Psychedelic Integration and Subjectivity: A Critical Scoping Review Protocol of Governance and Meaning Making Across Diverse Institutional and Cultural Logics

Abstract

This scoping review investigates the conceptual production and governance of psychedelic integration across a broad spectrum of institutional and cultural logics. While the term is increasingly central to psychedelic practice, it remains conceptually ambiguous, with definitions and practices varying significantly across clinical trials, therapeutic frameworks, and naturalistic settings. The primary aim of this research is to systematically map how integration is produced, stabilised, and positioned within diverse knowledge systems, including clinical protocols, community-based resources, and digital platforms, to better understand how these constructs influence the conditions through which post-experience meaning-making occurs. Utilising a critical, discursively informed orientation, the project will analyse how different conceptualisations of integration function as sites of governance. It will explore how these understandings allocate responsibility for care and risk, legitimise specific forms of expertise, and determine which vulnerabilities are recognised or ignored across diverse settings, including those involving Indigenous, peer-based, and marginalised communities. The expected outcome is a comprehensive mapping of the integration landscape which will inform the future development of a conceptual Ethics of Integration (EoI) framework. This framework will address the experiential, relational, structural, and governance conditions through which psychedelic integration is understood and enacted.