tends to endure well beyond the acute stages of the psychedelic session.