BACKGROUND: Individuals with advanced cancer often experience high levels of distress for which there are few standardized treatment approaches. Our multidisciplinary team has combined existing evidence-based approaches into Psilocybin-assisted Existential, Attachment, and RelationaL (PEARL) therapy. PEARL therapy combines elements from psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, including preparatory...
Background: There is promising evidence that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy may be a powerful new treatment approach for mortality-related distress. However, less is known about the possible benefits for people experiencing grief. Aim: To explore what is known about using psychedelics to attend to grief following death due to advanced illness. Design: This scoping review followed Arskey and...
Well-trained, competent therapists are crucial for safe and effective psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT). The question whether PAT training programs should require aspiring therapists to undergo their own PAT-commonly referred to as "experiential training"-has received much attention within the field. In this article, we analyze the potential benefits of experiential training in PAT by applying...
DOI: 10.1002/hast.1602 (opens in new tab)Psychedelic therapist trainingExperiential psychedelic trainingTherapist psychedelic experiencePsychedelic-assisted therapy education+18
The nascent for-profit psychedelic industry has begun to engage in corporate practices like funding scientific research and research programs. There is substantial evidence that such practices from other industries like tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and food create conflicts of interest and can negatively influence population health. However, in a context of funding pressures, low publicly...
We agree with Kratina et al. (2023) that the problem of psychological suffering at the end of life deserves attention from a policy standpoint and that psychedelic therapies show promise in this clinical context. However, we argue the following in this rejoinder: (1) disproportionate attention to psychedelics may overstate the current evidence base, potentially diverting resources away from...
Rationale: Microdosing psychedelics – the practice of consuming small, sub-hallucinogenic doses of substances such as LSD or psilocybin – is gaining attention in popular media but remains poorly characterized. Contemporary studies of psychedelic microdosing have yet to report the basic psychiatric descriptors of psychedelic microdosers. Objectives: To examine the practices and demographics of a...
These mixed-methods results help summarize and frame the experiences reported by an active microdosing community as high-potential avenues for future scientific research. The MDBC taxonomy reported here informs future research, leveraging participant reports to distil the highest-potential intervention targets so research funding can be efficiently allocated. Microdosing research complements...
RationaleMicrodosing psychedelics-the regular consumption of small amounts of psychedelic substances such as LSD or psilocybin-is a growing trend in popular culture. Recent studies on full-dose psychedelic psychotherapy reveal promising benefits for mental well-being, especially for depression and end-of-life anxiety. While full-dose therapies include perception-distorting properties,...
Mohamad Hemadi, Mathew Mercuri, Jean-François Thibodeau et al.
preprint
Abstract Despite growing interest in integrating “psychedelic knowledge” into medical and health professions training, the term remains inconsistently conceptualised and operationalised across the literature. This scoping review investigates how psychedelic knowledge is represented, justified and translated within medical education scholarship. Using the Mak and Thomas (2022) methodological...