Becoming a Psychedelic Therapist | +50 articles

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Safety guidelines for guides, psychedelic integration practitioners, and other leaders

December 3, 2018 | by Daniel "Sitaram Das" Shankin of Psymposia.com

This is a riff on the safety guidelines recently released by Chacruna. I have tons of respect for Chacruna, but I wanted to tweak the guidelines. I'm a white dude with plenty of power and privilege, and I know plenty of other people who fit the same description.

What would safety guidelines look like for us, the people most statistically likely to create a lack of safety? How can men, who participate in psychedelic community as members or leaders hold themselves to a standard that promotes safety for the people that really need it? How can we model ethical behavior for the next generation of men who will enter this work in the future? This is what I've come up with, in one quick run through. I'm aware that there is some biting humor here, some of it's brusque, but you're men, you can take it.

Note: I'm happy to make this a living, collaborative document. I know that Chacruna spent a lot of time and worked with many experts to draft their document, and I created this one on the spur of the moment. I'm happy to have an evolving conversation. I probably won't argue too much, as it's not fun for me. I also probably won't be super open to strangers who want to tell me what I should do, or should have done. I hope that everyone can appreciate and enjoy this in the spirit with which it is offered.

Psychedelic safety guidelines

1. Treat everyone like friends and family

Better yet, treat everyone like a family member who has had a rough day. People often come to ceremony to heal. If one of your siblings recently had their heart broken by a lousy partner, how would you treat them? My guess is you wouldn't sexually assault them. Don't do that to anyone else in your community either.'

2. Get experienced

Do your work. Go to trainings, workshops, and yoga classes. Meditate, read good books. Learn at the feet of brilliant people of a variety of genders, sexual orientations, and belief systems. Challenge yourself.

3. Be transparent about your skills and abilities.

Don't misrepresent your skills and abilities. That's lying. Don't lie.

4. Don't touch people without consent, on intimate areas of the body, or otherwise

You're dealing with family, remember. You wouldn't grope your mom, would you? Also, if touch is a consideration for some reason, best to discuss it clearly, transparently, in advance, and while everyone is sober. Also if you need to talk to someone alone, try to do it in such a way that it can't be construed as menacing. Remember that you're large and strong. Don't block doorways with your body or insist that meetings take place in overly remote locations. Maybe just a bench in a quiet area of a public park would be nice.

5. Keep your clothes on, everyone, please

If you're not at Harbin Hot Springs, everyone stays dressed. And you aren't at Harbin because it was lost in a fire a few years ago and hasn't been rebuilt. It's a tragedy. And you're a tragedy if you think you're clever because you conned someone to take their clothes off because of some weird fetish or power trip.

6. If you have sexual intentions, just take them elsewhere

Look, I want you to have a happy, fulfilling sex life. But this isn't the place. The gods have provided us with a plethora of online dating apps full of people who want to get down. Get your needs met on your own time.

7. Sexual intercourse during ceremonies is vetoed in nearly all ayahuasca traditions.

There is probably good reason for this. Don't try to bang anyone. On the off chance that someone tries to bang you, just be flattered and decline.

8. Sexual intercourse with a client does not make you cool.

Sometimes, men with power and opportunity think it does. Usually men who are new to power and opportunity. It's an immature, rookie move. See #2.

9. Receive friendliness and compliments with generous appreciation of the spirit with which they are offered

If you are helpful to people they are often grateful. The healing that people receive in a psychedelic space can be profound, and so the gratitude is often profound. People might be projecting some paternal archetype onto you as well, and be in a space where they see you as their dad or Jesus or Santa Claus or Jeff Goldblum or whatever. Don't abuse that. Be a good dad. Say thank you and tell them you appreciate what good work they did and send them home.

10. Respect each person's dignity and humanity

People dress in different ways. They talk in different ways, and they have different customs. Respect, however, is universal.

11. Respect everyone's personal space

Physically and spiritually - before, during, and after ceremony. Respect people's boundaries. Do not suggest anyone feel obliged to engage in verbal or physical communication with you or anyone else during or following ceremony.

12. Don't give people shit they aren't expecting.

If you give people shit, make sure you only give them the best, cleanest, highest quality shit, and don't give them more shit than necessary and don/t give them any surprise shit.

13. You're a shaman, not a saint.

And really, you probably aren't even a shaman. So get off your high horse and quit taking yourself so seriously.

14. If you screw up, or worry you might, get support

We are going to assume you aren't a sociopath. We're going to assume that you want to be a good man with good moral values, but that you struggle sometimes with the toxic ideas that you've been raised with. I know that I have. Find other healthy men. Work with them. Hold each other accountable. Root out the entitlement, anger, shame, and other issues that you take out on women. If you do hurt a woman, attempt to make amends quickly, learn from it, and don't do it again. If she doesn't want to hear it from you, you might just have to leave her alone.

15. Beware of consensual sex

Don't do this here. Go online. Also, for those of us with jobs in the field, we don't really get to clock out. Being someone's MDMA therapist during the day and then dating them at night is problematic. It might work, until it doesn't any more. Acting innocent and surprised when is blows up in your face will make you look like a schmuck.

16. Beware of getting romantically involved

Sometimes we have a sex/love/friendliness synesthesia. Wires get crossed. You've seen the diagram. You feel a cosmic love for the universe and you look over and see a woman and just decide she's the one. She's not the one. You're tripping. Chill out and leave her alone.

Daniel "Sitaram Das" Shankin

After a profound and intense awakening experience in 1998, Daniel dove deep into his yoga and meditation practice to stabilize his realization in his body and the world. He began teaching in 2002, and took over leadership of his neighborhood yoga studio in 2004. He's directed several teacher training programs and taught on the faculty of even more. Daniel "Sitaram Das" Shankin has dedicated his life to the cultivation of clarity, resilience, and heart. With the recognition that our true nature is vast and generous, wise, he strives to serve his clients in finding their own innate goodness and boundless strength. He currently offers leadership coaching with a heavy emphasis on mindfulness and somatics, and is based in Marin County.

https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/s...c-integration/
 
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The Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research

The Center educates the public about psychedelic medicines and trains psychotherapists to work in the expanding field of psychedelic studies.

To address the demand for trained psychotherapists, CIIS created the Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research in 2015. The Center is directed by clinical psychologist Dr. Janis Phelps, who is also a professor in the East-West Psychology program.

As part of a public service campaign to teach a variety of topics related to psychedelic research, the Center offers a series of evening lectures, weekend workshops, webinars, and films shown at CIIS and online. The goal of the Center's Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research is to invite cohorts of licensed psychotherapists and medical professionals to become psychedelic researchers and practitioners in legal clinical studies.

The goal of the Center's certificate program is to teach licensed psychotherapists and medical professionals and ordained clergy to become psychedelic researchers in the US and abroad. The certificate program trained 89 licensed and ordained professionals in 2016 and 2017. We are currently training 62 future psychedelic licensed therapists and researchers in the 2018 class. The next certificate course will be begin in March 2019. Dr. Phelps has spoken at national and international conferences about this innovative, first of its kind postgraduate certification program.

Throughout its history, CIIS has been a leader in consciousness research, including research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. In 1997, nearly three decades after the enactment of the Controlled Substances Act made psychedelic drugs illegal, CIIS began offering the Robert Joseph and Wilhelmina Kranzke Endowed Scholarships, a gift of Robert Barnhart in memory of his parents. The endowment supports two to four annual scholarships of $5,000 each for students who are conducting approved psychotropic research. CIIS Trustee Meihong Xu and her husband, Bill Melton, have continued this tradition by matching all gifts and grants to the Center up to $300,000, doubling the value of any donation made to support psychedelic studies at CIIS. The Center has received more than $100,000 in scholarship funding from individual and organizational donors including Robert Barnhart, the George Sarlo Foundation of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, and the Betsy Gordon Foundation. These scholarships have supported people of color, LGBTQI-identified people, and people who demonstrate financial need to study in the Center's certificate program.

Creation of the Center allows CIIS to build strong partnerships with other universities, medical centers, researchers, and research groups. More than a dozen top psychedelic researchers —including Dr. Bill Richards (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Charles Grob (UCLA), and Michael and Annie Mithoefer, lead researchers for the MAPS— have partnered with the Center to teach in the certificate program. Researchers from the UCSF and California Pacific Medical Center have joined the Center’s council of advisors.

By bringing together these top researchers, the Center has opened an avenue for collaboration between MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute, two of the most renowned research groups for psychedelic studies. The certificate program is the largest collaborative program focusing on psychedelic studies within a non-medical graduate university. Professor Phelps reports that "not only are we working with some of the majority of the psychedelic researchers in the country, but also we're preparing our graduates to make important advances in the fields of psychedelic research." Licensed therapists, medical professionals, and ordained clergy who earn a certificate in psychedelic research and therapy from CIIS will be specially trained as researchers and will eventually be eligible to be hired at future research centers across the United States. In expanded access programs, graduates of the certificate program at CIIS will eventually be eligible to work as psychedelic clinical researchers, under the supervision of a psychiatrist who would prescribe and administer the medication.

On March 23, 2018, Dr. Phelps and the certificate team hosted Dr. Bill Richards (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Tony Bossis (NYU), and author Michael Pollan at the opening reception for the 2018-19 certificate program. The Center is grateful for Pollan's latest New York Times article, "My Adventures With the Trip Doctors," in which he shares his own story and makes the Center's educational programming visible to practitioners and the general public.

“One of our primary goals is to build a cohort of licensed therapists with CIIS certificates,” says Phelps. “We want to see our CIIS graduates working across the country as trained psychedelic researchers.” Another goal is to continue to build partnerships and to raise funds so that the Center can eventually run a psychedelic-assisted therapy research study at CIIS in San Francisco. One thing is certain: with the creation of the Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research, CIIS has placed itself in the center of the cutting-edge field of psychedelic studies.

From Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research Director, Dr. Janis Phelps

"Research since the 1950's has shown that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has had significant positive effects in reductions of specific clinical symptoms and increases in quality of life as measured on a variety of indices. The intensity of focus on evidence-based outcomes, however, has resulted in a paucity of active discussions and research on the core competencies of the therapists themselves. With current discussions of phase 3 and expanded access research programs for psilocybin-assisted and MDMA-assisted psychotherapies, there will be a great need for competent therapists trained in this clinical specialty. This is particularly the case if less restricted, legal medical use is approved within the next six to ten years. The Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research's Certificate Program was created to focus on building the following core psychedelic therapist competencies:"

- empathetic abiding presence
- trust enhancement
- spiritual intelligence
- knowledge of the physical and psychological effects of psychedelics
- therapist self-awareness and ethical integrity
- proficiency in complementary techniques

"This development is particularly timely if expanded access and compassionate use programs are approved by the FDA in the near future. As current legal restrictions evolve, aspects of these training guidelines will be developed. CIIS is proud to be a key University leading those discussions."

-Janis Phelps, PhD

https://www.ciis.edu/research-cente...center-for-psychedelic-therapies-and-research
 
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psychedelic.support creates a network for the Psychedelic Therapist

by Russell Hausfeld - November 1, 2018

Alli Feduccia is a Clinical Data Scientist working for MAPS’ Public Benefit Corporation — a for-profit entity owned by MAPS. She is currently working on a collaboration with MAPS and software engineer Shawn Grona to develop a state-of-the-art online psychedelic therapy and integration support network — psychedelic.support. This website will showcase clinics and providers who are looking to network with one another and connect with people seeking treatment. This site could soon become a useful asset to anyone interested in the professional world of psychedelic-related therapy.

Feduccia spoke with Psymposia about the psychedelic.support website and how she originally got involved with MDMA research.

How did you end up getting involved with MDMA research?

Alli Feduccia: I first started working here about three years ago. I started as a volunteer, then did an internship, then started working on the clinical team.

I had been studying MDMA in rodent models in grad school, studying serotonin and dopamine release while rats were self-administering MDMA and then putting them in different environmental conditions — like playing music, or increasing the temperature of the cages. The idea being to replicate the rave scene.

I had read about the first MDMA studies in humans starting and I really wanted to get involved. What you can grasp from rat models about psychedelics is limited. I reached out in 2007, but there weren’t any opportunities. I went on to do some more clinical work, studying mainly alcohol addiction and looking at different medications and how they might work to help addictions. I got back in touch with MAPS around this time, and ended up getting a job there eventually.

Where did the interest in working with MDMA come from?

I was working in a lab and we were studying other drugs alongside MDMA, such as alcohol and cocaine. It was surprising in 2004 to see that people were using MDMA in this first clinical trial for treating PTSD. I went on to learn a bunch more about its use in the 1970’s and it made sense to me that the pharmacological effects of MDMA could potentially be beneficial when combined with therapy to help people with processing traumatic memories.

How did you begin working on psychedelic.support?

We met a lot of therapists at trainings and started to see that people were looking for psychedelic integration, or more open-minded providers in general. It is really hard to find these people. MAPS has lists online, but we wanted to take that a step further and use technology to make it easier for people to find therapists by location, and create a way to connect therapists to one another.

In collaboration with MAPS and other groups, we’re publishing documents defining terms like “integration,” and presenting them in a more accessible way to the public and other mental healthcare professionals who may want to get more involved.

Besides listing provider profiles, we’ve listed events for professional training opportunities and integration events. Most of these are in-person in small communities. The hope is that we’ll be able to expand to have more online groups for people who don’t have something in their area. Ten people could maybe join a web chat facilitated by one person.

You said you are working on defining terms like “integration” in a therapeutic setting. What does “integration” mean from a therapist’s perspective?

It can be a lot of different things. People work in different modalities of therapy. As far as why we’re working on honing the definition, there was an article that was recently posted that was sort of like: “Watch out therapists — if you are offering integration, you should talk to your board before doing this.”

The problem was that the writer lumped in integration to mean someone taking a drug and a provider working with them. She convoluted this underground work — where a therapist might be present during an experience with a drug — with something else. Integration is more in line with harm-reduction or talking to someone about an experience they had before.

On psychedelic.support we are requiring providers to agree to a code of conduct, basically saying they are working above ground, not giving illegal drugs, not sitting with people knowing that person has taken a drug. People can now offer ketamine and cannabis if it is approved in their state.

With all this emerging, there are lots of questions from therapists, and we’re trying to focus on making resources more available about what terms mean, what things are clearly legal, and what are not. At some point people may even start going to the boards to get more clarification on these topics.

Looking through the website, I noticed a couple providers in Austin, Texas and one in Asheville, North Carolina. Most therapists are on the West Coast. I was curious if there is any outreach to therapists in the Midwest or central United States. Is it harder to find people in those areas?

So far we’ve invited a limited number of people who we knew. Since setting up the site, people have been asking to be added. We review their resumes and their websites, and make sure they agree to our code of conduct, and then we will set them up. We haven’t done a lot of solicitation yet.

What other features about psychedelic.support are you excited about?

We’re also publishing articles on psychedelic.support. These are written by the providers or other people in the field on a number of different topics — either psychedelics or some sort of personal growth resources.

We want to give a platform for therapists and professionals in the field to talk about what their impressions are, and what they are seeing in therapeutic sessions. As more things become available, just putting out resources and information to the public that is understandable, especially for people who are looking for these treatments.

These articles are a way to help people know more about an individual provider. We link all the articles to the profiles of the writer. That way you might learn more about each person by reading a longer article that they wrote.

In the future I think we will introduce some kind of rating system on the clinics, so people will be able to get a better idea of what the services are like there. I think that is really important information that I would want to know if I were going to spend that much money on a treatment.

https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/p...ic-therapists/
 
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Psychedelic psychotherapy - a conversation with 3 underground providers

Psychedelic psychotherapy is coming.

In the face of excellent science and fine-tuned bureaucratic efforts, psychedelics are making their way out of their Orwellian prohibition and back into medicine. Psychedelic psychotherapy, including substances like MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, and Ibogaine, are being shown to be effective treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, treatment-resistant depression (and here), (cigarette, alcohol, and opiate) addiction, and existential anxiety at the end of life.

Psychedelic psychotherapy is on the verge of bursting into the mainstream institutions. MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is currently in phase 3 trials in the united states for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. It has been labelled a breakthrough therapy designation by the FDA. COMPASS pathways, (like ’em or not), have recently received FDA approval for psilocybin clinical trials for treatment-resistant depression. Furthermore, doctors in Canada are on the verge of offering therapeutic psilocybin for people in end-of-life distress based on scientific evidence and a strong legal argument.

Yes, psychedelic psychotherapy is coming… in fact, it’s already here.

As the legal, academic, and medical institutions work steadily to bring psychedelic psychotherapy into the mainstream, a thriving underground network of psychedelic therapists are already operating despite the potential legal ramifications of their action. Free from institutional oversight, underground psychedelic psychotherapy is a mixed bag.

The vast network of underground psychedelic psychotherapy is able to explore whole new realms of potential benefit through experimentation and following what works. Yet this same capacity can lead to unethical, ineffective, or even damaging results. It is being offered discreetly by aboveground certified clinical professionals in counselling and therapy, it is also being provided by people with no training at best or even megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur at worse. But, let’s not dwell too deeply on the antagonists of this network and instead focus on those providing quality care, and risking their careers and their freedom to offer people therapy that works where none other did, changing people’s lives for the better.

Today’s guests for the podcast — three female, underground psychedelic therapists from Canada — are on the show anonymously to share their wisdom, experience, and knowledge of psychedelic psychotherapy. Specifically, we talk about psilocybin, MDMA, and 3-MMC assisted psychotherapy; their methodologies and practices; cautions and concerns; and an in-depth look at both what it is like and what it takes to be an underground psychedelic psychotherapist.

This is an episode for anyone interested in psychedelic psychotherapy, be it as a current or future provider, or someone who is seeking it for their own health and healing.

Episode breakdown

- What models of therapy are being offered and what substances are being used
- How they decide what substance is best for each client
- What are the differences in methodology for different substance?
- Red flags
- Does the therapist take the dose as well?
- Who’s in the room? How many therapists, sitters, clients and why?
- How to address panic and anxiety attacks during psychedelic sessions
- Some cautions in finding a psychedelic therapist
- Specific needs for providing psychedelic therapy to people in their sick time
- Death anxiety within psychedelic therapy
- Providing psychedelic therapy to minors
- Integration practices and perspectives

 
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Trip Sitters: An interview with Chi of Truffles Therapy

by Wesley Thoricatha | Feb 13, 2019

Last week we spoke with Chi about his personal journey and what led him to start working as a facilitator for Psilocybin Truffle Experiences in Amsterdam. This week, we discuss some of his other projects that aim to unify psychedelic supporters and reinvent the debaucherous bachelorette party in a much more conscious way.

Thanks again for speaking with us, Chi. It was great speaking with you about Truffles Therapy last week. I know you are also involved in some other interesting projects. Can you tell me about Trip Sitters?

In Amsterdam there is this huge base of trip sitters building, and our goal is to build codes of ethics, to create a council of the most experienced trip sitters, and to create training videos and training courses. This area is going to keep on growing and we need to protect the movement. We also hope to bring more cohesion and have less infighting. Like, guys… we’re all literally on the same side! Of course we’re imperfect, and we all still have things to learn. But let’s link hands— we’re stronger together, you know?

So those initiatives have turned into this whole online guide and listing service. It’s created a wonderful sense of community, because many sitters have been doing this for years and never interacted with other people who are doing the same work. It’s the craziest thing.

At first, we were thinking we could be this global listing service for all psychedelic guides around the world, but we quickly realized that many underground practitioners wouldn’t want to put their faces out in other countries. There are many people and groups working with psilocybin all over the world, but they have to come to the Netherlands to be legit and above ground. When Oregon or Denver get their initiatives passed, we want to help them build their network. One day the US will overtake the Netherlands as the global hub for these experiences. There will be different training systems developed all over, but maybe we can help and make a contribution with what we’re doing here.

That’s super cool. The other project I’m aware of that you’re associated with is Conscious Bachelorette. Can you speak a little bit about what that is?

Oh gosh… never in my life would I ever think I would do anything with a group of women like this. But yeah, this writer Becky Wicks did a retreat with us and she’s written an article about us which you can read here. Her idea was that groups of women will often come to Amsterdam before getting married to go wild, drink, do drugs, and it’s all so unconscious. This is what most of the world thinks partying and fun is all about. We wanted to change that paradigm and change how people view Amsterdam. What kind of experiences could they have here that were boundary-pushing, but in a more conscious way? If we can provide these groups of women with beautiful, heart-opening experiences, it’s going to spread.

It feels to me like the mushroom and the truffle spirit want to reach more people. Alcohol and tobacco are widely accepted but addictive and harmful. Let’s get psilocybin accepted in society as a way to improve our well-being, live fuller and more creative lives, and be more connected and in harmony with nature. That’s really our end goal in everything. We have to get out of this disharmony and see ourselves as just belonging to Earth.

I really like that. People are nervous about mainstreaming these things, but this is exactly the kind of shift in perspective and behavior that we need people to take.

You know, rites of passage have happened throughout history with psychedelics. And if you look at our culture, whether it’s a bachelor party or bachelorette party or turning 21, it’s basically an orgy of drinking and debauchery. That’s our sort of shitty version of a rite of passage in the West. So I think it’s a really cool idea to take that and try and give a conscious alternative. Some people like to say, well these things are super sacred and everything should be done in this ultra-sacred, conservative, indigenous-influenced container. But I think that’s sort of missing the opportunity to take that sacredness but overlay it with things that are happening in our culture already, and try and bring it into new areas. So I’d like to elevate our pre-existing rite of passage in our culture.

Clearly the old ways of thinking and the old paradigms have not worked. We have to just be creative; we have to try new things. We have to have courage as a human species to not just hold on to old ways of thinking. We’ve just gotta give it our all! We have to do this or else it’s not going to work and the species might not survive, so let’s try something. As long as we’re trying to do good and we’re not consciously harming people, let’s give it a shot. We’re trying to bring goodness, more spirituality, more togetherness, more circles, more love, more laughter, more dancing, more freedom. Let’s go out on a limb, right?

Totally. If someone wants to get involved with any of your projects, how can they reach out to you and connect?

Of course our websites are good for that, and people can reach me directly at [email protected]. Beyond that, we have some Facebook groups like Amsterdam Conscious Community where locals can list their offerings and such.

Awesome. Is there anything else that you want to share that we haven’t touched on yet?

We need to come together as a human species. We need to link hands rather than point fingers. We have to accept people for their imperfections and their differences, and work on compromises rather than blaming. And I’m a big fan of talking circles. Indigenous cultures did this all the time, but a ton of people these days have never even been in one. People have this fear of talking in a group, but we have to clear our throats and open our hearts and speak our truth. The more clear our own channel is, the more that spirit can work through us. We need to wake up as a human species, so let’s all work together.

https://psychedelictimes.com/2019/02...ffles-therapy/
 
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The rise of underground LSD guides

Some Americans searching for alternative paths to healing have turned to psychedelics. But how does one forge a career as a guide when the substances are illegal?

Steve has cops in his family, so he doesn’t tell many people about his work as an underground psychedelic guide. The work takes up a significant amount of his time – around once a week, he’ll meet a client in their home or in a rented home, dose them with MDMA or hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms, and sit with them while they trip for up to 10 hours – but he doesn’t tell his siblings, parents or roommates about it, nor his fellow psychology PhD students.

They would probably never guess, either: Steve doesn’t display any signs of involvement with a stigmatized counterculture that many Americans still associate with its flamboyant 1960s figureheads. He’s a bespectacled, soft-spoken former business school student who plays in a brass band and works part-time as an over-the-phone mental health counselor. After one glass of wine, he says: “Whoa, I’m feeling a little drunk.”

But if you probe, he might tell you about the time he took psilocybin and a “snake god” entered his body and left him convulsing on the floor for an hour. (The snake god was benevolent, he says, and the convulsing was cathartic, “a tremendous discharge of anxious energy”.)

In early October, Steve attended a Manhattan conference called Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics, which bills itself as the world’s “largest and longest-running annual gathering of the psychedelic community”. I went with my 51-year-old cousin, Temple, a relatively mainstream psychotherapist. She had come to learn more about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which underground guides like Steve facilitate illegally. She hopes to incorporate this type of therapy into her practice if and when substances such as psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and ayahuasca become legal.

Like many attendees, Temple had recently read How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, a bestselling 2018 book by Michael Pollan. It convinced her that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy “might really be the way of the future”.

Indigenous people are believed to have used plant-based psychedelics for millennia; now, factions of the western medical establishment seem to be catching on. But most psychedelics are still Schedule I controlled substances, in the same category as heroin and cocaine; possession or sale has been punishable by prison sentence since 1971. With rare exceptions, the only way you can legally consume psychedelics in the US is as a participant in one of a few clinical research trials conducted at universities such as New York University and Johns Hopkins.

These studies have yielded astounding results: they suggest that, when administered to carefully screened patients by trained health professionals, psychedelics are safe and potent tools for alleviating PTSD, addictions, cluster headaches, anxiety and depression.

Amid a broken healthcare system and rising rates of opioid addiction and suicide, Americans are searching for alternative paths to healing, which is where underground guides come in. The industry has its share of charlatans, but many guides hold themselves to ethical standards and protocols comparable to those established in clinical settings.

Unlike psychotherapists, however, underground guides have no accredited educational institutions, no licensing and no way to publicly market their services. How, then, does one make a career as a guide?

Steve was one of many guides I spoke to who described feeling spiritually “called” to do this work. Like doctors who provided abortions pre-Roe v Wade, he breaks laws that he believes are unjust; he considers legal violations a risky but necessary part of his quest to alleviate people’s pain. He charges on a sliding scale that ranges from around $15 to $50 an hour.

As is the case with most guides, his own psychedelic experiences convinced him the job was worth the risk.

“During an early guided psilocybin session, I realized I’d never adequately dealt with the pain caused by my parents’ divorce,” Steve says. “There was clearly still this 11-year-old part of myself that was like, ‘I want to be part of a coherent family unit.’ During the experience, I was given this vision – there’s no way to say this that doesn’t sounds silly – but there was this mother figure who was like, half-Vedic goddess, with a million arms and a million eyes, and half-space alien, with gray skin. She was this space mother, surrounded by this space family, and she just beamed to me this incredible welcoming feeling of, this is the divine family that you stem from.”

In addition to keeping quiet about his work, Steve uses an encrypted messaging app to communicate with clients – precautions he takes to avoid the kind of legal trouble that has befallen some underground guides, such as Eric Osborne, a former middle school teacher from Kentucky.

The felon-turned-psilocybin retreat entrepreneur

On a July afternoon in 2015, state troopers showed up at Eric’s gourmet mushroom farm in Indiana with search warrants.

They searched his house, then trawled through his mushroom fruiting chambers, inspecting racks of shiitakes, turkey tails and reishis, which he sold to upscale local restaurants. Eric was confident the police would find nothing incriminating there – he grew his psilocybin mushrooms far from his restaurant-bound crops – but when he saw them heading towards the woods on his property, he panicked.

Two nights earlier, Eric and his then fiancee had sat around a campfire with a new friend, all tripping. A self-described “recovering Catholic” with a southern drawl who, in 2009, became Indiana’s first state-certified wild mushroom expert, he had been offering underground psilocybin therapy sessions for years. (He has no formal training in psychology; he says the mushrooms, which he’s consumed at high doses around 500 times, are his teachers.)

The friend had hoped a session might help resolve a years-old trauma. After the mushrooms took effect, she went to lie down in her tent. Minutes later, Eric saw a glow of headlights through the trees. As a safety precaution, he had hidden the woman’s car keys in the house, but now, her car was speeding down his driveway.

“My heart just dropped,” Eric says. “I was sure she was going to die.”

Eric and his fiancee spent 14 hours searching for her before she texted, saying she was safe. She had crashed into a ditch near the farm after retrieving a spare key hidden under her car’s transom. No one was hurt, but after police found her, disheveled, she told them everything about Eric’s psilocybin operation to avoid being charged with drug possession.

“I knew the cops were coming for me,” Eric says. Before they arrived, he stashed a pound of dried ‘Mr E’ psilocybin mushrooms – a unique strain he had bred and named himself and didn’t want to lose – inside a hollow log in the woods.

Somehow, the police managed to find it: “That was the end, there.”

He spent a week in jail contemplating the effects of the drug war on the mental healthcare system. “The horrible irony was, I sat in this cell with people who had drug addictions that psilocybin can help remedy,” he says. After being released, he was put on house arrest with an ankle monitor for eight weeks, forbidden from speaking to his fiancee, whose parents had bailed her out of jail after a day. He was facing a minimum of 10 years in prison for each of three B-felony charges – Schedule I substance manufacturing, distribution and possession.

“The night our friend drove off was the most terrifying, gut-wrenching moment of my life, but in the eight weeks that followed, when I sat on those 87 acres alone, there were moments of complete despair. I had to take my shotguns to a neighbor,” he says. “I have uncles who were cannabis growers who spent years in prison. I was certain I’d follow in their path.”

The judge at his trial was mercifully liberal, however. The B-felonies were pleaded down. Eric was convicted of “maintaining a common nuisance” and sentenced to two and a half years probation.

“Yeah, that’s what I do – ‘maintaining a common nuisance’,” he says. “I’ve turned it into a career now.”

He’s not joking: in October 2015, instead of quitting the mushroom world, he founded MycoMeditations, an above-board psilocybin-assisted therapy retreat center in Jamaica, one of the few countries where psilocybin is legal.

“I felt I had no other option,” he says. “The landlord kicked me off the farm, I was working in a Louisville restaurant – I couldn’t go back to teaching with a felony – so I just pushed full speed into this. I felt like the medicine was so needed that I couldn’t not do it.”

In the three years since, about 400 people from around the world have attended MycoMeditations’ seven- to 10-day group retreats in Treasure Beach, on Jamaica’s remote southern coast. Guests trip on psilocybin every other day in a fenced-in field surrounded by mango and coconut trees. “All I do is just sit there with people, supporting them silently, sometimes holding their hands,” Eric says.

While every guide has a unique approach, above-board and underground psychedelic-assisted therapy tends to follow a similar structure. Before a trip, clients have preparatory therapy sessions with guides, discussing their mental health issues and intentions for treatment. (Some guides won’t work with people who take psychiatric medications; they caution that prescription antidepressants can have potentially dangerous interactions with certain psychedelics, especially ayahuasca.)

During the trip, guides sit with the client, ensuring their safety, and, if necessary, helping them navigate what researchers call “difficult struggle experiences”.

“What we find in talking with patients is that this ‘difficult struggle’ is not a bug in the experience, but actually a feature,” says Dr Alex Belser, who co-founded the psychedelic research team at NYU in 2006. “When they take these medicines, people go into difficult places – they deal with past grief, trauma and suffering, and feel those feelings intensely, for a time … Without a strong sense of safety and trust with a therapist, that may lead to what’s been called a ‘bad trip’. But if there’s enough intention put into supporting that experience, it’s the beginning of an arc of healing that can lead to something extraordinary.”

After a trip, guides facilitate “integration” sessions, in which the client strives to incorporate lessons from the experience into their everyday lives. At MycoMeditations, after integration sessions, guests get massages and swim among sea turtles and coral reefs.

One attendee, a stage four cancer patient, felt so healed by the retreat that she donated a year’s salary to Eric, which allowed him to quit his job at the Louisville restaurant – he had been splitting his time between Jamaica and Kentucky – to focus full-time on the center. “Now she’s in remission, traveling the country fly-fishing in her Mercedes Winnebago,” Eric says. “Miracles are becoming – not mundane, but pretty normal around here.”

The social worker-turned-medicine woman

I meet Hummingbird at Alice’s Tea Cup, an Alice in Wonderland-themed cafe in Manhattan. Wearing a lavender shawl and a gold turtle-shaped brooch, Hummingbird matches the decor. One of six children of Cuban immigrant parents, she calls herself a “medicine woman”; her approach to guiding is ceremonial rather than clinical.

As a teenager in New Jersey in the 1980s, she was a star cheerleader and an enthusiastic participant in the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (Dare) program. Since age 10, she’d dreamed of becoming a social worker; after getting her master’s, she “tried basically every social work job” she could find, including working at a methadone clinic and as a family therapist in the Bronx. “I was very googly-eyed,” she says. “Quite the idealist. I wanted to change the system.”

After several years, though, “apathy was building”, she says. “I was very dissatisfied with the system, getting burnt out, very ill – constant bronchial infections, flus.”

During one such illness, while she was managing a program aimed at reducing psychiatric hospital recidivism, she tried treating herself with herbs – elderberry root and slippery elm – instead of visiting a doctor. This induced a fever dream of sorts, she says: “I’m having cold sweats and chills, and I feel this weight on me – this being, making this purring noise, in a language I now understand a lot better. It was calling me. I wake up and say: ‘OK, I’m leaving my job.’”

Shortly after she quit, a friend took her to a ceremony in Upstate New York and introduced her to “abuela”, as many devotees call ayahuasca, a plant-based tea containing the natural hallucinogen DMT. “By then, I’d tried everything – mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy, cocaine – but this was different,” Hummingbird says. “The sky opened up. At the end of a walkway of stars was this feeling, like, you’re home. I was flooded with tears of gratitude. And I started talking in this other language, chirping away, talking to birds in the woods.”

On sabbatical, she backpacked through Guatemala, where she attended eight more ayahuasca ceremonies led by indigenous curanderas. “When I came back to my luxurious home, I was shocked at the US way of life,” she says. “I couldn’t believe I’d let myself become part of this system.”

Instead of returning to social work, she studied indigenous healing traditions with a New York-based shaman, Irma StarSpirit Turtle Woman. In 2015, after adopting a “medicine name” – Hummingbird, translated from Zunzun, her Cuban grandmother’s nickname – she began leading ayahuasca ceremonies herself.

At ceremonies, which cost $230 a night, Hummingbird blows a tobacco snuff called rape up the noses of her guests, then serves ayahuasca and sings icaros – medicine songs – while they purge. “There’s a lot of crying, laughing, vomiting, urinating, sweating – what I call ‘getting well’,” she says.

Also on offer is sananga, a psychoactive eye drop that burns like habanero chilis, and Kambo, a drug made from the venom of the Amazonian giant monkey frog.

Hummingbird’s work with the psychiatric healthcare system left her concerned that the millennia-old spiritual traditions surrounding psychedelics risk being sidelined in the process of medicalization. Despite psychedelic researchers’ attempts to quantify results with tools like the “Mystical Experience Questionnaire”, trip experiences – such as encounters with “snake-gods” – tend to fall outside the realm of contemporary scientific understanding.

“Abuela is an ever-evolving quantity,” Hummingbird says. “There are no final end results, which science loves to have.”

The former labor nurse who helps people ‘give birth to themselves’

Since his book’s publication, Pollan’s readers have bombarded him with requests for referrals to underground guides – requests he turns down to protect his sources.

“The demand [for psychedelic therapy] far outweighs the supply and care we have, whether in clinical trials or in the underground,” Pollan said at Horizons. “I was struck by how many people are really suffering. I wish people could just go to 1-800-Underground Guide."

Steve’s schedule is at capacity; he finds himself turning away roughly three-quarters of referrals he gets, some of which come from licensed psychotherapists, who may risk losing their licenses by pursuing interests in illegal substances.

But many are optimistic about the future of legalization for medicinal use. In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted “breakthrough therapy designation” to MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, acknowledging that it “may demonstrate substantial improvement over existing therapies” and agreeing to expedite its development and review. In October, researchers from Johns Hopkins University recommended that psilocybin be reclassified to a schedule IV drug, with accepted medical use.

The push for legalization has received bipartisan support: Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire Republican and co-owner of Breitbart, recently donated $1m to the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (Maps), a not-for-profit organization conducting much of today’s psychedelic research.

In anticipation of expanded access, the California Institute for Integral Studies, in San Francisco, offers a training and certification program for medical and mental health professionals who hope to eventually facilitate legal psychedelic-assisted therapy.

‘I’m a super joyful person now’

While underground guides tend to fiercely support decriminalization, a few, such as Jackie, say that even if psychedelics were to be legalized medically, they would continue to work underground.

“I don’t want to work under the medical model,” Jackie says. “It’s too regimented for me.”

Before she became a guide, Jackie worked as a birth doula and a registered labor and delivery nurse. “I used to sit with people as they gave birth to humans,” she says. “Now I sit with people as they give birth to themselves.”

After leaving her “tumultuous, fucked-up family” at 17, she tried LSD for the first time with the man she would later marry. While raising her kids in the 1980s, she suffered from “persistent emotional pain” and tried everything to treat it: decades of psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, neurofeedback, self-help workshops. Nothing worked.

In 2016, on the recommendation of her 30-year-old daughter, she attended a shaman-led ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica. “Even as I was throwing up on the jungle floor, I was like: ‘Thank you. This is why I came here,’” she says. “Afterward, I felt like all the trauma stuck inside my body had been released.”

Upon returning home, she broke up with her psychotherapist. “I haven’t felt a need to go back,” she says. “I’m a super joyful person now.” She began attending Horizons and training as a guide with several mentors.

Now, at 57, she works full-time as a guide for two to four clients a month, either in her New England home or an Airbnb, charging several thousand dollars for 48-hour sessions and “unlimited post-trip integration”.

Many of her clients are “genius entrepreneurs”; most, she says, have little experience with drugs. She gets word-of-mouth referrals from all over the world and also mentors newbie guides.

“As underground therapists, we have to think, what if the worst thing happened and we went to jail?” she says. “But if I went to jail, I think I’d still find a way to serve. And I know it sounds woo-woo, but I somehow feel protected by the mushrooms.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/06/lsd-guides-psychedelic-assisted-psychotherapy
 
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Finding a psychedelic guide

by Psychedelics Today | July 12, 2018

Psychedelic science and research has been getting a lot of mainstream media attention over the years and for good reason. The preliminary research suggests that psychedelics may be extremely beneficial in helping to treat mental health disorders and as tools for studying consciousness. As this research begins to hit mainstream channels, some are left wondering, “How can I find a psychedelic guide or sitter?” If you are feeling overwhelmed by the search, set up a consulting call with us. We may be able to make your decision process safer and easier.

Michael Pollan, a well-respected journalist, and author, released a new book called, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence where he surveys the history of and current state of psychedelic research and therapy. In his book, Pollan describes his experiences with trained underground psychedelic guides. He also explores these experiences in this New York Times article called, My Adventures With The Trip Doctors: The Researchers and Renegades Bringing Psychedelic Drugs Into The Mental Health Mainstream. Pollan’s work has been entering the mainstream and it seems that more people are becoming interested in or curious about psychedelic therapy – so much that many people are seeking ways to find underground therapists and guides to work with.

We, at Psychedelics Today, have been receiving a lot of requests from people asking for instructions on how to obtain drugs or for us to connect them with people offering underground services. While we understand that many people are suffering and seeking psychedelic treatments, sometimes out of desperation for healing, it is not easy to provide advice. Unfortunately, because of the legal system and the current laws in The United States, we are unable to help you on either of these fronts.

With that stated, we can provide some general advice for those looking for alternatives or legal options. Please take the time to conduct your own research as well.

First things first

It is important to question what your intentions are and ask yourself why you may be seeking psychedelics either as therapy or as an experience.

- Are you seeking a therapeutic experience because of a mental health issue?
- Are you seeking a psychedelic experience for spiritual or religious reasons?
- Are you just curious to know what the experience may feel like or what it is all about?
- Are you looking for a recreational experience or to have fun?

Whatever your reasons or intentions are, it is important to continue to be self-reflective and question whether or not this is the right path to pursue. Also, be sure to spend time reflecting on the risk/benefit ratio.

Get Educated

Before making any quick decisions, please take your time to get educated on this topic and also reach out to others who may have previous experiences. Psychedelics Today has a lot of great podcast episodes and resources for education, so take some time exploring our site and content. If you want to get a great basic overview of psychedelics, harm reduction, safety, check out our free webinar course, 8 Common Psychedelic Mistakes: Exploring Harm Reduction and Safety or our more in-depth course Navigating Psychedelics: Lessons on Self-Care and Integration. Here is a link to a free – 101 version of our Navigating Psychedelics class so you can get a taste.

Mental and physical health considerations

While psychedelics are generally considered safe both psychologically and physiologically, there are some important considerations to take into account. These medicines and substances affect everyone differently based on the set and setting as well as a person’s own biology.

If you are seeking a psychedelic experience because you are suffering from a mental health issue or looking for psychological healing, it is important to evaluate whether or not it is the best option. The research is promising, but it also requires a lot of work, support, and follow-up treatment. Psychedelics are not always cure-alls or silver bullets.

If you are seeking this treatment out of desperation because you have read how positive or healing the experience can be, it is important to note that this change does not always happen right away. It may be important to find a psychedelic integration therapist to work with after or before. Also, ask yourself, “Have I tried other options?”

There are some powerful and effective somatic-based therapies that can be extremely cathartic and healing, such as breathwork, Somatic Experiencing, and others. A list of alternatives and somatic-based therapies can be found below in the “Experiential Therapies/Approaches” section. These therapies may be worth checking out if you have not looked into these therapies before and may also be a great first step to working with non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Legal psychedelic therapies and other alternatives

Experiential Therapies/Approaches

One thing that comes to mind is why are you looking for a guide? Is it to heal trauma or some sort of mental health issue? Are you looking for a spiritual experience or a way to reconnect with yourself? Depending on your intention, there may be other techniques and tools. It may not be as “sexy” as partaking in psychedelic work, but it is important to ask yourself, “What is my intention?”

There are some really powerful therapies and techniques that could potentially be helpful depending on the intention. In regard to therapy or addressing mental health issues, starting with a form of experiential therapy could be beneficial. You could look into some of these somatic approaches that could be helpful for dealing with trauma and other mental health issues before trying to seek underground work or travel outside of the country to work with psychedelic medicines.

Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork
Hakomi
Holotropic Breathwork
Internal Family Systems
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Somatic Experiencing
Spiritual Emergence Coaching
Trauma Dynamics

Finding/working with a shamanic practitioner may be helpful for some as well. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies (Founded by Michael Harner) is a good starting point for finding a practitioner to work with.

Legal Therapy Options

Ketamine-assisted therapy

Ketamine is an interesting substance and has recently been used to help treat depression. There are ketamine clinics throughout the United States that provide treatment for depression and other mental health issues. If you are interested in learning more about ketamine-assisted therapy, check out a few of our episodes covering the topic.

Shane LeMaster – Ketamine
Dr. Scott Shannon – Ketamine Therapies
Alyssa Gursky – Transpersonal Art and Ketamine Therapies


Cannabis-assisted psychotherapy

While many people do not think of cannabis as a psychedelic, some are exploring the therapeutic potential of cannabis in a legal and therapeutic setting. There are not many clinics operating with this protocol, so it may be hard to find, but as cannabis becomes legalized in more states for medicinal use and recreational use, this may become more accessible. Here are three resources that we know of so far for cannabis-assisted psychotherapy.

Medicinal mindfulness

Did you know that when cannabis is used intentionally and skillfully, it is psychedelic and mimics other psychedelic medicines? Our participants commonly report experiences quite similar to MDMA, Psilocybin, Ayahuasca and even DMT. Cannabis is also safe, and legal to use in Colorado in this way. As the first organization to facilitate legal psychedelic cannabis experiences in Colorado, beginning in 2014, Medicinal Mindfulness has an incredible track record of keeping our clients safe and creating profound, life changing psychedelic experiences.

Conscious Cannabis Experiences are perfect for people who are curious about psychedelics but don’t know where to start. They’re also great for experienced practitioners seeking to deepen their psychedelic practice. As trauma informed practitioners, we also work with individuals who seek deep, transformational healing. As guides, we work with creative explorers of consciousness and complex problem-solvers, pushing the edges of what is possible.

Innate Path: Ketamine and cannabis-assisted psychotherapy

Innate Path, located in Colorado, is exploring the potential of cannabis-assisted psychotherapy and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. As mentioned on their site, “Cannabis can be a powerful catalyzer of therapeutic process.”

Innate Path combines somatic processing with ketamine or cannabis assisted work, which is a unique bottom-up approach to psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Sara Ouimette Psychotherapy

Sara Ouimette Psychotherapy, located in Oakland, CA, offers psychotherapy, psychedelic integration services, and cannabis-assisted psychotherapy. As stated on Sara’s page:

When used in a particular way, cannabis can actually amplify or exacerbate your internal experience. You can become more aware of tightness or soreness in your body. Emotions are heightened; senses are more acute. You may have access to thoughts, fears, and feelings that are normally out of reach. You may even enter a trance-like state and “journey.” In these ways, cannabis can help deepen your therapy process.

To learn more about Sara’s work and cannabis-assisted psychotherapy, check out Sara’s article called, Checking In, Not Checking Out: Cannabis-Assisted Psychotherapy.

Participate in clinical research

One way to find a psychedelic sitter/guide is to participate in clinical research. Check out the following for more information.

Clinicaltrials.gov: This is a database of clinical studies from around the country and around the world. You can use this database to search active clinical studies on psychedelics and to search for recruitment opportunities. Just perform a simple search for “psychedelic” or anything else that you may be looking for in the search box. You can filter your search option and only search studies that are currently open for “recruitment.”

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies: If you are already not aware, MAPS is streamlining research for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Check out their Participate in Research page for more information about how to get involved in one of their studies.

Psychedelic retreats & centers

This option is not always available to everyone because of the cost of travel, accommodations and other expenses. While we understand attending a retreat or center in another country is not accessible for most, it is one of the few legal options for participating in this work. We advise doing extensive research including interviewing the retreat staff/owner and past guests before committing to international travel.

One site that we recommend for finding retreats or reviews is the Psychedelic Experience. While this site is still growing, this may be a great starting point for research. Another popular site is AyaAdvisors.

Psilocybin retreats

Traveling to another country to participate in this work is obviously not ideal, but the option exists. Mushrooms are legal in The Netherlands, Jamaica, and Brazil. Mexico has protection for traditional medicines, and mushrooms do fall in this category.
Ayahuasca Retreats

Ayahuasca has an interesting legal status in the USA, where many groups are offering sessions in various contexts and settings from religious ceremonies (Christian or shamanic), YMCA gyms, rural retreat centers, churches, etc. Ayahuasca is legal in some countries like Peru and Ecuador. Ecuador provides licenses for shamans/facilitators which no other countries currently do.

Ibogaine retreats

These retreats exist in Canada, Mexico and other countries around the world including where the plant is from and traditionally used – Gabon. Some facilities are very clinical and others are very traditional. Please know that Iboga and Ibogaine have some serious dangers that need to be carefully considered. There are also environmental concerns around iboga. Please don’t over-use this plant and if you go forward with it, please try to give back to the local environmental movements in Gabon.

5-MeO-DMT retreats

We currently don’t advise people go on these retreats. The pressure on toad populations is severe and our culture’s desire for the toad venom may push this toad towards an endangered status. After interviewing toad scientists (herpetologists) we have concluded that it is not ethical to be participating in this “market”. If you feel very compelled, the more ethical path (at this point in history) is to work with synthetic molecules.

Conclusion

Finding an underground therapist to work with is extremely difficult because unfortunately, many of these substances are still illegal. This is why we often refer people to check out techniques like Holotropic Breathwork or to find a legal way to pursue this type of work. Remember, many underground guides are putting their professional careers and lives on the line providing psychedelic work.

We advise you to learn as much as you can before breaking any law as the consequences can be severe. If there are any questions that you think are serious enough to cause harm to yourself or others, please contact a legal professional before acting.

https://psychedelicstoday.com/2018/07/12/find-psychedelic-guide/
 
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Cambridge

Navigating your way through the psychedelic field: How to get involved

by Kyle Buller | May 29, 2018

As psychedelic research re-emerges from its dark ages, the world is beginning to learn about their healing potential for various psychological disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and near-death anxiety due to terminal illness. The research is fascinating, exciting, and seems to be catching a lot more mainstream attention. The preliminary research shows that psychedelics may be promising tools for mental health and could be the future of medicine. So the question is, how does one get involved in this work?

Joe and Kyle had the opportunity to talk with Ingmar Gorman, Ph.D.about how people can get involved in psychedelic research or in the field of psychedelics in general. Ingmar shared with us some really great information and we would like to recap some highlights. Some of the information provided is a mix between our own thoughts and what Ingmar mentioned.

First things first

- Ask yourself, “Why am I interested in entering into the field of psychedelic research?”

- Did you have an experience that changed your life or inspired you in some way? Did you have a healing experience that you want to share with others?

- Do you want to give back to the community in some way by furthering scientific research or inquiry? If so, what is your expertise and area of interest?

- What role can you play later on? Are there areas or specialties that need attention or growth?

- Understanding and asking yourself, “Why do I want to do this? What is my motive?”

Personal or transformational experiences may not always be the best option for pursuing an active career in researching psychedelics. Psychedelic experiences can be healing, transformative, and magical, but this does not mean you have to enter into the field of science or research. There may be other options that might suit your interests better. Obtaining a professional degree can be a well-worth investment with your time and money if that is surely a path that you wish to pursue. It is important to think outside of the box.

Also, an important thing to note here is that psychedelics are still illegal. While the research and science is happening, obtaining a research position is often difficult considering the limited amount of research. This is not to discourage any of you, but just saying it will require a lot of work! While MAPS is projecting that MDMA will be legal for psychotherapy by 2021, it is still uncertain what the laws and regulations will be. We are hopeful that the future looks bright for psychedelic careers, but it is also important to err on the side of caution as well.

General information

Along with asking the questions above, here is some general information or advice for individuals who not wish to pursue a traditional degree. We are all hardwired differently and earning a professional degree may not be in everyone’s best interest.

Do Your Research: It is important to be well-read with the research and science behind psychedelics. If you do not have access to a journal database, check out Google Scholar or check out Academia.edu. MAPS and Erowid have some great free sources from research papers to free ebooks.

