The Psychedelic Information Swirl

I get why people have fears around alternative treatments. But also.

In August of 2024, the FDA denied approval to MDMA as a treatment for PTSD. Many pages have been written about the decision, as well as it's causes and ramifications. The treatment had been covered off and on in mainstream news over the last decade. The FDA declared it a breakthrough treatment in 2017, so perhaps much more than a decade. I simply remember seeing the clip in John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight where a veteran described in an Economist interview from 2018 that, “It’s like doing therapy while being hugged by everyone who loves you in a bathtub of puppies licking your face.” Again, I believe that might be some people’s idea of a nightmare, but it was still communicative of the personalized reassurance and security the treatment can give people internally.

I will not be able to say anything more than has already been said about the treatment, the culture, and the controversies, but I can speak to my own navigation of the swirl. There really is an extraordinary and apt swirl of information surrounding psychedelic assisted therapy. Hope and fear, trust and suspicion, romanticism and realism, spirituality and science. Not exactly medicine, not exactly therapy, not exactly a treatment that can be ruled by the system of checks and balances that still allowed prescription opioids to lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

When my own study was put on pause, I gathered from my researchers’ communication to me that they needed to make absolutely certain they were meeting another higher level of scrutiny which it seemed to me they might already be meeting anyway. I need to qualify that they were focused on my experience, and this was just an impression I had. To me the checks and balances that I was already experiencing seemed as thorough as they could get. They carefully asked about and recorded everything I could possibly be experiencing, thinking and feeling while caveating themselves continuously.

Because I was waiting anyway, I decided to delve into all the information I could about the history of psychedelics with respect to research into assisted therapy. While my physical health struggled in the beginning of 2024, my mental health was on a distinctly upward trajectory. I was able to read as freely and prolifically as I had in my childhood. During a homeschool survivors event I attended in the spring of that year, a number of formerly homeschooled adults talked about how they much struggle to read in their adult lives because reading for survival became so associated with their trauma. It was a sentiment I certainly resonated with until the MDMA protocol. Healing can have unexpected benefits.

Photo by Anastasiia Chepinska on Unsplash

I started out with Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” and The Great Courses Audible offering called “The History of Psychedelics.” I read “Trippy” by Ernesto Londono about a journalist’s experiences with ayahuasca. Books like “Strange Rites” by Tara Isabella Burton and “Spare” by Prince Harry also mentioned different kinds of engagement with mind altering drugs. I then went back to the era of psychedelics proper and read “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolfe and Timothy Leary’s “The Psychedelic Experience.” I also read articles and papers that I have since lost track of because it truly is a swirl.

I got why this potential path freaks people out. There is something especially unnerving about really engaging with the black box of the human brain. I don’t want to minimize the ways that lives went horrifically awry as a result of psychedelic culture. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” which I do not recommend by the way, was especially good at portraying how unmoored both people and their respective sanities got from reality. Some of the stories made me ill. Though probably not the ones you would think. I have worked so hard for my presence and my sanity. I did not enjoy portrayals that involved giving up presence to the point where people authentically lost their sanity. And not in the temporary universe expanding way people believe to be a benefit of psychedelics.

A lot of the books made distinctions between psychedelics properly and consciousness expanding drugs like MDMA. The latter is not thought to cause the same level of egoless experience advertised as a benefit of psychedelics. At least not as I understand it. Go on a trip, let go of the ego and feel connected to a larger reality. I did feel like I went on a trip when I took my first dose. I did feel connected to the universe outside of myself to a greater extent, but I have not experienced LSD so I cannot make comparisons. A number of authors and researchers commented that the kind of ego death that people seek in psychedelics can also be achieved through practices like meditation and prayer of which I do have a lot of experience so it is possible I brought something to my treatment that can’t be assumed.

If I was going to recommend any one of those books as a must read, it would be “How to Change Your Mind.” I have always liked Michael Pollan and I thought it was the best broad overview of both the history and the current state of the research. I learned a lot about the ways psychedelics impact everything from out technology to our entertainment that I had no idea of before, and I gained a better understanding of why the medical research is where it is today.

It’s so strange when there’s a battle royale that ends up in an FDA hearing over things like spirituality and scientific rigor. Opponents of MDMA to treat PTSD and other psychedelic assisted therapies have concerns ranging from the fact that some of these treatments are rooted in indigenous spiritual practices that they believe shouldn’t be exploited and monetized to the difficulty of exactly quantifying the impacts of set and setting to the standards of double blind scientific testing. There are also concerns that the scientists and backers of the treatment are possessed by their own spiritual bias which is covered in a number of different ways including in Michael Pollan’s book. All of these concerns seem really manageable with appropriate care and intentionality. I don’t believe there will be perfect agreement about where this treatment falls with respect to spirituality and science. There should be checks, there should be rigor, but also there should still be choices when backed by enough data.

I care about all of this because I care about everything. But also. People need help. People need options. And people need care. We have a lot of damage in our society, and veterans especially are faced with lifelong consequences for their service. Ultimately, as a person who has had a healing experienced, I know I am biased and I am going to remain biased. We need to do better, and this is one path towards better. There are not a lot of other alternatives. I believe in the possibilities, and I am going to keep trying to speak towards that.