Long before the plague infected our bodies, a sickness was spreading roots in our minds. We’re in the grips of a global mental health crisis, with close to a billion people struggling with some form of mental illness. Someone takes their own life every 40 seconds. A sense of dislocation, anxiety and loneliness pervades modern life. As psychiatry struggles to find solutions, psychedelics are emerging as beacons of hope. Promising results from a new wave of clinical research suggests that psychedelic-assisted therapy using psilocybin, MDMA and DMT, might not just be more effective than current treatments, but usher in a new paradigm of treating mental health. The last two years in particular have seen a gold rush of investment, with dozens of psychedelic pharma companies raising close to $2 billion in stock market flotations. The press has stopped telling stories about people jumping out of windows high on acid, and instead pumps out glowing headlines about the promise of psychedelic science. Investors like Christian Angermayer claim that psychedelic pharma companies could solve the mental health crisis. |
| The hype can make it appear as though we understand what’s causing this crisis. We don’t. From the perspective of biomedical psychiatry, our depressions, anxieties and addictions can be fixed with the right drugs. From another perspective, this crisis is a desperate howl from the heart of consumer culture. A howl that warns of socioeconomic disparity, with children from underprivileged backgrounds four times more likely to suffer mental health difficulties than wealthier peers. Of an epidemic of loneliness, and skyrocketing rates of teenage mental illness driven by predatory social media algorithms. The early promise of the psychedelic counterculture was that these medicines would address the roots of our problems, not their symptoms. That they would decondition us from the cultural values driving us insane by reconnecting us to the sacred. The trajectory of my life has been inspired by this hope. However, as these medicines have encountered market forces, I’ve felt increasingly cynical. The counterculture vision has been commodified. Not just by biomedical science, but by a narcissistic culture hungry for the latest fix to sell to those stranded on the shores of a dying world. But over the last year, something has shifted in me. I’ve moved from a kind of premature grief to a renewed hope that psychedelics can play a vital role in helping us find solutions to the crisis of the times, from environmental collapse to political polarisation. This essay recounts the conversations I’ve had over the last year with leaders in psychedelics and other guests we’ve had on Rebel Wisdom. Clinicians, activists and indigenous leaders. Researchers, lawyers and artists. Game theorists, futurists, consultants and occultists. Conversations that have led me to an unexpected hope, and a trickster belief that we can steal psychedelic culture back from the hollow nightmare of a broken system. |
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| Sacred Transformations The idea that psychedelics can lead to cultural transformation has fallen out of fashion. What’s more in fashion is the latest neuroscience and clinical research. However, the latter provides clues to the former. To find those clues, we can look at how psychedelics work. Humans have been using psychedelics for thousands of years to widen our perception of reality. Shamanism, including the use of medicinal plants to attain wisdom, is widely regarded to be one of the first forms of human spirituality and healing. In ‘Awakening from the Meaning Crisis’, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke points out that shamanism is often associated with a phenomenon called ‘soul flight’. The shaman might have the experience of transforming into a bird or leaving their body and seeing the world from above. In doing so, they could identify previously hidden patterns. Where the antelope are, a new insight into the social dynamics of the tribe, when it’s going to rain. It’s no coincidence we still talk about ‘getting high’. |
Unorthodox Truth 