- MAPS: Research Papers
- MAPS: Free Books and Essays
- MAPS: Videos
- Erowid
- Erowid Library

Go to Conferences and Events: As in any field, it is important to try and make it to a conference or an event. The reality of our world today is that most people get opportunities because they network and seek out the opportunities. Conferences are great ways to network, promote your research or interests, and find the “others.” This is a relatively small and intimate field, and many people are approachable. Chances are you will be exposed to the most up-to-date research, learn about multidisciplinary approaches, and probably meet a lot of great people. You do not have to be a researcher or student to attend, there is definitely a place for everyone at conferences. Here are a few popular events/conferences

- Psymposia (Nationwide)
- Horizons.org: Perspectives on Psychedelics (NYC)
- MAPS: Psychedelic Science
- Beyond Psychedelics (Prague, Czech Republic)
- Breaking Convention (London, England)
- The Aware Project (Southern California)
- Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research (CIIS) (Bay Area, CA)
- Exploring Psychedelics (Oregon)
- Los Angeles Psychedelic Science Symposium (Los Angeles, California)
- Detroit Psychedelic Conference (Detroit, Michigan)
- Colloquium on Psychedelic Psychiatry (Sweden)
- The International Drug Policy Reform Conference

The Non-Traditional Approach: There are other ways to get involved that do not require the investment your time and money for a professional degree. Are you a visual artist? Do you produce music? An interviewer? Are you a product inventor? For example, Joe mentioned during the podcast that he did not feel the need to go on to pursue a mental health degree because he does not feel like being a therapist is the thing that he wants to do right now. Instead, Joe and I are creating this podcast as a resource for the community. The bottom line, is there anything that you can contribute or create for the field? Many researchers and scientists are not artists or graphic designers and the field needs art to help convey the visual experience. Look at Alex and Allison Grey or Android Jones for example.

Develop an Expertise: Whether you are taking a traditional or non-traditional approach, I think it is safe to say that developing an expertise is a smart approach. Develop an expertise that can translate well to psychedelic research. Ask yourself, “how can I help or what can I contribute?”

Apply Your Skills: Again, think about how you can develop an expertise and think about how your skills can be applied to the field. Are you an accountant or into finances? Maybe if Rick Doblin’s dream of psychedelic treatment centers become real in the future, we are going to need lots of people to manage everything.

Volunteer: It does not hurt to reach out and develop a relationship with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Erowid, Zendo Project, DanceSafe, Drug Policy Alliance, or any other psychedelic organization. These organizations might be looking for a helping hand in a project or event. Volunteering can help you become connected with an organization, develop a relationship, and maybe help you land a job somewhere! Worst case scenario, you meet some awesome people.

Festival Harm Reduction Services: There are various organizations that provide harm reduction services at festivals. This may be a great way to get experience in the field. Check out the Zendo Project, DanceSafe, or Kosmicare for potential future opportunities.

Create a Psychedelic Club or Society: Local psychedelic clubs and societies are popping up all over the place. You can create your own too! You can check out our guide Tips on Creating Your Own Psychedelic Group.

Psychedelic Community: Check out this new site, Psychedelic.Community to connect with others.

Stay Up-To-Date: Get the latest psychedelic news, articles, and podcasts by visiting these websites:

- Adventures Through The Mind
- Chacruna
- MAPS Podcast
- Psychedelics Times
- Psychedelics Today
- Psymposia
- The Third Wave

Get involved in research

There are numerous ways to get involved in research projects. From self-report studies to actual participation, there are ways to get involved and possibly become a study participant. Here is a list of a few different options.

Clinicaltrials.gov: This is a database of clinical studies from around the country and around the world. You can use this database to search active clinical studies on psychedelics and to search for recruitment opportunities. Just perform a simple search for “psychedelic” or anything else that you may be looking for in the search box. You can filter your search option and only search studies that are currently open for “recruitment.”

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies: If you are already not aware, MAPS is streamlining research for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Check out their Participate in Research page for more information about how to get involved in one of their studies

The Third Wave: A self-report survey about psychedelics and worldview

Medicinal Mindfulness and DMTx: Are you interested in participating in an extended-state DMT research project? Medicinal Mindfulness is currently in the process of putting a study together. Learn more at DMTx.org or sign up for the DMTx Psychonaut Training

Johns Hopkins University: Self-report survey – Have you had an encounter with a seemingly autonomous entity after taking DMT?

Psychedelic Surveys: Psychedelic Survey is a collaborative research platform powering today’s groundbreaking research into psychedelics and the mind.

- Psychedelic Ceremony Study
- Global Psychedelic Survey
- Microdosing Survey Study

For students

If you are thinking about trying to get your foot in the door with psychedelic research, it is important to analyze which route you wish to take. There are many paths to choose from and you do not need always need to pursue a degree in science.

Are you currently or thinking about pursuing your Bachelor’s degree?

- What are your interests? Are you interested in psychology or psychiatry? Neuroscience or neuropsychology? Chemistry? Biology? History or anthropology? Do you want to do therapy at some point? Figure out what interests you.

- It is recommended if you want to do therapy or conduct scientific research to earn a degree in science and psychology.

- Find a niche or a specialty: If you’re off to an early start, figure out what you may want to focus on. If you’re a psychology student, maybe focus on trauma or addiction. Current psychedelic research is mostly focused on if these substances can be beneficial for certain psychiatric or mental disorders. The research funds are not really there for “how” these substances work, but that might not be the case down the line in a few years. The field is shifting rapidly.

- Go to conferences: Just in case you missed this in the last section, remember to try and attend a conference or event!

- Find A School: It is suggested that if you would like to do rigorous academic/scientific research it might be important to seek out applying to a traditional school. There are schools out there doing research and it might not hurt to look into their programs. MAPS has made a list of schools that might make psychedelic research easier.

- Create a Club: You can always try to create a drug advocacy/policy club at your university. If you are unsure how to go about doing so, you could always check out the Students for Sensible Drug Policy and create a local chapter at your university or school.

- Training and Education: There are plenty of training opportunities that may be helpful when thinking about adding new skills to your toolbox. Here are some examples of trainings that could be beneficial or helpful.

Harm reduction

- DanceSafe Training Program
- Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program
- Psychedelic.Support Event Calendar
- Psychedelics Today: Navigating Psychedelics: Lessons on Self-Care & Integration
- PsychSitter: The Manual of Psychedelic Support
- Zendo Project: Psychedelic Harm Reduction Training

Techniques and therapies

Some of these trainings/techniques may require advanced credentials and education.

Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork
Hakomi
Holotropic Breathwork
Internal Family Systems
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Somatic Experiencing
Spiritual Emergence Coaching
Trauma Dynamics

Beyond the bachelor’s degree

If you just had just completed your undergraduate degree, are currently a graduate student, or trying to figure out what is next, here is some advice.

Master’s Degree or Ph.D.: Many people get caught up on this decision/topic. Some people believe that pursuing a clinical psychology PhD or PsyD is the best option if they want to get their foot in the door with psychedelic psychotherapy. Earning a Ph.D. or PsyD or even a medical degree such as a Psychiatry is a large investment in both your time and money. This route may not be the best option for everyone and it is important to know what you are interested in or what skills you are strong in. Maybe science and math is not your strong point, so pursuing a clinical psychology degree to become a clinical psychologist may not suit you. Some people just want to be able to conduct psychotherapy and there are plenty of ways to do so, such as getting a master’s degree in clinical mental health or social work. Weigh your options and think about what fits you the best.

Specialty and Niche: Like the bachelor’s advice, what is your specialty or expertise? What role can you play later on? The field of psychedelic research is looking for individuals with specialties. Look into the ways how to develop an expertise in the field. If your interest is in trauma, research how to develop a focus in body psychotherapy for trauma disorders. Focus on alternative treatments for addiction.

Passion and Drive: Since earning a professional degree or a doctorate degree is both an investment of time and money, you are going to need to be passionate about what you are studying. There are many people who start programs and realize that it is not for them. Know that if you want to pursue a professional career in psychedelics, you’re in it for the long haul!

Therapeutic Benefit: If you are interested in research Ingmar mentioned that the funding may not be there for questions like, “how do these substances work?” or “how do they heal?” Even though the Imperial College of London has been doing amazing “how” research (how LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA affect the brain) there is not much of that type of research going on within the United States. The MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study wanted to know not how MDMA cures or helps PTSD, but rather, does MDMA-assisted psychotherapy help with PTSD?

Find a Mentor or Professor: It does not hurt to research mentors or professors in the field to see where they are teaching. Katherine Maclean mentioned in our latest interview that she was interested in psychedelic research and knew that Johns Hopkins was researching psilocybin. Look for post-doctorate fellowships, internships, etc. Attend a school that is doing the research

Find Grants for Research: If you are enrolled in a program and can find a faculty member that supports your psychedelic mission, try to find grants or scholarship money to support your research program. The Source Research Foundation is a new organization that is helping to provide grant money to students who want to conduct psychedelic research.

Training and Education: As mentioned in the “For Students” section above, there are various training/education opportunities that will help you grow and develop new skills. Please view the list above for ideas.

Additional resources

Organizations

- Council on Spiritual Practices
- DanceSafe
- Drug Policy Alliance
- EmmaSofia
- Entheogenic Research Integration and Education (ERIE)
- Erowid
- International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service
- Kahpi
- MIND: European Foundation for Psychedelic Science
- Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program
- Source Research Foundation
- The Beckley Foundation
- The California Institute for Integral Studies Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research
- The Heffter Research Institute
- The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
- The Usona Institute
- Women’s Visionary Council
- Zendo Project

https://psychedelicstoday.com/2018/05/29/navigating-way-psychedelic-field-get-involved/
 
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MDMA could revolutionize care for trauma: a social worker’s perspective

by Courtney Hutchison | Feb 19, 2019

In my role as a social worker and psychotherapist, I see so many clients suffering from the repercussions of trauma—experiences of abuse, neglect, and discrimination—that have left them struggling to feel safe on a fundamental level.

Healing from these traumas invariably focuses on helping these clients overcome feelings of disempowerment and disconnection, rebuilding interpersonal trust and intimacy in the context of the therapeutic relationship.

At the same time, there is growing recognition in the mental health field that we must address trauma across multiple levels: not only interpersonally or psychologically, but physiologically. We must also heal the way trauma inscribes itself on the brain and body, leaving survivors hijacked by nervous systems that vault into fight, flight, or freeze at a moment’s notice.

That is why it is imperative that social workers, and all mental health professionals, take notice when a new promising treatment comes along that seems to treat trauma across these multiple levels: the limited, adjunctive use of MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) in psychotherapeutic treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) presents just such a treatment.

MDMA as a breakthrough therapy

Research on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD has been growing over the past 15 years, showing remarkable success in clinical trials. The FDA granted it “breakthrough therapy” status in 2017 based on these strong results.

For example, a 2011 study found that 83% of those receiving a combination of supportive psychotherapy and two MDMA-assisted psychotherapy sessions no longer met criteria for a PTSD diagnosis after treatment, compared to only 25% of those who received the same supportive psychotherapy and a placebo.

Moreover, these studies were working with the hardest-to-treat cases—clients whose PTSD had failed to respond to other treatments, such as prolonged exposure therapy, other cognitive behavioral therapies, or pharmaceutical medications. Follow-up studies have shown that the majority of those helped are still PTSD-free nearly four years later.

These striking findings led me and my colleague, Dr. Sara Bressi, to explore the potential of this treatment, especially given the stigma often attached to MDMA as being the primary ingredient in the recreational drug “molly” or “ecstasy” (though substances found in recreational settings are rarely observed to be pure MDMA).

This article is a summary of the findings from our recent paper on this topic, including: why mental health professionals are in dire need of better treatment for PTSD, how MDMA-assisted psychotherapy works, and how important a treatment like this could be for addressing the immense burden of trauma in vulnerable communities, especially communities of color and low-income communities.

Treating PTSD is an uphill battle

For those with PTSD, past traumatic events intrude upon their daily life through flashbacks, nightmares, and pervasive anxiety and hyper-vigilance that makes it difficult for them to engage in day-to-day life, and can make it especially difficulty to talk about or reflect on their traumatic experiences.

In an attempt to minimize their symptoms, individuals with PTSD often avoid anything that could trigger them, and begin to isolate themselves from the world and others—consequences that tragically cut them off from the potentially healing effects of relationships, both within their personal lives and within the context of therapy.

Existing PTSD treatments try to reduce these symptoms in a few different ways: psychiatric medications try to change brain chemistry to reduce anxiety; exposure therapies try to de-link trauma triggers from the strong fear response; skills-focused therapies target areas such as emotional coping and interpersonal skills; other trauma-informed approaches try to create a sense of safety in session that rebuilds trust over time and extends outside of the therapy room.

Unfortunately, these treatments often have mixed results and do not meet the needs of all people with PTSD: studies in veterans, for example, show that more than 70% of those engaging in PTSD treatment do not see significant improvement.

How does MDMA-assisted psychotherapy work?

In MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, the MDMA acts as a catalyst for the therapeutic process, working synergistically with regular psychotherapy sessions. Biochemically, MDMA releases chemicals that increase a sense of well-being, enhance empathy and feelings of closeness to others, and dramatically reduce fear and anxiety.

A potentially key ingredient in this process is oxytocin, sometimes called the “love hormone” because we release it when we bond socially, when we are with people we care about, and even when we cuddle with our pets.

In a course of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, traditional talk therapy is interspersed with two or three medicated sessions. These medicated sessions occur over 6-8 hours (the drug’s duration plus a few hours), under medical supervision, and consist of periods of quiet introspection and client-led discussion of traumatic material, facilitated by two therapists.

Non-drug psychotherapy sessions then help process and understand what came up for client while on the drug. After treatment, which generally occurs over 8-15 weeks, the majority of participants are not only PTSD-free, they report an “increased self-awareness,” “increased ability to feel emotions,” and “improved relationships in general.”

Though research on why MDMA is such a powerful catalyst is still new, in our paper we hypothesize that MDMA’s fear-reducing and pro-social affects work together to help clients tap into their capacity to heal, allowing them to engage in therapy faster and more profoundly than they could otherwise.

The fear-reducing effects help clients think and talk about their trauma without being as hijacked by flashbacks or panic symptoms, allowing them to gain perspective on what happened to them and integrate it into a larger narrative of their lives.

The pro-social effects help clients trust and bond with their therapists and “take in” the support and empathic attunement they provide—a task that is especially difficult for those who have had their trust violated through interpersonal trauma and abuse.

Moving forward: How this treatment could be a game-changer

That MDMA-assisted psychotherapy has worked so rapidly, and so effectively, in many people who have not responded to existing treatments is a powerful testament to its potential—especially for low-income communities and communities of color who disproportionately experience trauma.

At the same time, it is unclear what access to this treatment will be like for these populations. Given that people of color and low-income individuals already face the dual hurdle of being more likely to experience trauma, and less likely to have reliable access to health care, it will be essential that social workers be attuned to these potential barriers and be fierce advocates for access to this breakthrough treatment.

First and foremost, trauma survivors have experienced ruptures in trust—trust in others, in the safety of the world, and in their own inherent value. Too often, these ruptures are then tragically re-experienced in relationships with loved ones, clinicians, and institutions.

If MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, in helping clients move toward spaces of empathy and trust, can facilitate and accelerate repair of these ruptures, its use will have repercussions far beyond the treatment of PTSD symptoms.

It could enable clinicians to more readily, more consistently, and more profoundly tap into what psychotherapy at its best offers: a pathway toward more fully, authentically, and lovingly engaging with themselves and their lives.

https://psychedelic.support/resources/mdma-assisted-psychotherapy-trauma/
 
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The Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research

The Center educates the public about psychedelic medicines and trains psychotherapists to work in the expanding field of psychedelic studies.

To address the demand for trained psychotherapists to work in the expanding field of psychedelic studies, CIIS created the Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research (the Center) in 2015. The Center is directed by clinical psychologist Dr. Janis Phelps, who is also a professor in the East-West Psychology program.

As part of a public service campaign to teach a variety of topics related to psychedelic research, the Center offers a series of evening lectures, weekend workshops, webinars, and films shown at CIIS and online. The goal of the Center's Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research is to invite cohorts of licensed psychotherapists and medical professionals to become psychedelic researchers and practitioners in legal clinical studies.

The goal of the Center's certificate program is to teach licensed psychotherapists and medical professionals and ordained clergy to become psychedelic researchers in the US and abroad. The certificate program trained 89 licensed and ordained professionals in 2016 and 2017. We are currently training 62 future psychedelic licensed therapists and researchers in the 2018 class. The next certificate course will be begin in March 2019. Dr. Phelps has spoken at national and international conferences about this innovative, first of its kind postgraduate certification program.

Throughout its history, CIIS has been a leader in consciousness research, including research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. In 1997, nearly three decades after the enactment of the Controlled Substances Act made psychedelic drugs illegal, CIIS began offering the Robert Joseph and Wilhelmina Kranzke Endowed Scholarships, a gift of Robert Barnhart in memory of his parents. The endowment supports two to four annual scholarships of $5,000 each for students who are conducting approved psychotropic research. CIIS Trustee Meihong Xu and her husband, Bill Melton, have continued this tradition by matching all gifts and grants to the Center up to $300,000, doubling the value of any donation made to support psychedelic studies at CIIS. The Center has received more than $100,000 in scholarship funding from individual and organizational donors including Robert Barnhart, the George Sarlo Foundation of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, and the Betsy Gordon Foundation. These scholarships have supported people of color, LGBTQI-identified people, and people who demonstrate financial need to study in the Center's certificate program.

Creation of the Center allows CIIS to build strong partnerships with other universities, medical centers, researchers, and research groups. More than a dozen top psychedelic researchers —including Dr. Bill Richards (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Charles Grob (University of California, Los Angeles), and Michael and Annie Mithoefer, lead researchers for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)— have partnered with the Center to teach in the certificate program. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and California Pacific Medical Center have joined the Center’s council of advisors.

By bringing together these top researchers, the Center has opened an avenue for collaboration between MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute, two of the most renowned research groups for psychedelic studies. The certificate program is the largest collaborative program focusing on psychedelic studies within a non-medical graduate university. Professor Phelps reports that "not only are we working with some of the majority of the psychedelic researchers in the country, but also we're preparing our graduates to make important advances in the fields of psychedelic research." Licensed therapists, medical professionals, and ordained clergy who earn a certificate in psychedelic research and therapy from CIIS will be specially trained as researchers and will eventually be eligible to be hired at future research centers across the United States. In expanded access programs, graduates of the certificate program at CIIS will eventually be eligible to work as psychedelic clinical researchers, under the supervision of a psychiatrist who would prescribe and administer the medication.

On March 23, 2018, Dr. Phelps and the certificate team hosted Dr. Bill Richards (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Tony Bossis (New York University), and author Michael Pollan at the opening reception for the 2018-19 certificate program. The Center is grateful for Pollan's latest New York Times article, "My Adventures With the Trip Doctors," in which he shares his own story and makes the Center's educational programming visible to practitioners and the general public.

“One of our primary goals is to build a cohort of licensed therapists with CIIS certificates,” says Phelps. “We want to see our CIIS graduates working across the country as trained psychedelic researchers.” Another goal is to continue to build partnerships and to raise funds so that the Center can eventually run a psychedelic-assisted therapy research study at CIIS in San Francisco. One thing is certain: with the creation of the Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research, CIIS has placed itself in the center of the cutting-edge field of psychedelic studies.

From Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research Director, Dr. Janis Phelps

"Research since the 1950's has shown that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has had significant positive effects in reductions of specific clinical symptoms and increases in quality of life as measured on a variety of indices. The intensity of focus on evidence-based outcomes, however, has resulted in a paucity of active discussions and research on the core competencies of the therapists themselves. With current discussions of phase 3 and expanded access research programs for psilocybin-assisted and MDMA-assisted psychotherapies, there will be a great need for competent therapists trained in this clinical specialty. This is particularly the case if less restricted, legal medical use is approved within the next six to ten years. The Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research's Certificate Program was created to focus on building the following core psychedelic therapist competencies:"

- empathetic abiding presence
- trust enhancement
- spiritual intelligence
- knowledge of the physical and psychological effects of psychedelics
- therapist self-awareness and ethical integrity
- proficiency in complementary techniques

"This development is particularly timely if expanded access and compassionate use programs are approved by the FDA in the near future. As current legal restrictions evolve, aspects of these training guidelines will be developed. CIIS is proud to be a key University leading those discussions."

-Janis Phelps, PhD

https://www.ciis.edu/research-cente...center-for-psychedelic-therapies-and-research
 
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Magic in the margins: Interview with an underground Psychedelic Therapist

by Wesley Thoricatha | Feb 25, 2019

Luna is an underground psychedelic therapist in the United States who has treated over 100 people in her two years of underground therapeutic work, mostly with MDMA and psilocybin. I spoke with Luna recently about her backstory and what the process of underground treatment is like.

Thanks so much for speaking with us, Luna. Can you share your story of how you came to be an underground psychedelic therapist?

I’m an immigrant. I was born in Ukraine, and when I was four I moved to California with my family. I had a tumultuous childhood, various levels of abuse and trauma and transgenerational patterns that I inherited. It was challenging to say the least, and as a result I became depressed starting in middle school. I started feeling extremely chronically depressed, and that persisted throughout my early 20s.

Psychedelics have been a huge healing piece in my journey. I did my first psilocybin journey when I was 19 and it was a difficult experience. I was not really prepared for it; it challenged me in a lot of ways, but it also gave me a tremendous amount of gifts. After that experience I integrated a lot of parts of myself that I had divorced myself from. My Ukrainian heritage was a big piece that I reconnected with during that journey.

When I was about 19-23 I was a pretty heavy drinker. I was self medicating with cannabis and alcohol as much as I could, trying to manage my emotions and help myself in whatever ways I knew. When I was 23, I had another psilocybin experience on 2.5 grams of some really strong medicine. That experience was also challenging in different ways, but it was also very beautiful and blissful. I credit that experience to my “awakening” because it really helped me connect with the pleasure that lives in my body, and it opened up my energy in a way that had never been accessed before. There was so much that I gained from this experience… it would take hours to recount, but the coolest thing I think that happened was the mushrooms asked me, “So why are you taking a depressant every day when you are already predisposed to depression?” I remember that voice coming through and it really got me thinking.

After that, I actually wasn’t able to drink at all. I would take a sip of wine and get an immediate headache. So something that happened with the mushrooms just made me not in alignment with alcohol anymore; they said that was enough.

Shortly after that psilocybin experience I had my first encounter with LSD. I candy-flipped LSD and MDMA and had another profound awakening. I realized that I was so lucky and looked after by the universe, but was still depressed. It helped me develop this sense of compassion for other beings who are struggling on this planet, and gave me a sense of being here to be of service— to give back and support people in their unfolding and awakening process so they don’t feel as alone. Because when I was going through this process, I was feeling very alone. I promised to myself and the world that I would be a support.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I came to Naropa University for my master’s in transpersonal counseling. Through this program I was required to see a therapist for the entire 3 years. I was going through all kinds of different therapy and some heavy somatic work, all kinds of big releases, but then I would be left wiped out afterwards. I noticed that I was still waking up depressed everyday, so I wasn’t actually having any breakthroughs. I was putting in a lot of work but not feeling any relief in terms of the depression.

I had been following the science of psychedelics since 2010, so I told my regular therapist I was interested in MDMA-assisted therapy and thought it could help me. I was also interested in learning how to do this kind of work. She asked me if I had ever done this work before myself, and I said no. So she sent me to a guy that works underground here; he’s been working since the 70s helping people in therapeutic and psychospiritual contexts. I came to see him, and after my first session of MDMA with him, I was not waking up depressed. I mean, I have good days and bad days and life still goes on, but overall I noticed a tremendous improvement in my ability to engage with my life and my ability to bring my nervous system to a place of regulation after this treatment. Before, the PTSD symptoms were very much taking me out of the moment— the emotion would just sweep me up and I would be really anxious and dysregulated. The MDMA gave me a tool to regulate my nervous system in a way that was sustainable and accessible, even when I was sober.

After I worked with this man for several sessions, we developed a very strong bond and he began to mentor me. He saw potential in my work and abilities as a healer in this space, and I mentored with him for about 2 years. He would work on me, I would work on him, and we worked with all kinds of different medicines— psilocybin, DMT, 2C-B MDA, MDMA, lots of different variety of medicines. Eventually we both worked on clients together, and he taught me everything he knew.

That was a little over 2 years ago. I’ve been on my own doing this work for about 2 years now, and I have over 100 sessions under my belt. I’m finding tremendous results, and it fuels my spirit because people get their life back. As I see it, my role is to provide the highest therapeutic techniques that I know, and this is the best that we have in our toolkit right now. Psychedelics help people heal in a very holistic way. I like to say that with talk therapy, you’re telling the stories; in psychedelic therapy, you’re getting underneath the stories, and in integrating the psychedelic experience you’re changing the stories. So it heals in a very deep way, and it also leads to this deep kind of ecological consciousness which is crucial right now on this planet. You get this visceral feeling of “We’re all one, I need to protect the earth, I need to protect my body from toxins, I need to nurture this beautiful gift that is being alive on this planet.”

Beautiful. You mentioned talk therapy being about the stories, and psychedelic therapy getting underneath. In your sessions, how much do those two things interplay with one another? How much dialogue is happening versus the client coming to realizations on their own?


In our waking consciousness we exist in just a small part of our brain. Our perceptions filter out a lot of the info that’s coming in just so we can cope with reality and move through the world. What happens in a psychedelic session is those filters are taken off, and people are able to make connections in a more meta way, so they are able to see their lives from a place where they have access to these unconscious patterns.

For example, people might be sharing something, a story— stories definitely happen in psychedelic sessions— and they’ll notice themselves starting to talk about something that brings up shame or embarrassment, and they’ll almost stop themselves. They’ll feel and notice where in their body they are holding back this energy of shame or unwillingness to express. Oftentimes it’s in the jaw and neck area where they hold a lot of tension, and in that moment we stop the story from happening, and I bring their awareness to their jaw. I’ll say “did you notice you just swallowed and pulled your emotion back in? Let’s breathe with the pain in the jaw that you’re noticing.”

It’s about allowing the body’s wisdom to have a place, where in talk therapy sometimes the body’s wisdom can get lost. Normally we try to logically analyze our way through things. Psychedelics kind of take away that logical analysis, and allow the space for the body to bring out its own wisdom and allow itself to heal. Truly we all have the capacity to move towards healing and heal ourselves if we stop trying to tell ourselves how things should be and how we want things to be and what’s wrong. Psychedelics help us to stop telling those stories of dysfunction and suffering, and just allow our bodies to just feel what needs to be felt, release it, discharge it, and find regulation again.

I put full trust into my clients and the wisdom they hold within themselves because I tell everyone, “I don’t know how to heal you, you know how to heal yourself.” I’m here to reflect some things you might not be seeing; I’m here to ask good questions; I’m here to hold a tight space so you feel completely safe. If regressing, rolling around on the floor, twitching, yelling, crying, or any other part of you that you usually hold back needs to express itself, it is welcome here. Here is a place where you can bring it and have it be witnessed and seen and loved in a way that maybe you haven’t experienced since childhood.

https://psychedelictimes.com/
 
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Underground Psychedelic Therapy

by Jenny Valentish | Dec 3 2018

The resurgence in clinical trials into the effectiveness of LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin in treating depression and trauma has received widespread publicity. But outside the labs, regular people are taking psychedelic therapy into their own hands.

Anita’s stepfather was a dark force in her life. He would concoct inventive punishments for the children if they didn’t do his bidding. One night, he drove them out to a quarry and left them there for an hour. Another time, he made Anita strip in front of a mirror while he sat and watched. When Anita turned 15, she says he started raping her.

“I honestly don’t think I would be alive without MDMA and LSD,” Anita, a pastry baker from Maine, told me.

But they weren’t her first choices. At 16, she’d started self-medicating with the benzodiazepine Klonopin, snorting it until she passed out and had to be dumped on the doorstep by friends. She got into pot. She smoked four packs of cigarettes a day.

That routine continued until she was 24, when she started to experience extreme anxiety. “I had agoraphobia so bad it was a struggle to leave my home,” says Anita, now 32. “I just wanted to die, and I began obsessing over how.”

A guy she was seeing, Josh, had been experimenting with LSD. He seemed happier, calmer, more optimistic. One night he brought over a couple of tabs. At first she was cautious. She was into obliteration, not mind expansion, and she was completely unaware of the scientific research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics that has been stacking up since the 1950s. “I would have thought that was ridiculous,” she says, “because taking acid had always been described to me as going into this nightmare world where you look into your deepest darkness.”

She kept waiting for the trip to turn into a PSA nightmare, or that TV movie she saw once, Desperate Lives, where Helen Hunt took PCP, the hallucinogenic anesthetic also known as angel dust. Instead she began feeling calm, and more connected to nature. She and Josh followed up with a few more trips over the next few weeks, then he brought over some MDMA. “This made me relive my experiences, and some might consider it a ‘bad trip,’” she says. “But even so, I noticed I felt more resilient. I faced things, head-on, with fascination. At times it felt like I was an exorcist, peering into the void and letting it speak through me.”

Into this new regimen she introduced meditation, wrote letters to herself, and took bike rides into the country, before reaching a point where the drugs were no longer necessary. “I do not feel fully cured of my PTSD,” she says. “But my experience gave me a set of tools to cope with my downs in a healthy, positive manner, and it taught me self-love and self-care.”

The past few years have seen a psychedelic renaissance thanks to the progress of clinical trials of substances such as LSD, psilocybin, and even ayahuasca to treat PTSD, depression, anxiety, and addiction. In trials conducted in 2016 by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), 61 percent of the 108 participants no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis two months after receiving three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Similarly, researchers at John Hopkins University have found that psilocybin reduces depressed mood and anxiety in patients with cancer.

But what does that mean for the general population? The FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation to MDMA in 2017, and with phase 3 trials now underway, MAPS predicts, perhaps optimistically, that MDMA could be regulated as a medicine by 2021. Still, it’s likely that MDMA-assisted therapy will be limited to people experiencing PTSD. The same is true of psilocybin and other substances—they will likely be targeted at end-of-life patients rather than those with anxiety and depression, or just good old-fashioned stress.

And so, an increasing number of people who’ve been following the progress of these trials have gone off-grid and found sympathetic therapists to facilitate illegal sessions. As previously reported by Motherboard, VICE’s technology site, one psychotherapist in her 60s, Friederike Meckel Fischer, was arrested by Swiss police back in 2010 and received a 16-month suspended sentence for giving her patients LSD and MDMA as tools to help them reconnect with their feelings. Her case wasn’t helped by the fact that she’d supplied the illegal highs.

The benefit of using a professional therapist is that they can safely guide the client toward a particular traumatic event, responding to whatever the client brings up. The therapist provides minimal intervention during the trip, because the hard work comes afterward. In the follow-up integration sessions—which are conducted without psychedelics—the client and therapist process what came up during the trip.

But there are downsides for a patient seeking to use underground therapists. First, an individual needs to be well connected to even find one in the first place. Secondly, there’s the expense—picture a therapist’s hourly rate and apply that to an eight-hour session. It is also frowned upon by institutions. When I contacted the British Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association for their stance on DIY psychedelic use, the former commented that “the use of psychedelic drugs in psychological therapy is illegal,” while a spokesperson for the latter told me they “do not have an official stance on this.”

Many people, then, choose to go it alone, or with a friend as a kind of trip-sitter. They might get their information on doses and substances (or just read first-person accounts) from forums like Reddit, Bluelight, and Erowid, or from books such as Julian Vayne’s Getting Higher, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious.

That’s exactly what Cameron, a consultant in London, does when he suffers burnout or has some kind of emotional problem that won’t shift. The 30-year-old had read about clinical trials in the media; now he looks up doses on forums and sets an intention. Sometimes he goes solo, sometimes he drops a dose with a friend. He’s used LSD and mushrooms, but for a breakup that had been bothering him for 18 months, he took MDMA. “I don’t usually come to any conclusion during the trip, but it tends to crystallize afterwards,” he told me. “In this instance, I was able to understand why my ex-girlfriend did what she did, and to empathize. Afterwards, I went from having no contact with her to us being quite close friends.”

Dan, a former soldier in his 40s, is also London-based. He is part of a psychedelic community that he describes as being populated by academics and intellectuals. During his time in the military he had many near-death experiences that led to him to develop PTSD. “At the time, I didn’t think they were having any emotional impact on me,” he says. “I had a typical macho response of ‘Look what I can put up with and I’m fine.’ I had no idea it would be contributing to a mental illness so many years later.”

Dan had enjoyed Aldous Huxley’s essays about psychedelic use, and he later came across the work of Canadian researchers that took place between the 50s and 70s who had phenomenal results treating alcohol dependence using LSD. He’d always dabbled with psychedelics for stress relief, but when he read a book about tryptamines, called TIHKAL: The Continuation (by Alexander and Ann Shulgin), he decided to try 4-AcO-DMT. “It’s a close analogue of psilocybin but also dramatically different,” he claims. “Whereas mushrooms operate in a part of the brain that could be considered about language or intellect, 4-AcO-DMT acts on the emotional thought processes.”

Dan finds that 4-AcO-DMT helps him understand how his emotions have become warped. “People can have a horrific time on mushrooms, and if you fall down that hole there’s no real limit to how far you can go. With 4-AcO-DMT you bounce. It’s a lighter, safer experience. I am still stuck with these symptoms—it’s chronic—but I can manage them. I might only need to use it once every two months.”

Before this, Dan had been prescribed an SSRI antidepressant, which worked well for the first year, but then he realized that just as the medication was preventing him dipping too low, it similarly put a cap on his pleasure in life. By contrast, 4-AcO-DMT allowed him to experience happiness and connection. As a result, he found his reliance on alcohol tapering off.

Without expert supervision, using psychedelics and other therapeutic substances relies on trial and error. The exclusion criteria for John Hopkins studies using psychedelics include a history of schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder, or bipolar I or II disorder. Studies using psychedelics to alleviate depression in terminal patients usually exclude people with borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. But there are no such precautions in the DIY world. And even those wanting to treat depression and anxiety may find that their inexperience around integration doesn’t bring good results.

Back in 2015, Kirsty, then 33, was receiving ketamine treatment in Sydney for her 15-year history of depression. She’d read about the treatment in a news story and put out a Google alert for it starting in Australia, then managed to sign up as a patient at Aura Medical Corporation. Aura had its clinics shut down later that same year for not supplying adequate psychiatric support and for handing out self-injecting packs—including ketamine—for clients to use at home.

