Book Review - October 2022 - The Psychology of Psychedelics - Review written by Barry Goddard
PSYCHEDELIC RESEARCH
Here is a great interview about current psychedelic research, using psilocybin, at John Hopkins University in the US. It is remarkable that it is happening at all, after decades of being demonised. One of the strengths of the academic approach is that descriptive categories for the psychedelic experience are created. Volunteers typically experience interconnectedness, like we’re all in this together; a sense of the preciousness of the experience; and a level of meaning. All of which can mean they end up rewriting the narrative they have about themselves and their place in the world. Many of the volunteers describe it as the single most important experience of their lives. Meanwhile, over at Harvard, a ‘psychedelic chaplaincy’ programme is being developed.
Peterson and Griffiths also discuss DMT, which is the active ingredient in Ayahuasca. There has not been experimental research with this – it doesn’t last enough time to be an efficient use of the research grant – but they have collated accounts of people who have smoked/injected it. A common experience is of benevolent entities, whose objective status is insisted on afterwards, and was the cause of the original academic research into DMT, many years ago, being abandoned, because they didn’t know what to do with these claims!
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