Exploring critical psychedelic phenomenology: What Frantz Fanon can teach us about psychedelic therapy for racialized and colonized people

Abstract

Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has demonstrated how systemic racism, racialized mental health disparities, and histories of colonial and biomedical violence shape psychedelic experiences, therapeutic outcomes, and processes of integration. Emerging literature has foregrounded concerns including racial underrepresentation in research, the violent legacy of the War on Drugs, systemic racism in psychiatry, and the exploitation of Indigenous psychedelic traditions and healing practices. At the same time, clinicians and researchers have suggested that culturally informed psychedelic-assisted therapies may offer meaningful benefits for racialized individuals, particularly in addressing psychiatric symptoms linked to racial and colonial trauma. This paper contributes to this growing body of scholarship by applying Frantz Fanon’s critical phenomenology, postcolonial theory, and psychiatric critiques to contemporary psychedelic therapy discourse. I show how Fanon’s writings illuminate key tensions in the treatment of racialized peoples with psychedelic therapies. I first trace the history of racial-colonial violence embedded in the development of psychedelic biomedicine. I then apply Fanon’s critique of colonial psychiatry to MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD; arguing that racial-colonial trauma cannot be reduced to an individual psychosomatic disorder detached from colonial structures. Next, I explore the contradiction between the historical weaponization of psychedelics against racialized bodies and the contemporary therapeutic framing of psychedelics. I place this tension, and the resulting skepticism toward psychiatric institutions, in conversation with Fanon’s understanding of collective racial-colonial trauma. Finally, I address issues of positionality and double-consciousness among racialized psychedelic therapists and emphasize the necessity of anti-colonial theory and anti-racist praxis within contemporary psychedelic therapy research and practice.