“After the clinic shut, I went ‘off-book’ for six months, in that I was buying K from dealers,” Kirsty told me. “I was snorting rather than injecting, but I tried to re-create the experience, sitting quietly for an hour. I definitely felt a bit high, which made it hard to process my thoughts.”

In recent years more and more people have been microdosing LSD or psilocybin as way to improve productivity and mental health. Paul Austin, founder of the Third Wave, a resource center to educate the public about “practical, measured use” of psychedelics, thinks regular small doses give the advantage of experiencing the present more fully. “Microdosing is something that someone can do twice or three times a week. Depression is often linked to a rumination on the past, and anxiety to a focus on the future. Microdosing puts us in the here and now.”

But Dan, the former soldier, thinks achieving “ego death”—when the lines between the self and the outside world drop away—is most beneficial. “You can’t become at one with yourself and connected with all things through microdosing,” he says. “I’m dubious when people talk about doing it every day. The tolerance builds so quickly—and there’s a cross-tolerance between all the serotonergic hallucinogens—that the classic view is you don’t dose more than every two months.”

Dr. Prashanth Puspanathan is a medical doctor and neuropsychiatry fellow at a major Melbourne hospital, and a clinical adviser to the Australian Psychedelic Society. He’s pleased that interest in clinical trials is reducing stigma around psychedelic use and is overwriting old headlines about hippies and people thinking they can fly out of windows.

“If nothing else, these trials are the first step towards changing preconceived notions towards psychedelics,” he says. “I do think psychedelic psychotherapy is quicker. When you see it work in trials with trained therapists, the results are pretty fascinating. But the thing that really works is the integration afterwards with the same therapist—that’s the hard work you need to put in. You don’t walk away from the transcendental experience knowing all the answers.”

For Anita, the psychedelic effects have lasted years beyond her final dose. "The downside," she says, "is that while they gave me a connection to everything around me and offered a way out of my hellish personal narrative, it has become impossible to stop caring about my impact on the rest of the world, and that can be exhausting."

“There’s such a stigma associated with LSD,”
she says. “But I was just a deeply broken girl who wanted to get closer to nature, get closer to herself, and find some peace through whatever nonharmful means.”

Mindfully using psychedelics for their therapeutic benefits used to largely be the domain of those plugged into the psychedelic lifestyle. It seems only logical that now, as news headlines mount up about the progress of clinical trials, public experimentation has similarly slipped into the mainstream. DIY therapy is likely to only gain momentum as we wait out the long scientific and legislative process necessary for these substances to become legitimate medicines.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/a3m3zk/going-underground-v25n4
 
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The extraordinary therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, explained*

by Sean Illing | Mar 8, 2019

I had a close call on the second night of the ayahuasca ceremony.

I saw my teenage self melting into particles and eventually disappearing altogether. I pulled off my sleep mask and saw the people around me shape-shifting into shadows. I thought I was dying, or perhaps losing my grip on reality.

Suddenly, Kat, my guide, appeared and began singing to me. I couldn’t make out the words, but the cadence was soothing. After a minute or two, the dread washed away and I settled back into a peaceful half-sleep.

The 12 of us — nine women and three men — taking ayahuasca in a private home in San Diego were led by two trained guides: Kat and her partner, whom I’ll call Sarah since she requested anonymity due to legal concerns. Together they have more than 20 years of experience working with psychedelics, including ayahuasca, a plant concoction that contains the natural hallucinogen known as DMT.

Kat (her full name is Tina Kourtney) and Sarah work as a team serving psychedelic medicine every month or so in a different city. Their primary role is to create a space in which everyone feels secure enough to drop their emotional guards and open up to the drugs’ potential to change their attitudes, moods, and behaviors.

There’s a lot of unease heading into these ceremonies, especially for people who have never experimented with psychedelics. The fear of what you might see or feel can be overwhelming. But guides like Kat are your port in the storm. When things get turbulent, they respond with a steady, calm hand.

Though psychedelic drugs remain illegal, guided ceremonies, or sessions, are happening across the country, especially in major cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Guiding itself has become a viable profession, both underground and above, as more Americans seek out safe, structured environments to use psychedelics for spiritual growth and psychological healing. This new world of psychedelic-assisted therapy functions as a kind of parallel mental health service. Access to it remains limited, but it’s evolving quicker than you might expect.

A majority of Americans now support the legalization of marijuana, and while a 2016 public poll on psychedelics suggested they aren’t as favorable, it’s possible that attitudes will shift as the research findings on their therapeutic potential enter the mainstream. (Author Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, about his own experiences with psychedelics, helped spread the word. Even Gwyneth Paltrow has acknowledged their potential in a recent New York Times interview.)

But what would a world in which psychedelics are legal look like? And what sort of cultural structures would we need to ensure that these drugs are used responsibly?

Psychedelic drugs like LSD seeped into American society in the 1960s, and the results were mixed at best. They certainly revolutionized the culture, but they ultimately left us with draconian drug laws and a cultural backlash that pushed psychedelics into the underground.

Today, however, a renaissance is underway. At institutions like John Hopkins University and New York University, clinical trials exploring psilocybin as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression, drug addiction, and other anxiety disorders are yielding hopeful results.

In October, the Food and Drug Administration took the extraordinary step of granting psilocybin therapy for depression a “breakthrough therapy” designation. That means the treatment has demonstrated such potential that the FDA has decided to expedite its development and review process. It’s a sign of how far the research and the public perception of psychedelics have come.

It’s because of this progress that we have to think seriously about what comes next and how we would integrate psychedelics into the broader culture. I’ve spent the past three months talking with guides, researchers, and therapists who are training clinicians to do psychedelic-assisted therapy. I’ve participated in underground ceremonies, and I’ve spoken to people who claim to have conquered their drug addictions after a single psychedelic experience.

Our current laws sanction various poisons, including booze and cigarettes. These are drugs that destroy lives and feed addictions. And yet one of the most striking things about the recent (limited) psychedelic research is that the drugs do not appear to be addictive or have adverse effects when a guide is involved. Many researchers believe these drugs, when used under the supervision of trained professionals, could revolutionize mental health care.

Psychedelics are becoming tools of healing rather than a threat to the social order. And the scientists and organizations and training institutions leading the way are working within the system to reduce the potential for blowback. This is very different from the approach taken in the ’60s, and so far it’s been a success.
Your mind on psychedelics

Psilocybin is the drug of choice for most researchers in recent years for a variety of reasons. For one, it carries less cultural baggage than LSD, and so study participants are more willing to work with it. Psilocybin also has strong safety data based on studies conducted before prohibition, and so the FDA has allowed a small number of small clinical trials to move forward.

Although the most recent studies are still preliminary and the sample sizes fairly small, the results so far are compelling. In one 2014 Johns Hopkins study, 80 percent of the smokers who participated in psilocybin-assisted therapy remained fully abstinent six months after the trial. By way of comparison, smoking cessation trials using varenicline (a prescription medication for smoking addiction) has success rates around 35 percent.

In a separate 2016 study of cancer-related depression or anxiety, 83 percent of 51 participants reported significant increases in well-being or satisfaction six months after a single dose of psilocybin. (Sixty-seven percent said it was one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives.)

A typical psilocybin session lasts somewhere between four and six hours (compared with 12 hours with LSD), yet it produces enduring decreases in depression and anxiety for patients. Which is why researchers like Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins believe psychedelics represents an entirely new model for treating major psychiatric conditions. Conventional treatments like antidepressants don’t work for a lot of patients and can come with a host of side effects.

This is a big reason why many researchers believe that psychedelics will eventually be rescheduled by the FDA (more on this below) and legalized for medical use — though the timeline on this is far from clear. In November, in fact, officials in Oregon approved a 2020 ballot measure that would allow medical professionals to conduct psilocybin-assisted therapy. If it passes, Oregon will be the first state to let licensed therapists administer psilocybin. Other states like California are likely to follow suit.

For more on the broad medical potential of psychedelics, I’d urge you to read my colleague German Lopez’s 2016 review of the science. Here I wanted to focus on how psilocybin works and why it’s so powerful for the people who take it. To understand the clinical side, I traveled to Johns Hopkins to sit down with Alan Davis, a clinical psychologist, and Mary Cosimano, a research coordinator and trained guide. Both help lead the psilocybin sessions at Hopkins.

Researchers at Hopkins have worked with a number of populations since they received approval from the FDA to study psilocybin in 2000 — healthy adults without any psychological issues, cancer patients suffering from anxiety and depression, smokers, and even seasoned meditators.

A key part of the process at Hopkins is what they call “life review.” Before they provide the drug, they want to know who you are, where you’re at in your life, and what kinds of emotional or psychological walls you’ve built up around yourself. The idea is to work with patients to determine what’s holding them back in their lives, and explore how they might overcome it.

Davis and Cosimano both say psilocybin has benefited every population they’ve worked with. “It’s not for everyone,” Cosimano told me, “but for the right person at the right time, it can be positively transformative.” (They don’t accept patients anywhere on the spectrum of psychosis — it’s just too dangerous.)

The psilocybin sessions are intense and, in some cases, last all day. The rooms they use are a curious blend of drab doctor’s office decor and New Age ornamentation. There’s a vanilla-colored couch covered with embroidered pillows and draped on both sides by South American art. Near the couch, on an end table, is a ceremonial cup and mini sculptures of magic mushrooms; it’s not quite an altar, but it may as well be.

The important thing, Cosimano and Davis say, is to make the patient as comfortable as possible. They even encourage people to bring personal artifacts with them, or letters from loved ones, or basically anything with deep emotional resonance. Much like the underground guides, researchers do everything they can to create a safe psychological space.

Sessions can unfold in multiple directions, depending on the depth of the experience (which is hard to predict) and the mental state of the individual. Mostly, patients are lying on the couch with a sleep mask covering their eyes. Cosimano, Davis, and other clinical guides act as lodestars — holding the patient’s hand and helping them process what they’re seeing and what it means. “I never get bored with this,” Cosimano told me. “Every single session is different, every experience is different, and I’m just blown away at being able to witness each person’s journey.”

Yet it’s not entirely clear to the scientists what it is about these experiences that produce such profound changes in attitude, mood, and behavior. Is it a sense of awe? Is it what the American philosopher William James called the “mystical experience,” something so overwhelming that it shatters the authority of everyday consciousness and alters our perception of the world? What’s clear in any case is that psychedelic trips are often beyond the bounds of language.

The best metaphor I’ve heard to describe what psychedelics does to the human mind comes from Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelic researcher at Imperial College in London. He said we should think of the mind as a ski slope. Every ski slope develops grooves as more and more people make their way down the hill. As those grooves deepen over time, it becomes harder to ski around them.

Like a ski slope, Carhart-Harris argues, our minds develop patterns as we navigate the world. These patterns harden as you get older. After a while, you stop realizing how conditioned you’ve become — you’re just responding to stimuli in predictable ways. Eventually, your brain becomes what Michael Pollan has aptly called an “uncertainty-reducing machine,” obsessed with securing the ego and locked in uncontrollable loops that reinforce self-destructive habits.

Taking psychedelics is like shaking the snow globe, Carhart-Harris said. It disrupts these patterns and explodes cognitive barriers. It also interacts with what’s called the default mode network (DMN), the part of the brain associated with mental chatter, self-absorption, memories, and emotions. Anytime you’re anxious about the future or fretting over the past, or engaged in compulsive self-reflection, this part of the brain lights up. When researchers looked at images of brains on psychedelics, they discovered that the DMN shuts down almost entirely.

Think of it this way: You spend your whole life in this body, and because you’re always at the center of your experience, you become trapped in your own drama, your own narrative. But if you pay close attention, say, in a deep meditation practice, you’ll discover that the experience of self is an illusion. Yet the sensation that there’s a “you” separate and apart from the world is very hard to shake; it’s as though we’re wired to see the world this way.

The only time I’ve ever been able to cut through this ego structure is under the influence of psychedelics (in my case, ayahuasca). I was able to see myself from outside my self, to see the world from the perspective of nowhere and everywhere all at once, and suddenly this horror show of self-regard stopped. And I believe I learned something about the world that I could not have learned any other way, something that altered how I think about, well, everything.

At Johns Hopkins, the drug experience is only one part of the treatment. Equally important is the therapy that follows. People regularly tell researchers that the psilocybin session is the single most personally and spiritually significant experience of their lives, including childbirth and the loss of loved ones.

But there’s a need, Davis said, “to make sense of these experiences and to bring them into your day-to-day life in a way that doesn’t discount the meaning.” That doesn’t necessarily have to be therapy or one-on-one counseling with a guide, but it’s crucial to integrate the experience into your daily life, whether that’s taking up a new practice like yoga or meditation, spending more time in nature, or just cultivating new relationships.

The point is that’s it not enough to take the ride and move on; it’s about establishing new habits, new mental patterns, new ways of being. Psychedelics can kick-start this process, but for many people, at least, that’s all they can do.

When I returned from my first ayahuasca retreat, I struggled to process what had happened to me. I had no formal help, no instruction, no real support. It’s jarring to slide back into your routine after having your inner world turned upside down like that. I’ve adopted new practices (like meditation), and that has gone a long way in keeping me connected to that initial encounter with psychedelics, but there are limits to what you can do alone.

Recognizing the need for more integration, schools like the California Institute of Integral Studies and psychedelic researchers like NYU’s Elizabeth Nielson are focused on training professional therapists to work specifically with psychedelic users. Nielson is part of the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program, which does not conduct psychotherapy but offers instruction to clinicians who want to learn about psychedelics.

“People who have used psychedelics, or will use psychedelics in the future, will need help integrating their experiences, and many will feel safest doing that in a therapist’s office,” she told me. “That means we’ll need more therapists who understand these experiences and know how to have these kinds of conversations with patients.”

In the meantime, we’ve seen a parallel growth in a more informal support system for people experimenting with psychedelics, one that exists mostly underground.

Psychedelics and the underground

For decades, a community of guides has worked quietly in the shadows, serving psychedelics to people across the country. And they’re not that different from their above-ground counterparts — or at least not as different as you might expect. Many of them have spent years apprenticing under traditional healers in places like Peru and Brazil and follow a strict code of conduct designed to formalize practices and ensure safety.

This was certainly true of Kat, the guide I sat with in San Diego. She studied under a Peruvian mentor for eight years and estimates that she’s used ayahuasca more than 900 times and led hundreds of ceremonies in Europe and the US.

She calls herself a “tone setter,” someone who controls the space. Mostly, she puts everyone at ease by projecting a calm and reassuring presence. “I take the pulse of the room, and when I have to go over to somebody, I try to be as grounded as the earth itself — that sort of calmness is contagious,” she said. “The key thing is to be attuned to what’s happening and how people are feeling, and respond to that.”

Her role is a tightrope walk between letting people go through whatever they’re going through and intervening when they’re too close to the abyss. If everyone’s fine, she’s somewhere in the room singing medicine songs and keeping a watchful eye on things. If someone panics, Kat must talk them down, and do it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm everyone else in the room.

Just a few months ago, she told me, a woman at one of her ceremonies was convinced demons had taken over her body. She became hysterical and threatened to call 911. Situations like this arise all the time, and the guide has to figure it out on the fly.

Unlike the clinicians at Hopkins, Kat manages the trips of multiple people at a time, sometimes dozens, and that carries risks. I asked her, why do this? Why risk managing someone reacting in ways she can’t control, or risk going to jail?

“Because it heals people,” she told me. “I see it every time I hold a circle, every time I walk a group of people through this experience. People enter with one perspective and leave with another. Sometimes that means they see the world with new eyes, and sometimes it means they realize they’re more than their addiction, that their flaws don’t define them.”

Kat, now 43, has had plenty of her own battles. Before discovering ayahuasca 13 years ago on a trip to Peru, she had alcoholism, bulimia, and bipolar disorder — at one point, she attempted suicide. “The medicine wasn’t a panacea,” she said, “but it set me on a different path, and basically I dedicated my whole life to this work.”

She tried traditional therapy for several years, mostly to treat her bipolar disorder and bulimia. When that failed, she dabbled in self-help workshops, from Radical Awakening seminars to Mastery in Transformational Training courses. “I was obsessed with finding some sort of relief,” she told me, “but nothing worked, nothing stuck.”

Everyone who shows up at Kat’s ceremonies has their own reason for being there. Some are psychonauts — people looking to explore altered states of consciousness through the use of psychedelics. Others, like Laura, a 35-year-old woman from Philadelphia, are drawn to plant medicine as a last-ditch effort to conquer an addiction.

In Laura’s case, it was a 14-year addiction to heroin. “I was at the edge of death. I tried every conventional method you can think of — detox, counseling, rehab — and nothing worked,” she told me. She eventually found ibogaine, a psychedelic compound derived from the roots of a West African shrub. “Ibogaine was like a myth on the streets, this miraculous modality that could reset your brain and save you from the throes of addiction.”

