medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences
July 14, 2026
Ali J Zarrabi, Tanja Mletzko, George H. Grant et al.
Demoralization, a syndrome of helplessness, hopelessness, and loss of meaning and chronic pain are common sources of distress in early palliative care. Psilocybin-assisted therapy (PAT) is an emerging intervention with preliminary data suggesting improvements in pain and demoralization. To date, PAT has not been studied among people living with both demoralization and chronic pain nor has it...
Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.)
June 1, 2026
Roman Palitsky, Laura E Captari, Jessica L Maples-Keller et al.
3 citations
Psychedelic-assisted therapies (PAT) can provoke personally meaningful spiritual or existential experiences in patients; these experiences have been associated with improved outcomes across several treatment targets and populations. The need for spiritual and religious competence, though present across the spectrum of psychotherapeutic practice, is especially strong in psychedelic-assisted...
PLoS One
May 29, 2026
Roman Palitsky, Caroline Peacock, Jeffrey A. Breau et al.
Skilled interpersonal support and safety monitoring can enhance the therapeutic potential of psychedelic compounds and reduce the potential for harm. In the anticipation of legalized psychedelic care, and the recognition of ongoing psychedelic use across a variety of contexts, numerous training programs have been established to educate psychedelic facilitators in supporting individuals who take...
Psychedelic medicine (New Rochelle, N.Y.)
March 1, 2026
Syed F. Rab, Salman S Ahmad, Roman Palitsky et al.
1 citation
Muslims living in the United States (MLUS) are underrepresented in psychedelics research. Despite growing research on psychedelic-assisted mental health care, little is known about its acceptance among MLUS, a population with some history of rejecting mental health services. This study examined whether MLUS' rejection attitudes toward mental health services were related to lower acceptance of...
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Roman Palitsky, David J. Cooper, Jared R. Lindahl et al.
10 citations
Contemporary Buddhist meditators in the West are likely to find themselves engaged in practices with rich associations with both religious and scientific worldviews. Meditation-related challenges can provoke existential concerns that make unexplored relationships between religious and scientific worldviews more important and explicit for Western Buddhist meditators, who may turn to both...
PsyArXiv
July 10, 2025
Roman Palitsky, Caroline Peacock, Jeffrey A. Breau et al.
preprint
Skilled interpersonal support and safety monitoring can enhance the therapeutic potential of psychedelic compounds and reduce the potential for harm. In the anticipation of legalized psychedelic care, and the recognition of ongoing psychedelic use across a variety of contexts, numerous training programs have been established to educate psychedelic facilitators in supporting individuals who take...
Psychedelics
April 29, 2025
Ishan Pasricha, Caroline Peacock, Roman Palitsky et al.
3 citations
Spiritual health practitioners (SHPs), also known as healthcare chaplains, are increasingly involved in facilitating psychedelic-assisted therapies in clinical trials and community settings. Although the motivations of therapeutic practitioners are known to impact clinical decision-making and treatment outcomes, little research has investigated what drives SHPs to pursue this work. This...
Contemporary Buddhism
April 22, 2025
Nicholas K. Canby, Jared R. Lindahl, David J. Cooper et al.
1 citation
Although meditation is often treated as an individual practice, meditation teachers can play an important role. Drawing on the mixed-methods dataset of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project, this paper examines the role of meditation teachers and their impacts on Western practitioners who are navigating meditation-related challenges. Quantitative and qualitative results from 68...
The American journal of orthopsychiatry
March 24, 2025
Matthew J Lyons, Deanna M Kaplan, Sarah H Cross et al.
1 citation
Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are increasingly used in clinical and community settings and show significant potential to address a broad range of physical and mental health outcomes. This potential has led to calls for ever greater implementation of MBIs internationally, particularly with vulnerable populations and in low-resource settings. However, the effectiveness of MBIs has not...
J Psychiatr Res
March 17, 2025
Otto Simonsson, Sankalp Chaturvedi, Peter S. Hendricks et al.
2 citations
Previous research has investigated associations between psychedelic experiences and meditation practice, but knowledge gaps remain. Using a longitudinal research design with a sample of US residents between 18 and 50 years old (N = 13,012), we investigated associations between psychedelic-related and meditation-related variables. The follow-up survey was completed by 7484 respondents, of whom...
BMC Psychiatry
February 28, 2025
John Perna, Justin Trop, Roman Palitsky et al.
15 citations
This case highlights the tensions between legal and underground psychedelic use within psychedelic therapy training programs, psychiatry and neo-shamanism, and the use of psychiatric interventions (i.e., ECT) and energy medicine to address prolonged adverse effects from psychedelics. Clinicians should be aware of these potential conflicts between psychiatric conceptualizations of PAEs and...
Psychiatr Res Clin Pract
February 11, 2025
Jules Evans, Marc Aixalà, Brian T Anderson et al.
18 citations
Objective: This article outlines recommendations from 30 psychedelic researchers on how to create a better psychedelic safety net. Methods: A survey of 30 psychedelic researchers asked them to identify key critical research gaps around psychedelic harm and safety. Results: The critical research gaps identified by the authors included defining the main types of psychedelic harm, the predictors...
