Abstract: Field observations of underground, illicit, and private ceremonial substance use has been central to ongoing research in psychedelics-assisted therapy. This paper explores a novel use of MDA in a ceremonial virtual environment. Participant interviews and field notes are used to explore the reported therapeutic effects of this understudied entactogen. Users report therapeutic effects...
Research, Society and DevelopmentAugust 22, 2021Myla Christie Araújo Custódio Bonifácio, Pietra Bruna Batrbosa Bento, Kaynara Trevisan et al.1 citation
Este trabalho discute acerca da ação da psilocibina no organismo humano e seu potencial terapêutico enquanto tratamento principal ou adjuvante para certos distúrbios psiquiátricos, mais especificamente a depressão e a ansiedade, como aquelas encontradas em pacientes que estão em cuidados paliativos e enfrentando o processo de fim de vida, mas também em pacientes nos quais o tratamento...
Despite resurgent interest in psychedelic-assisted therapy, our insights into psychiatrists' knowledge and opinions about medicinal psychedelic applications are surprisingly narrow. Therefore, we anonymously surveyed psychiatrists attending psychedelic didactic presentations at two national meetings about these issues using a 26-item questionnaire. Response rate was 40.20% (106/264)....
Two recent surveys of people who took psychedelic drugs and reported “God experience encounters”, along with successful clinical trials using psychedelic therapy for depression, have given rise to public misconceptions about psychedelics and atheism. Specifically, three inferences have been drawn: (1) that the psychedelic experience tends to dissolve atheist convictions; (2) that atheist...
The revival of psychedelic research coincided and more recently conjoined with psychopharmacological research on how drugs affect moral judgments and behaviors. This article makes the case for a moral psychopharmacology of psychedelics that examines whether psychedelics serve as non-specific amplifiers that enable subjects to (re-)connect with their values, or whether they promote specific...
This Introduction outlines the central focus of Philosophy of Psychedelics: the therapeutic use of psychedelics in psychiatry and its apparent conflict with philosophical naturalism. The chapter briefly describes recent findings that controlled psychedelic administration can have lasting psychological benefits for healthy subjects and for psychiatric patients. It then cites evidence that these...
‘The role of self-representation’ presents three lines of evidence in support of a simple hypothesis: the central mechanism of psychedelic therapy is the disruption and revision of mental representations of the self. One line of evidence connects experiences of ‘psychological insight’ to positive clinical outcomes, and the insights in question are often autobiographical in character. A second...
‘Unbinding the self’ outlines the predictive self-binding account of psychedelic therapy introduced by Letheby and Gerrans (2017). On this account, the networks targeted by psychedelics integrate or ‘bind’ information from multiple sources into a hierarchical predictive model of the self. In pathological conditions, detrimental forms of self-modelling can become rigidly entrenched. By...
‘Resetting the brain’ examines the hypothesis that (i) large-scale neural networks become stuck in dysfunctional configurations in pathology, and (ii) psychedelics cause therapeutic benefits by disrupting these configurations, providing an opportunity to ‘reset’ the relevant networks into a healthier state. This chapter argues that this view is correct but limited; per Chapter 5, it needs to be...
The ‘Conclusion’ summarises the main ideas of Philosophy of Psychedelics and makes some suggestions for future research. The first part of the chapter provides a chapter-by-chapter summary of the arguments of the book, and lists the various testable predictions that follow from these arguments. The second part suggests some other directions for future research, pointing to outstanding questions...