Laura told me that she eventually went to her family and said: “Put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger or send me to an ibogaine clinic.” They sent her to an ibogaine treatment center just north of Cancun, where she did a few sessions. She has now been clean for the past eight years.

Ibogaine is not as well researched as psilocybin or LSD, and it’s comparatively dangerous, but it’s one of the most powerful known psychedelic drugs, and there is preliminary research suggesting it may be an effective treatment for opioid and cocaine addiction.

Another woman, a 48-year-old from Kansas whom I’ll call April, told me she spent 15 years hooked on Adderall, a stimulant prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It consumed my entire life — every decision, every plan, basically every moment.” She tried several times to quit, but the withdrawal was too much. On a whim, she decided to look into psychedelics and found her way to Kat’s website. A few weeks later, she was sitting in a ceremony.

Her first ayahuasca trip was in September, nearly three months ago, and she hasn’t touched Adderall since. “The experience was rough,” she said. “It was like seeing myself and my life through a funhouse mirror, and I could see all the masks I wear, how Adderall had become this crutch, this source of false energy that propelled me through my life. I feel like it recalibrated my whole being.”

These stories are inspiring, but it’s not clear how representative they are. Psychedelics aren’t a magic elixir, and there are physical and psychological risks to taking them haphazardly, particularly if you’re on medication or have been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition. But used in a proper setting with a trained guide, they can be remarkably therapeutic. (As far as I know, there are no documented “bad trips” in the research literature.)

Kat believes this work could be more impactful if it wasn’t forced underground. “If this was legal, I’d spend more time with people before and after the experience. I’d want to build up my team and do this aboveground like a normal business and take care of people from start to finish. Because we’re in this legal gray area, people often come into the ceremony and then they’re shot right back into the world, and that can be traumatic.”

I asked Kat if she’s noticed a shift in the sorts of people attending her ceremonies. It used to be mainly the psychonauts, she told me, but lately it’s people, old and young, who want to make peace with mortality or face down deep traumas. She’s working with more and more veterans struggling with PTSD, many of whom tell her they failed to find relief from traditional mental health care.

Still, she hesitated when I asked her about legalization. “They should absolutely be legal, but I’m not sure they should be legal tomorrow,” she said. “We need a firm foundation in place, a way to keep the reverence around these medicines. If we lose that, if psychedelics become another substance like marijuana, I worry that we’ll blow this up and burn it down like we did in the ’60s.”

Kat’s concern, shared by many people in this space, is that the ceremonial aspects around psychedelics will be lost if they’re legalized overnight. There’s nothing inherently wrong with recreational use, but for those who regard psychedelics with a kind of sacred awe, there’s a genuine fear that these substances will be trivialized if we don’t make this transition wisely.

So how do we integrate psychedelics into the culture?

For better or worse, psychedelics, like all drugs, are going to be used outside the safer contexts of research facilities or private sessions with experienced guides. According to Geoff Bathje, a psychologist at Adler University who works with high-trauma patients, the question is therefore, “What sort of harm reductions do we need to help protect people?”

Several people I spoke with pointed to the “harm reduction” model. Harm reduction focuses on reducing the risks associated with drug use, as opposed to punitive models aimed at eliminating use altogether. It’s a practical and humane approach that has worked well in places like Portugal, where all drugs for personal use have been decriminalized.

Although the harm reduction model isn’t typically associated with psychedelics, the principles apply all the same.

For Bathje, it’s about doing good drug education in the general population, “making sure people understand the risks involved with psychedelics — how they can be misused, how people can be exploited when under the influence, etc.” There are already national harm reduction groups like Zendo Project, which is sponsored by MAPS, that focus on peer-to-peer counseling for people experimenting with psychedelics.

Bathje and some of his colleagues have established a harm reduction group in Chicago called Psychedelic Safety Support and Integration. The goal is to promote safety and help people process their psychedelic experiences. It’s a critical container that brings in the community, spreads awareness of the risks associated with psychedelic drug use, and creates a space for connection.

At the moment, there’s a gap between the harm reduction movement and the psychedelic research community. “You go to a psychedelics conference and it’s focused on the science and the therapeutic potential,” Bathje said, “and the general assumption is that if we just produce good science, these drugs will get approved as medicines and everything will just fall into place.”

“If you attend a harm reduction conference,”
he added, “it’s all about cultural change and how politicians don’t care about the science. The focus is much more on organizing and who has the power and how we can reduce risks and do things safely.” This is partly why the harm reduction movement can be useful to psychedelics. Science may be critical to legalization, but public health programs would have to help integrate these drugs into the broader culture.

Harm reduction groups like Bathje’s and the Zendo Project are the best models we have for this sort of integration, and we’d need to scale them up if psychedelics are legalized for medicinal use.

There are reasons to be cautious, but we should welcome the evolution of psychedelic research

After spending months thinking about these issues and talking to people involved at nearly every level, I’m convinced that the new culture of therapeutic psychedelics is evolving quickly. Just this week, a group of citizens in Denver gathered enough signatures to approve a ballot measure in the spring that would decriminalize magic mushrooms.

As Rick Doblin pointed out, the social and political milieu is much different today than it was in the ’60s, and there’s no reason to suspect a similar backlash. The cultural containers and the knowledge are there, and they could increasingly be brought out of the shadows.

What this transition on a larger scale will look like, and how long it will take, is less clear. Advocates like Doblin seem wise to continue playing the long game. Given the progress of the research, it’s possible that psilocybin will be recategorized from a schedule 1 drug (drugs with no known medical value) to a schedule 4 drug (drugs with a low potential for abuse and a known medical value) in the next three or four years.

The process of rescheduling drugs, however, is a bit muddled. Under federal law, the US attorney general can move to reschedule drugs on their own, but they are required to gather data and medical research from the secretary of health and human services before doing so. Congress can also pass laws to change the scheduling of drugs, and could, if they chose, overrule an attorney general.

We’re unlikely to see much progress on this front under the current administration, but the political winds can shift in a hurry, especially if the research continues apace. That the Drug Enforcement Agency is already comfortable with the possibility of rescheduling psychedelics is a very positive sign.

“We’re happy to see the research progressing at institutions like Johns Hopkins,” Rusty Payne, the DEA’s spokesperson, told me in a phone interview. “When the scientific and medical community come to the DEA and say, ‘This should be a medicine, this should be recategorized as a schedule 4 or 5 instead of a schedule 1’; then we will act accordingly.”

Support for psychedelics is also one of those rare issues that can, in some cases, cut across conventional political lines. Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire Republican financier and co-owner of Breitbart, has donated a $1 million to MAPS to fund their studies focused on veterans with PTSD. As the research advances, we could see more bipartisan support like this.

One big remaining question has to do with access. If you spend any time at all in the psychedelic subculture, you can’t help but notice that it consists mostly of privileged white people. This is largely a product of who’s holding these spaces, how much they cost (anywhere from $600 to well over $1,000 per session), where they’re being held, and the networks of people propping them up. That many people simply don’t know about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics is yet another barrier. All of this has to change, and hopefully it will when psychedelics aren’t relegated to the underground.

Within the psychedelic community itself, there are concerns about commodification. Companies like Compass Pathways are seeking to turn psilocybin into a pharmaceutical product. (Compass’s psilocybin study is the one that received the breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA in October.)

Compass began as a nonprofit venture with an interest in starting a psychedelic hospice center but has since pivoted to a for-profit approach. With major investors like Peter Thiel behind it, Compass might dominate the medical supply chain of psychedelics from synthesis to therapy. It’s also impeding the research efforts of nonprofit companies like Usona that are developing their own psychedelic medicines. If the market becomes monopolized, or if a few pharmaceutical companies control critical patents, lots of people could be priced out of access.

Despite all these concerns, we should welcome the evolution of psychedelic research. We need bigger studies, and we need to include more diverse populations in them to learn as much as we can about how these drugs work. As Richard Friedman, a clinical psychiatrist at Cornell University, told me, “I’m all for optimism, but show me the data. I embrace the enthusiasm for the therapeutic potential of psychedelics ... but as to whether it’s justified, the answer will be the data. And nothing but the data.”

So far the data is encouraging, yet there’s plenty we don’t yet understand. But we know enough to say that psychedelics are powerful tools for reducing suffering at least for some people. And we simply don’t have enough of these tools to justify their prohibition.

*From the article here :
 
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Starting a Community Psychedelic Integration Circle

by Sherree M. Godasi | psychedelic.support | Apr 26, 2019

In May 2017, the first psychedelic integration circle was hosted in Los Angeles with the purpose of creating a safe space for people to talk about non-ordinary states of consciousness and offer emotional support, educational information, and harm reduction strategies to individuals who use psychedelic substances. Nearly three years later, PsychedeLiA: Psychedelic Integration, Los Angeles’ peer-led integration circles are held multiple times a week across the greater LA area drawing anywhere from 3 to 30 people per meeting. Clearly, there is a high demand for these gatherings, and a primary response received from new guests is that they wish they knew about the circles sooner.

Though we are completely out of the psychedelic closet, I sometimes half-humorously refer to PsychedeLiA’s integration circles as “Psychedelics Anonymous”, simply because the organic evolution of our meetings seems to have surpassed the original intentions. The circles have become somewhat of a subculture, becoming the primary place to meet “The Others” intimately.

With the meetings being open to the public and the guest composition completely spontaneous, no circle is ever the same. They are typically a blend between regulars that have been with us since the beginning and newbies that just recently found us through a Google search. The personal psychedelic experience ranges from curious after reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind to decades of use of various substances.

The structured circles (see details below) always start with an intention to “co-create the space.” We share experiences, stories, dilemmas, concerns, hesitations, ideas, questions, information and news. Some members come in with the intention of silent presence to show solidarity and support with the community. Like a tribe sitting around the fire, through the different voices in the gathering a theme is woven to discuss topics such as ego transcendence, spiritual emergence, samadhi states, personal traumas and struggles, and safety preparation techniques.

Like other genre-specific meetups the attracted crowd seem to share similar philosophies, outlooks, values and lifestyle aspirations. More than an evening social event, the personal relationships forged overtime can support the members’ ongoing integration journey and provide accountability measures and feedback to the progress (or lack thereof). In the containment provided by the circle, guests gently explore relationships through a live connection to the collective consciousness, which many attendees have witnessed through psychedelic exploration. As a result, deep friendships can be forged. They often extend well beyond the circles as members recognize one another to be part of the same tribe. The community bonding, we have come to realize, can in fact be the medicines’ most potent healing property.

If you’re interested in starting psychedelic integration circles in your area and not sure where to begin, here are some basic guidelines:

Preparing and Planning

- Make decisions: on ideal size of group, duration, frequency, cost, rules of conduct and structure of meeting.

- Prepare materials: laminated name and contribution signs (if you are taking donations to cover meeting costs), group rules and guest sign in sheets. Gather objects for your sacred altar and a talking stick. A kettle for tea, tea selection and cups.

- Reserve location: can be a local event space, yoga studio, a park or your living room. Anywhere that is inviting and accessible will work. Though not necessary, I personally have a preference for closed spaces as they feel more contained and thus impact the depth of conversation.

- Advertise: through Meetup, Facebook, Instagram, Eventbrite, yoga/meditation studios, conscious businesses in your area. Collaborate with other local psychedelic organizations. You can also build a free website and integrate a calendar. Gather emails through the sign in sheets to create a mailing list.

- Consistency is everything: hold the circles at predictable times (e.g. first Wednesday of the month at 6-8 pm). This makes is easy for guests to plan ahead without waiting for a meeting announcement.

Setting Up

- Arrive 30 minutes prior to the beginning of your circle to set up room in a circle format with pillows, back jacks or chairs, an inviting tea corner.

- Have a welcome table with a sign in sheet, group rules, payment contribution bowl with sign, cards, list of additional support resources (help hotlines, local emotional support organizations, integration professionals).

- Arrange altar that includes sacred objects, flowers and a talking stick, if this feels like a suitable option for the group.

- May play soft music to set mood at entrance and replay at end of circle as guests interact and network.

Welcoming Guests

- It is highly recommended guests be restricted to those over 18 years old and who are presenting as completely sober (i.e., not under the influence of any substances).

- Welcome every guest warmly, make sure they have arrived to the right event and ask them how they heard of it, for advertising reference.

- Encourage guest to sign in legibly, read the rules and provide their contribution as they enter the room. As a community led group, a suggested donation amount should be fair and in line with providing access to people regardless of their financial situation (i.e., optional or minimal donations). Typically rules cover, at a minimum, confidentiality of attendees and respectful communication within the group.

- Though not necessary, a no-shoe policy may add to the cozy/comfortable feel of the gathering.

- As guests settle in, encourage them to introduce themselves to other guests in the room and make new friends.

- Circles should start and end on time.

- Consider not allowing entries 15 minutes past the start time of the circle (unless guests drove from far away/got stuck in abnormal traffic). Late entries will potentially compromise the safe container of the circle and all guests will be affected by latecomers.

Facilitating the Circle

Circle leaders are peers that are ideally personally experienced with non-ordinary states of consciousness, familiar with various psychedelic substances and not only knowledgeable about psychedelic integration but are a testament to it. This guideline, of course, can be interpreted in various ways; my interpretation of a well-integrated person is a grounded, present, authentic and happy individual that embodies medicine wisdom, a person who one would want to learn from and potentially emulate in some ways.

- Maintain a sense of non-judgmental and kind presence, make eye contact and remain open and approachable. Listen attentively to the circle conversation.

- Allow the circle to flow naturally; make room for silence.

- Keep an eye on time and make sure every guest has an opportunity to share and contribute, including toning down dominant participants. You may wish to use a timer and allow each member a set number of minutes to share.

- Attempt to not intervene in the circle content, unless some of the information that is presented is factually inaccurate (opportunity for an educational moment).

- The objective of the community integration circles is to offer a peer-support environment. While peer-led groups have a myriad of benefits they are not substitutes for therapy or professional mental health services; do not attempt to provide either. If you recognize a situation that you feel could be better addressed by a professional, offer a reference to a friendly resource, PsychedeLiA Support Network or MAPS Integration List.

- Encourage community connection and networking following the circle.

Psychedelic Integration Community Circle - An Example Group Structure

- Welcome by leader, personal introduction

- Definition of “psychedelic integration”

- Mission purpose of the organization

- Legal disclaimer

- Centering meditation

- Guest introductions and intentions round

- Group rules (read aloud)

- Community integration circle

- Conclusion & final announcements

- Community mantra, gratitude and contribution reminder

My hope is that this information serves other communities well as we strive to safely and mindfully navigate the process of collective and psychedelic integration.

 
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Applying for the Certificate of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research

California Institute of Integral Studies of San Francisco

The certificate is designed for advanced professionals working in related therapeutic areas: licensed mental health clinicians, specific medical professionals and ordained/commissioned clergy and chaplains. Licensed professionals in these specializations must have an MA, MSW, RN or higher degree in behavioral health, medicine, or mental health fields. Clergy and chaplains must be trained within one or more of the major world religions and be ordained or commissioned prior to application. Under specific circumstances, specific medical and mental health professionals, who are not yet licensed, may apply if they have completed their coursework and 1,000 training hours of counseling and psychotherapy.

Only professionals who hold the following specific advanced degrees, licensure, commissions, or ordinations may apply to the certificate program:

- Professional Clinical Counselors (LPCC)
- Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT)
- Clinical Social Workers (LCSW)
- Occupational Therapists (OT with master's degree)
- Registered Nurses (RN)
- Nurse Practitioners (NP)
- Naturopathic Doctors (ND)
- Clinical and Counseling Psychologists (PhD/PsyD)
- Physicians and Psychiatrists (MD)
- Physician Assistants (PA)
- Ordained Clergy and Commissioned Chaplains (with M.Div. and 4 hours CPE)
- Attorneys (JD in counseling specialties only)
- Advanced Alcohol and Drug Counselors (LAADC with master's degree)
- Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners (TCM with master's degree)
- Physical Therapists (PT with master's degree)

These are strict criteria and only people with the above degrees and credentials are eligible to apply. For these professionals, preference will be given to applicants with a substantial background in psychological treatment and spiritual direction in behavioral medicine, chronic trauma and PTSD, palliative care, hospice, psychiatry, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, oncology, mediation and resolution, and/or pain management.

The Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research especially encourages applications from individuals in the above list who identity as people of color and/or LGBTQi, serve marginalized and underserved populations, and/or are military veterans.

For medical professionals, clergy, chaplains, and counseling attorneys, those applicants with substantial experience in providing psychotherapy, counseling, pastoral care, mediation, and/or spiritual direction will be considered strong candidates for the certificate program.

Criteria for Clergy and Chaplains: Ordained clergy and commissioned/ordained chaplains are considered as applicants if they serve in pastoral counseling and spiritual direction within the well-known world religious traditions. For ordained/commissioned clergy and chaplains, an M.Div. and 4 hours CPE with study in psychology and therapeutic skills is a requirement. We encourage applicants from these backgrounds. There are special tuition discounts available for clergy and chaplains who report a need for financial aid.

Criteria for Counseling Attorneys: Only JD licensed attorneys with demonstrated supervised training and counseling work with families, couples and individuals in several specific areas are eligible to apply. These areas are limited to: divorce mediation, child custody mediation and resolution, end-of-life and estate plan counseling, family and elder law counseling, and community dispute resolution. A strong candidate will be an applicant who did this counseling work under clinical supervision in non-profits or service agencies for the benefit of marginalized populations. Counseling attorneys must have passed the bar, been licensed prior to applying, and have earned certifications in one or more of these specific areas.

Criteria for Eligible Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners, Physical Therapists, Advanced Alcohol and Drug Counselors, and Occupational Therapists: These professionals must have an accredited master's or doctoral degree in mental health, medicine, or behavioral health, as well as the applicable license. These specific credentials are required for these 2019 applicants.

Eligibility for Pre-licensed Professionals: Under certain circumstances, five types of eligible mental health or medical professionals may be admitted prior to the completion of licensure requirements. These five groups of therapists are Professional Clinical Counselors, Marriage and Family Therapists, Clinical Social Workers, Psychologists, and Psychiatrists. Unlicensed members of these five groups will be considered on an individual basis only if they: a) have completed their degree coursework, b) have completed 1,000 or more supervised internship or residency clinical hours in which they conducted psychotherapy and counseling and c) have two or more years of work experience in mental health fields. In all cases where an applicant is not yet licensed, the coursework and 1,000 supervised hours of psychotherapy or counseling experience must be completed prior to the start of the certificate program. To document the completion of the coursework, pre-licensed applicants will need to include a copy of their degree's academic requirements from the university's catalog.

Continuing Education Credits

Up to 40 Continuing Education Hours are available for MFT, LPCC, LCSW, RN, and Nurse Practitioner trainees.

 
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Online courses from Psychedelics Today

Psychedelics Today | June 2019

Psychedelics have been making headlines in mainstream media and more people are becoming interested in the potential therapeutic benefits of these substances. There is a good chance that your clients may be developing an interest in wanting to work or already have worked with these substances. How does one support or work with clients who are bringing their psychedelic experiences into the therapy room? What do you need to know about doing integration work with clients? These questions and more will be explored throughout the course!

This live online course will provide a transpersonal theoretical framework for understanding the psychedelic experience and also explore integration techniques and practices. There will be five (5) virtual classroom meetings where students will have an opportunity to connect with each other, ask questions, and engage with the course presenters. Students will also get full and lifetime access to our online course, Navigating Psychedelics: Lessons on Self-Care & Integration and a bonus course for therapists and clinicians, which comes with masterclasses that include ethics of providing integration therapy, challenges and successes of providing integration therapy, and more.

Fall #1

Course Outline

The curriculum is subject to change depending on group interests.

Week 1: Thursday, September 12th – Introduction Week: Group introductions and intention setting for the course. We will explore each other’s interests.

Week 2: September 19th- Preparation & Safety: Harm Reduction for clients

Week 3: September 26th – The Psychedelic Experience: Dr. Stanislav Grof’s theoretical framework

Week 4: October 3rd– Psychedelic Integration with Clients – Case Reports and Challenges

Week 5: October 17th – Beyond Integration – Exploring what it means to go beyond Integration

*Online Virtual Meetings: September 12, 19, 26, October 3rd, and 17th

Time: 7:00pm – 8:30pm EST

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Fall #2

Course Outline

The curriculum is subject to change depending on group interests.

Week 1: Thursday, November 7th – Introduction Week: Group introductions and intention setting for the course. We will explore each other’s interests.

Week 2: November 14th- Preparation & Safety: Harm Reduction for clients

Week 3: November 21st – The Psychedelic Experience: Dr. Stanislav Grof’s theoretical framework

Week 4: November 28th– Psychedelic Integration with Clients – Case Reports and Challenges

Week 5: December 5th – Beyond Integration – Exploring what it means to go beyond Integration

*Online Virtual Meetings: November 7, 14, 21, 28 and December 5th

Time: 7:00pm – 8:30pm EST

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By taking these classes you will

- Learn to plan for success with psychedelic substances
- Build a toolkit that will allow you to better handle difficult experiences for you and your clients
- Learn integration group best practices
- Gain tools that will allow you to improve safety
- Understand the variety of drugs available and how to make informed decisions about them
- Acquire different approaches to psychedelic use including microdosing, recreational and ceremonial uses
- Explore a framework for understanding and working with psychedelic experiences
- Walk through personal integration experiences

What’s included in the Tool Kit:

- Tips on how to facilitate/start your own support group
- Journaling exercises
- Guided meditation practices
- Breathwork & other somatic techniques
- Kyle and Joe’s personal integration stories
- A Spotify music playlist
- Physical and digital copies of the Navigating Psychedelics Today: Trip Journal and Integration Workbook

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Dates and times:

The class will meet 5 times. Meetings will be held on Thursday nights, from 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm Eastern Time / 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm PST

Fall #1: September 12, 19, 26, October 3rd, and 17th

Fall#2: November 7, 14, 21, 28 and December 5th


 
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Psychedelic guide training at the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness

Whether you’re a doctor or therapist interested in pursuing legally available psychedelic tools to help treat your clients, the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness has you covered.

Developed by co-founders Daniel McQueen (MA, Executive Director & Psychedelic Therapist) and Alison McQueen (MA, LPC, ATR), this educational, psychedelic harm-reduction training program focuses on safe and legal practices, first and foremost. Our experienced facilitators and trained staff will be by your side to support you every step of the way.

Psychedelic Sitters School includes a 5-part webinar instruction before attending so students are ready to participate in a 5-day experiential training retreat. The retreat includes at least one intentional psychedelic experience each day, including Conscious Cannabis Circle, Cannabis Healing Meditations, Community Breathwork, Cannabis-Assisted Breathwork, and participant guided individual sessions. You’ll learn how to make your own psychedelic cannabis blends, setup and safely hold space as a psychedelic sitter.

This training is moving to a retreat format in 2019 so we’ll have a lot of time to add more experiences, including yoga and sound-healing sessions. PSS is a prerequisite to assist at our local community events and a prerequisite for Psychedelic Guide Training.

Maturity, psychological stability, your own ongoing journeywork practice and relevant training are essential in being a competent sitter and guide. The Level 1 training series is designed to provide students with foundational skill sets to increase the depth and meaning of transformational experiences while keeping them as safe as possible. Additional readings and other educational resources will be provided.

Established 2012 in Boulder, Colorado, Medicinal Mindfulness pioneered and became the first Cannabis-Assisted Psychotherapy, Psychedelic Therapy & Conscious Cannabis organization in the United States, and has since then become an established leader in the emerging field of Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy, and safe and legal Psychedelic Experiences.

 
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Psychedelics for Clinicians 101 & 102 – Fall 2019 Montreal

with Ingmar Gorman, Ph.D. and Elizabeth Nielson, Ph.D. | 2 - 3 November, 2019

This 2-day training offered by psychologists Ingmar Gorman and Elizabeth Nielson is designed for clinicians and healthcare providers who want to learn more about current psychedelic research and clinical practice, including how to work with patients who have a history of psychedelic use or who have expressed an interest in using psychedelics. This interactive training includes experiential learning and role-play exercises. It is the first time a program of this kind has been offered in Montreal.

Psychedelics 101

Your patients are curious and so are you: What is all this about psychedelics being used for treatment of addiction and trauma? This session gives an overview of psychedelic drugs, their history, and current research with MDMA and Psilocybin-assisted therapy. This program includes overview of recent and current clinical trials, outcomes, legal status, and what it all means for the future of addiction and trauma treatment.

Learning Objectives:

- State the historical justifications for psychedelic clinical research

- Describe key theoretical approaches to psychedelic-assisted therapy

- Discuss the state of psychedelic clinical research, rescheduling efforts, and how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy works with clients.

- Define and differentiate psychedelic integration psychotherapy from integration in peer and shamanic settings

Psychedelics 102

What are psychedelic harm reduction and integration and how can they occur in a clinical setting? This session focuses on translating research findings into clinical practice including working with patients who are considering using psychedelics, or have used them. This program includes discussion of assessment and integration techniques, resources, and legal and ethical issues.

Learning objectives:

- Identify key “red flags” that indicate someone should seek specialized psychiatric care after a psychedelic experience

- Perform basic/initial assessment of clients who report psychedelic use

- Identify contraindications and discuss high risk cases of individuals who are contemplating psychedelic use

- Define and differentiate the role of the therapist in an individual’s psychotherapeutic process

Fees:

Full program cost: $525

Limited number of early registration tickets available until July 1st for $475.

Limited number of student registration tickets available for $395

$50 USD for APA CE credits

CONTINUING EDUCATION INFORMATION

OPQ credits approval process in underway and will be posted here when confirmed.

CE credits for psychologists are provided by the Spiritual Competency Resource Center (SCRC) which is co-sponsoring this program. The Spiritual Competency Resource Center is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Spiritual Competency Resource Center maintains responsibility for this program and its content. SCRC is approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN Provider CEP16887) for licensed nurses in California. The California Board of Behavioral Sciences accepts CE credits for LCSW, LPCC, LEP, and LMFT license renewal for programs offered by approved sponsors of CE by the American Psychological Association.

For questions about receiving your Certificate of Attendance, contact Woodstock Mindfulness at [email protected]

 
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How about a career in psychedelic-assisted therapy and research?

I'm very interested in a career in psychedelic research/therapy, but since it's still sort of taboo there aren't really any how-to guides on entering the field or getting involved. I'm just an undergrad Psychology major right now, but what would one study in graduate school to be qualified to enter this field? I'm pretty excited about the potential of MDMA assisted therapy and the likes, and it looks like it's definitely going to be a thing in the future. Recently saw that MAPS is currently aiming to train 300 therapists by 2021. Can anyone here offer any insight? Thanks!

-acescracked7 (reddit)

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Such careers fall within the field of clinical psychology or psychiatry. If you wanted to prescribe/administer the drugs yourself, that would require a medical degree (to go the psychiatrist route). A good place to start would be to research some of the labs/programs that are currently doing the research you are interested in. Labs are often looking for recent graduates to fill lab tech/lab manager roles. That type of job would put you in a great position to apply to med school/grad school in clinical psych. It would also give you exposure to that type of research, which is incredibly valuable.

Source: current lab manager, friend works in lab that administers ketamine

-spiderrico25 (reddit)

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Try to get an internship with MAPS. They offer internships every year, and would be a phenomenal resource to you I expect. I'd look into getting a degree in clinical psychology or (even better) getting into medical school and doing your residency in a psychiatry program somewhere that is conducting clinical research on these substances.

There are therapists that treat patients with these substances, but they do it in secret to avoid the legal and professional trouble they'd be in if found out. So that's a potential avenue for you to consider after getting your license to practice. You could train yourself using the books that these underground therapists have written..., or you could try to find one to teach you. Hopefully though, therapy will be approved and you can do this stuff legally by the time you've finished all the grad school you're going to have to do.

-RareMajority (reddit)

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Have you visited the MAPS Student Resources page yet? We have tons of resources available for people in your position!

So You Want to be a Psychedelic Researcher?

Making Your Mark on the Psychedelic Renaissance

How Does One Go About Performing Research with Psychedelics?

-MAPSPsychedelic (reddit)​
 
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The certificate in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies and research

By Lisa Denenmark

Word has definitely gotten around about the Certificate in Psychedelic-assisted Psychotherapies & Research. In the past nine months, there were 150 serious inquiries about the Certificate, most of them from therapists who are not from CIIS.

"They're coming in at three or four a week," says Janis Phelps, Director of the Center for Psychedelic Therapies & Research (the Center), which houses the Certificate program. "And we haven't even started the heavy publicity."

The Certificate was created to serve a growing need for trained licensed therapist guides to facilitate in future FDA-approved psychedelic- and entactogen-assisted psychotherapy research. Research and medical experts have estimated that need at perhaps several hundred therapist guides in the next three to six years. The Certificate, which launches in Spring 2016, comprises 180 hours of comprehensive, in-depth academic training.

Phenomenal timing

The field of research into medical applications of psychedelics, especially for the treatment of end-of-life distress, chronic PTSD, and longstanding substance abuse and addiction, is again heating up. Michael Pollan's widely popular article "The Trip Treatment," in The New Yorker, earlier this year ignited strong interest in the midst of the revival of psychedelic research.

Studies by research scientists are regularly appearing in such prestigious publications as the Journal of Psychopharmacology and Archives of General Psychiatry, and adding new legitimacy to the field. And two summary reports on Phase II psilocybin studies by Johns Hopkins University and New York University due out in Spring 2016 are sure to further spark positive sentiment about the medicines.

With meditation and mindfulness, holism and hospice now in the vernacular and the backlash against recreational psychedelic drug use in the '60s abated, some experts believe that culturally in the United States, the time just might be right to integrate psychedelics further into mainstream medical care. Enter CIIS.

"The return of government-approved scientific research into psilocybin and related compounds has significant potential for myriad scientific and clinical studies, including the important treatment of existential distress at the end of life," says Dr. Anthony Bossis, Co-Principal Investigator of the Cancer and Palliative Care Research, Psilocybin Cancer Project at NYU School of Medicine.

"The reemergence of this field will require serious multidisciplinary academic centers to address the theoretical, research, and clinical domains of this work. CIIS, with its history integrating psychology and spirituality, is uniquely and enormously qualified to meet this historic challenge,"
he says.

In offering the Certificate, the Center joins three of its partner organizations, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Usona Institute, and the Heffter Research Institute (Heffter), in running successful training programs for psychedelic research therapists.

Many researchers at MAPS and Heffter are predicting that Phase III studies of MDMA and psilocybin will begin rolling out in two to four years, particularly for chronic PTSD and advanced cancer anxiety and distress. Phase III trials, which can involve patient groups of up to 3,000, are typically the definitive assessment of a drug's effectiveness. In anticipation of these events, the Center developed the Certificate program.

Luminaries leading the way

CIIS' long tradition of rigorous education in contemplative mysticism, spirituality, psychedelic research, transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, and anthropology makes the University an unparalleled place to train future therapist guides. The Certificate, though it emphasizes the therapeutic medical model of psychedelic research, will address the philosophy and theory from these other intellectual traditions as well.

MAPS and Heffter researchers as lead instructors will teach alongside Bay Area psychedelic luminaries Stan Grof and Ralph Metzner, who are longtime CIIS faculty. Members of the Center's Council of Advisors-many of them psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists from leading universities and research centers-will be teaching in the program.

Among these well-known leaders in the field are Bossis and Jeffrey Guss (NYU School of Medicine), William Richards and Mary Cosimano (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), Charles Grob (UCLA), Robert Jesse (Council on Spiritual Practices), Rick Doblin and Annie and Michael Mithoefer (MAPS), Daniel Muller (University of Wisconsin School of Medicine), and psychiatrist Gabor Maté-many of whom have given lecturers and workshops sponsored by CIIS Public Programs & Performances.

Since March 2015, the Center has been providing diverse public education about psychedelic research from past decades, harm-histories of the research, as well as film screenings and book readings.

Professional development

For licensed master's and doctoral clinicians in CIIS therapy training programs, the Certificate can be viewed as a postgraduate development opportunity.

"Ideally, the skills and knowledge learned in the Certificate program will be finalized in advanced training at a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy research center affiliated with MAPS and/or Heffter," says Phelps. Graduates can apply for internships or scholarships at the medical centers that will provide them with mentoring and advanced training with real volunteers in FDA-approved research studies. Phelps is active in the push to reinstitute research in the Bay Area.

Students applying for the Certificate must be licensed professionals (or those seeking licensure) in mental health and medicine, or senior members of the clergy. Several scholarships are available.

Optimal enrollment is 16 for the first year and 30-plus for the second. "We have aspirations about the second year being a hybrid residential-online program to enable distance learning," says Phelps.

Graduates of the program will have a significant knowledge base in pharmacology, session preparation and later integration, competency skills, and design of research protocols. They can apply to MAPS and Heffter for on-site, advanced training and can then apply to work in actual clinical studies. There will likely be opportunities for therapists to work with psychiatrists prescribing these medicines to people during a period of "expanded access."

Expanded access refers to a process by which people with intractable mental health indications, for which few (if any) other drugs or therapies have worked to alleviate symptoms, can be eligible to be given such medicines under supervision of a physician.

"Accompanying the rebirth of psychedelic research and its many promising clinical, educational, and religious applications, CIIS has stepped forward to design a program that not only offers techniques and information, but also nurtures the psychological and spiritual maturation of future investigators and practitioners," says William Richards, of Johns Hopkins University. "It is an honor to be associated with CIIS and to contribute to the rich unfolding of this educational trajectory."

In collaboration with scientists from Heffter, MAPS, Usona, and the Council for Spiritual Practices, "innovative and inspired ideas have been implemented in the curriculum," says Phelps. "We are fully engaged and enthusiastic in spearheading this cutting-edge Certificate for psychedelic practitioners of the future."

 
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