Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Practices and Human Caring Science: Toward a Care-Informed Model of Treatment

Psychedelic therapies combine a healing environment, psychotherapy, and psychedelic medicine to treat depression and PTSD. This article uses Jean Watson's nursing theory of human caring science to describe essential caring qualities in psychedelic therapy. It maps these qualities onto traits of a psychedelic therapist articulated by Janis Phelps, illustrating them with qualitative data from a psilocybin-assisted therapy study. The resulting nursing-informed philosophical framework helps examine trust between patient and therapist, therapeutic openness, mutual learning, the influence of therapists' spiritual practices, optimizing healing environments, and physical care during sessions. The article aims to identify themes and generate hypotheses for future nursing-informed psychedelic psychotherapy research.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Psychedelic therapies intentionally combine a caring/healing environment, psychotherapy, and psychedelic medicine as a powerful means of treating intractable conditions of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. This article utilizes the nursing theory of human caring science, as articulated by Jean Watson, to describe the essential and fundamental human caring qualities in psychedelic therapy. By mapping these qualities onto the traits of a psychedelic therapist, articulated by Janis Phelps and illustrating them with qualitative, exemplar data from a psilocybin assisted therapy study, we have created a nursing-informed philosophical theoretical framework with which to begin to examine questions related to trust enhancement between patient and therapist, therapeutic communication of openness to patient experiences, mutual learning between therapist and patient, the influence spiritual or psychedelic practices of the therapist on outcomes, optimizing therapeutic healing environments, and care of the physical body during psychedelic therapy sessions. This article is intended to identify themes and generate hypotheses for future nursing-informed psychedelic psychotherapy research.