Background: Burnout, stress and anxiety have been identified as areas of concern for informal caregivers and health professionals, particularly in the palliative setting. Meditative interventions are gaining acceptance as tools to improve well-being in a variety of clinical contexts, however, their effectiveness as an intervention for caregivers remains unknown. Aim: To explore the effect of...
Spirituality encompasses a wide range of meanings between holistic wellbeing and mysticism. We explored advanced cancer patients' spiritual experiences of transcendence. A total of 251 patients with advanced cancer were included and observed (participant observation) over 12 months by a psycho-oncologist/music-therapist. She recorded and documented patients' spontaneously expressed spiritual...
Interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances has recently resumed. During an early phase of human psychedelic research, their therapeutic application in different pathologies had been suggested, and the first evidence for efficacy was provided. The range of recent clinical applications of psychedelics spans from cluster headaches and obsessive-compulsive disorder to addiction...
Two studies informed by the terror management health model were conducted to examine the question of how death cognition affects cannabis craving and whether actual cannabis smoking alleviates death cognitions. The first study examined whether priming thoughts of death are associated with subjective cannabis craving among 42 frequent cannabis users randomly assigned to either a mortality...
In a big yawn of death life is extinguished, ennui of existence comes to an end. The implacable pain evokes a cascade of emotions so does the idea of death and dying. Pain is not always somatic, but would also signify loss of dignity, incontinence, disfigurement, cognitive impairment, nutritional deprivation and immobility. Palliative care is a neglected aspect of cancer care. There are just a...
The aim was to explore how mindfulness group therapy for somatoform disorders influenced the patients' stress experiences, coping strategies and contextual psychosocial processes. A longitudinal pre- and post-treatment design, using 22 semi-structured individual pre- and post-treatment interviews. Data-analysis was based on a thematic methodology. Pre-treatment patients were struggling in an...
Little is known about the psychological phenomenology of death. Reported across known history and in all cultures by those who have died or been close to death, NDEs challenge objective-mechanistic models by suggesting the phenomenology of death may involve a variety of complex psychological processes. This article discusses three notable characteristics of the NDE—loss of the fear of death,...
The term "synthetic cathinones" is fairly new, but, although the abuse of synthetic cathinones is a recent problem, research on cathinone analogs dates back >100 years. One structural element cathinone analogs have in common is an α-aminophenone moiety. Introduction of amine and/or aryl substituents affords a large number of agents. Today, >40 synthetic cathinones have been identified on the...
This essay describes the founding of the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 and its development up to the present. The Institute is the only scientific research organization dedicated to scientific research into the medical value of psychedelics, and it has particularly focused on the use of psilocybin. The first clinical treatment study was of the value of psilocybin in obsessive-compulsive...
Psychedelic drugs are still tarred with their 1960s-era image of “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” but serious investigators had been studying these compounds at least since the 1940s to manage conditions such as alcoholism, chronic pain, and terminal illness. By the mid-1970s, most of that research had been shut down. But interest in the therapeutic properties of psychedelic agents never...