View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Psychedelics have brought mysticism into modern medicine. Researchers are listening. What happens when transcendent experiences collide with a culture that lacks language for understanding them?
A collection of essays and videos on life’s biggest questions. Millions of Americans now use psychedelics, as mounting evidence suggests that substances like psilocybin, ketamine and ayahuasca may help alleviate depression and other mental health conditions. But when you speak to someone who took psychedelics with therapeutic intentions, they don’t just say they feel better.
They talk about transcendence: strange visions, encounters with ancestors, perhaps even meeting God. This is new territory for mainstream Western psychiatry and culture. A psychedelic isn’t just medicine, yet taking one isn’t just “tripping.” So what is it?
Notre Dame medical anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman studies such questions. She’s spent the past couple years interviewing people who took psychedelics for improved mental health in settings ranging from underground churches to clinical trials, and, in many cases, emerged with a reshaped worldview. _The Well_ spoke with Seale-Feldman about the possibilities and risks of psychedelic medicine, the rise of what she calls “secular mysticism,” and what these experiences reveal about the search for meaning today. **The Well: How did you become interested in medical anthropology?** **Seale-Feldman:** I’m from a family of psychoanalysts and I was always interested in psychology, but when I took a college course in medical anthropology, I felt it offered a more truthful way of exploring the psyche and mental health. How is our way of understanding, say, depression, actually a product of historical and cultural context?
After studying the expansion of psychiatry in Nepal — a place with a rich tradition of shamanic healing — I got interested in psychedelic medicine. In the U.S., the growing critique of conventional psychiatry and the introduction of this new way of thinking is fascinating. **In clinical research, patients often describe psychedelic experiences as deeply meaningful. What’s the difference between a hallucination and a revelation?** Many of the people I work with would strongly disagree with the use of the word “hallucination.” For example, I interviewed someone who participated in a psilocybin clinical trial and experienced being inside the body of her young child who struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.
She felt her child’s big emotions in a way she’d never had access to. Clinical facilitators are trained to ask the patient to define what the experience might mean in their lives. The participant I just mentioned said it helped her have profound empathy for her child and be a better parent. **What kinds of experiences and insights did participants describe in your interviews?** One man I met had stage IV cancer; he was working through his fear of death.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
