THE HYPE OF PSYCHEDELICS

"I am using you! I am using your human embedded escapist drives, to sell you the idea that there might be a quick fix to all your suffering! YES, a fictitious way out of this shithole is what I am trying to sell you my friend! And I am not the only one!"

Psychedelic research and videos about psychedelics are inflating at rapid speed due to the billions of dollars that could be made from this new trend in the drug industry. This means many people will be captured by this new trend for the worst reasons possible, and in the worst conditions possible too. I wish that message above came through all the propaganda as clearly as it is written there, but it doesn't, and so in this article I am going to make it clear to you why the topic of psychedelics is full of hype, and what you should guard yourself against.

As Dr. Geerhud says, I put it forward to you that "In my view there is a lot of euphoria currently in the field. Some people think that psychedelics are good for everything, they will solve not only mental health problems, but save us from the problems of the world at large”. One line of reasoning in these claims is that individual betterment will lead to societal betterment, and since these drugs are believed to foster kindness, creativity, empathy, and connection, the logical conclusion is that the more people consume these drugs the more kindness will spread throughout the social system. 

There is, however, absolutely zero research to support this level of argumentation, because even though there is some research done on the broader public health level, these efforts focus mostly on reduction of harm, such as people being better able to deal with this or that other addiction, or increase of harm, such as people being more prone to risky behaviours. 

Generally speaking, also, there is a claim that psychedelics are relatively safe, and that the level of harm done by psychedelics is lower than many other controlled substances. Yet, behind all these claims is the fact that we are talking about controlled experiments in the classic sense, meaning, controlled doses to the milligram, controlled environments, controlled sets of actions prior to ingestion and after, and follow up interviews by researchers, increasing the chances of a placebo effect due to the simple increase in attention brought upon the participants. 

Public health claims, moreover, mostly rely on survey data, or demographics and crime statistics, and it is unlikely that the self-reported consumption of psychedelics can be isolated from the very influential aspects of childhood adverse experiences, regular or exceptional social interactions, family circusmtances, economic mobility, employment status, broader national agendas in the vests of political reforms or legislations, and private sector interests etc. etc. In other words, self-administered survey data often fail to tell us how the responses were skewed by a multitude of uncontrollable variables.

Yet despite the controversial efficacy of public health surveys, psychedelics are still being branded as champions of higher states of consciousness, and by extrapolation, the key to an enlightened society. 

To substantiate these claims, websites and pioneers often falsely claim that psychedelics have been consumed throughout history.  However, Dr. Singh, who specialises on historical usage of psychedelics around the world, says that this is a common false assumption among scientists and popularizers, and calls it "the ancient worldwide shamanic hypothesis”. Examples of this claims abound, such as "Cultures around the world...have been taking psychedelics for thousands of years, and each one developed rituals for them, led by experienced guides" (Vox), or "Psychedelics have been used for millennia by Indigenous people around the world, from the Amazon basi to Gabon to the American Great Plains (Neolife 2020), or "elements in shamanism might have a role to play in psychedelic therapy - as indeed it has probably done for several thousand years before there was such a thing as science (Pollan, 2019). 

And Dr. Singh is not alone in demystifying historical consumption of psychedelics. Another very ambitious project trying to rectify this lack of recorded data comes from Martin Fortier, a cognitive scientist and anthropologist who studies the use of Ayahuasca in the Shapebo people in Peru, but who also searched extensively for data in the Hallucinogenic Use Throughout Time and Space database. Dr. Fortier aimed to include in this way more than a 1000 cultures, as well as academic books, historical chronicles, and diaries of explorers, and for each mentioning he would answer these questions: Who used them? 2 was this used in hallucinogenic doses? 3 How were they used? 4 How reliable is evidence?

So what were his findings? 

1 Reliable evidence was limited to the area of the Rio Grande and South of it, which means Mesoamerica and South America. And his conclusions are that some usage clearly goes back millennia, yet even in these samples less than 5%, on a liberal estimation, consumed psychedelics. To think that what Indigenous people do today they have been doing for thousands of years, it’s simply yet again a romanticisation of reality.

Now many people use myths and art as evidence for the millenary consumption but we should probably agree that these kinds of evidence, in the absence of other data and a systematic analysis, is very open to interpretations and personally motivated biases. To get a feeling for this line of claims Dr. Singh conducted another preliminary analysis of 50.000 paragraphs on mythology from 321 cultures by searching for the word mushroom, and he found 10 paragraphs that included the word mushroom in 10 different cultures. "There you go, I told you ya!" you may say. "Wait a second!" here is the interesting twist

When he compared mentionings of other psychoactive compounds, such as wine, beer, kava, and tobacco in the same database, he found that 92 of these paragraphs, as opposed to 10, contained "wine" (35 cultures), 150 of these contained "Kava" (9 cultures), 162 beer (42), 305 peyote (10 cultures), and 463 tobacco (85 cultures). 

