From Climate Distress to Psychedelic Insight: Exploring the Lived Experience of Eco-anxiety and Psychedelics
Luisa Čapková, Ginie Servant Miklos
Eco-anxiety involves grief, anger, worry, uncertainty, and hopelessness stemming from perceived lack of control over ecological destruction, and it also affects behavior and engagement with environmental issues. Existing interventions like Acceptance Commitment Therapy have shown mixed results. Using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, in-depth interviews revealed that psychedelic experiences can serve as transformative catalysts for eco-anxiety, triggering worldview shifts and a sense of interconnectedness of self, nature, and the universe. Such experiences enabled emotional release and reconfiguration, alleviating distress and offering new ways to respond to eco-anxiety by mitigating hopelessness and anger through adaptive environmental action.