Psychotherapy
January 13, 2025
Roman Palitsky, Jessica L Maples-Keller, Caroline Peacock et al.
13 citations
Psilocybin-assisted therapy (PAT) is an experimental treatment with transformative promise. Developing standards for PAT psychotherapy protocols is a priority, but psychotherapeutic protocol components of PAT have been subjected to little rigorous research. This study was designed to assess protocol components in a trial of PAT. The Enhanced Critical Incident Technique (E-CIT) was used to...
Am J Bioeth
January 13, 2025
Keenan Davis, Roman Palitsky, Boadie W Dunlop et al.
3 citations
In their article “Psychedelic Medicine Exceptionalism,” Cohen and Marks (2025) aim to chart a middle course between two extreme positions—the Scylla and Charybdis of psychedelic “exceptionalism” an...
PLoS One
2025
Nicholas K. Canby, Elizabeth A Cosby, Roman Palitsky et al.
10 citations
Within mindfulness-based programs (MBPs), mixed results have been found for the role of childhood trauma as a moderator of depression outcomes. Furthermore, childhood trauma and PTSD symptoms have been identified as possible risk factors for the occurrence of meditation-related adverse effects (MRAE). The present research examined multiple forms of childhood trauma and PTSD symptoms as...
Psychedelics.
December 17, 2024
Zachary Bosshardt, Jessica L Maples-Keller, Deanna M Kaplan et al.
Social attitudes, policy, and perceptions of psychedelics are currently undergoing considerable change. Growing public salience of psychedelics has been accompanied by the emergence of conferences focused on psychedelic education and dialogue. Attendees at such events compose an important group of stakeholders in psychedelic science and practice; their views of psychedelics can be valuable for...
International review of psychiatry (Abingdon, England)
December 1, 2024
Roman Palitsky, Nicholas K. Canby, Nicholas T. van Dam et al.
6 citations
Psychedelics have shown early evidence for a range of benefits and low harm profiles in extant research. However, adverse effects (AEs) research in psychedelics has been limited, leading to underspecified AE profiles, inconsistent measurement, and potential undercounting of AEs. The development of safe, effective psychedelic therapies and treatments for AEs when they occur requires a thorough...
Journal of Psychopharmacology
July 31, 2024
Roman Palitsky, Deanna M Kaplan, John Perna et al.
32 citations
Objective: Despite considerable research examining the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapies (PATs) for treating psychiatric disorders, assessment of adverse events (AEs) in PAT research has lagged. Current AE reporting standards in PAT trials are poorly calibrated to features of PAT that distinguish it from other treatments, leaving many potential AEs unassessed. Methods: A...
PLoS One
January 2, 2024
Caroline Peacock, Erin Brauer, Ali John Zarrabi et al.
27 citations
Background Psychedelic-assisted therapies hold early promise for treating multiple psychiatric conditions. However, absent standards for the care, teams providing psychedelic-assisted therapy pose a major roadblock to safe administration. Psychedelics often produce spiritually and existentially meaningful experiences, and spiritual health practitioners have been involved in administering...
Transcultural Psychiatry
August 1, 2023
Jared R. Lindahl, Roman Palitsky, David J Cooper et al.
Previous research has shown that worldviews can serve as a coping response to periods of difficulty or struggle, and worldviews can also change on account of difficulty. This paper investigates the impacts worldviews have on the nature and trajectory of meditation-related challenges, as well as how worldviews change or are impacted by such challenges. The context of meditation-related...
JAMA Psychiatry
July 1, 2023
Roman Palitsky, Deanna M Kaplan, Caroline Peacock et al.
86 citations
Mounting evidence supports the role of spiritual, existential, religious, and theological components in mediating psychedelic-assisted therapy, yet integration of these elements into the clinical setting is lagging. Although psychedelic-assisted therapy commonly produces spiritually, existentially, religiously, or theologically relevant experiences for patients, these have not been...
Frontiers in Psychology
2022
Jennifer S Mascaro, Marianne P Florian, Marcia J Ash et al.
Over the last decade, numerous interventions and techniques that aim to engender, strengthen, and expand compassion have been created, proliferating an evidence base for the benefits of compassion meditation training. However, to date, little research has been conducted to examine individual variation in the learning, beliefs, practices, and subjective experiences of compassion meditation. This...
Religions
November 24, 2021
David J. Cooper, Jared R. Lindahl, Roman Palitsky et al.
20 citations
There are numerous historical and textual references to energy-like somatic experiences (ELSEs) from religious traditions, and even a few psychological studies that have documented related phenomena. However, ELSEs remain an understudied effect of meditation in contemporary research. Based upon narratives from a large qualitative sample of Buddhist meditators in the West reporting...
Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
May 18, 2021
Willoughby B. Britton, Jared R. Lindahl, David J. C. Cooper et al.
Research on the adverse effects of mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) has been sparse and hindered by methodological imprecision. The 44-item Meditation Experiences Interview (MedEx-I) was used by an independent assessor to measure meditation-related side effects (MRSEs) following three variants of an 8-week program of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (n = 96). Each item was queried for...