All of this means that if the law of millenary endurance  were a true standard of wisdom, then smokers today would figure among the most prominent wise people on earth!

Dr. Singh addresses this data as preliminary and not conclusive, but thinks this is sufficient to raise our cautiousness in addressing this topic in the deep, ancient, wise and universal terms we often engage with  in popular parlance. More clearly, all of these assumptions support a line of approach towards psychedelics that says that by consuming them we are recapitulating deep, ancient, wise universal practices. 

And you can see how this line of argumentation is not unlike the idea of a big hearted, if not sometimes perverse, great father overseeing our actions from an eternal landscape high above us, cocooning us in something eternally known and good. The main danger in being excited about psychedelic experiences within a therapeutic discourse is in my view the frequent loss of awareness of what healing actually is as a concrete lived experience in the real world, not in your dreams, not in your wishes, not in someone’s heavenly vision of the future, but in this finite environment where it takes me 5 hours to write a short article!

Humans have a tendency to think in linear terms, in the simplisitc forms of one cause, one effect, one symptom, and therefore one cure. From there, the leap from thinking that a pill could solve it all is not great. But the truth is that there is no ultimate healing point, no ultimate exit from this shit-hole my friend (to put it politely!). This is why Dr. Paul Liknaitzky of Monash University warns that being a psychiatrist or being qualified to administer psychedelics does not equate to being able to heal people. Psychedelics are useful tools, they are useful in the sense that they can provide an important source of novelty, a window into studying the brain and by extension what therapy is, but not a magic bullet, a view shared by many researchers.

And here is my point. The only healing I know, and the one I practice with those I am a partner in conversation with, is the healing that comes from understanding the true systemic nature of our suffering. When you can come to see me to talk about what you are going through, you will slowly see that that something is not happening TO you, but THROUGH you, via a greater whole that has suffering embedded in its fabric. You are not at fault for the pain you carry, anymore than the human species is at fault for suffering the Earthly condition. Suffering and healing are part and parcel of the fabric of life. There is no escape from either.

In this sense, my interest is in understanding to what degree you accept there is no way out of this shithole? And then see how strong is your  commitment to make do with it? This seems to me one of the strongest predictors of betterment, because only then can you first recognise the huge short-term interests that play in and out of hypes in any sector, including psychotherapy, and also only then can you really find the compassion needed for real healing.

As psychedelics prove effective in treating disorders like addiction and anxiety, scientists and enthusiasts push for their broader societal acceptance. Connecting psychedelics—and particularly, psychedelic therapy, to ancient, worldwide traditions makes them, in historian’s Erika Dyck’s words, “more natural, more wholesome, perhaps more spiritual.”  These stories provide a social psycho-narrative framework within which the desiring consumer can feel more relaxed about his or her intentions to enter his or her deeper sensibilities, reaching down into the wells of his or her ancient wisdom. Whether this is ultimately really useful or not, is still an open question.

I have tried psychedelics almost ten times. Six of these times I did mushrooms, and while I praise and pride myself in taking courage in these explorations, if someone were to ask me if it flipped my life around, I’d answer a resounding no, even when the visions were grand, surprising, fascinating, deep, curious, impressive, and insightful. None of this ever flipped my life!

So more than warning you that there is incredible hype building around the topic of psychedelics at present, and that you should be careful who you engage with, I think my call here as a psychologist interested in your holistic well being, is that you learn to recognise hype in whatever subject matter. 

Check out for example this video by theoretical physicist and science communicator Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder on Quantum technology (Don’t fall for Quantum Hype). Or the hype surrounding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, certainly an effective approach to talk therapy, but not as effective as the hype and private industry interests wants it to have it (Dr. Don Meichenbaum on CBT and Hype). 

In absolutely everything man made there are those that are in it for a quick buck, and those that are in it for the genuine exploration that this or that other subject can present us with. The first type will make a grand fuss about it and try to convince you that there has never been a better time for you to pay attention to this or that, and that the quicker you buy into it, the quicker you will get out of life as is. The second type will go quietly about his interest, driven by the true muse that exists in all of us to explore curiously and skeptically, with sense and empathy, the world at large. 

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko