“Culture and psychedelic psychotherapy: Ethnic and racial themes from three black women therapists”

Abstract

The promise that Psychedelic Medicine holds for debilitating, treatment-resistant, disorders rests as much upon novel explanations of illness as it does upon novel treatments. If actualized, Psychedelic Medicine will revolutionize heath care and theories of healing. Psychedelic medicine's unintended consequences may prove to be just as far-reaching, as non-ordinary states of consciousness, induced by psychedelics, raise fundamental questions about knowledge, our place in the world, and about reality itself. In particular, such states reveal the anthropocentric fiction of an ontologically distinct Self at the heart of individual, social and ecological malaise. As the testimonies of the three authors (who, though trained therapists, assumed the role of clients in this study) reveal, psychedelic healing is an inextricably embodied process, informed by historical, social and cultural factors, and tied to community both present and past, visible and invisible. Healing occurs, at least in part, through the remembrance of and re-connection with "things past"-a recovering and interweaving of one's personal narrative with one's collective narrative, including embodied collective trauma.That the authors at the center of this study are African American women was not incidental to their psychedelic experiences, any more than it is accidental to their everyday embodied ways of being. The "I" at the center of their experiences is not an unchanging entity or substance, but a historically, culturally, and socially constituted one. And, as the experiences revealed, it is one powerfully shaped by the experience of racialized oppression.Psychedelics make short work of our pretense to self-sufficiency by removing protective shields, often forcefully, and leaving us exposed. While this can be a place of radical vulnerability, it is also, as the testimonials here show, the ground out of which healing emerges. With the presence of a skilled therapist, we can come to identify fear as nothing more than the desperate pleas of the disintegrating illusory Self, and we can come to experience the death of this Self as the condition for authentic connection with others. Wholeness, not annihilation, emerges in its wake, along with feelings of connectedness, love and security.While this is the promise of psychedelics, it is not guaranteed. Despite the great hopes of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as a cultural predilection for "quick-fixes", healing is not simply a function of the psychedelic substance ingested. Research continues to mount confirming the centrality of "set and setting" to therapeutic outcomes. The more we learn about the states of hyper-suggestibility and receptivity that psychedelics are apt to occasion, the more the role of the therapeutic encounter takes center-stage. Healing hinges, at least in part, on being seen, and on having one's experience heard and validated in ways that go beyond discursive communication. At a minimum, the therapist needs to bear nonjudgemental witness to the life of the other, and resist addin...

Entheogens and psychedelics in Canada: Proposal for a new paradigm.

“…Without proper multicultural supervision and training, this may cause complications within communities that may already be wary of these substances due to oppressive and racist drug policies (George et al, 2020; United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2017). A special sensitivity to cultural and sociopolitical issues is required when working in communities of color (Vallely, 2020). All participants should have the right to choose a practitioner with a shared language, culture, and ethnic heritage, if they so desire, and each community may develop their own culturally appropriate approaches to entheogenic and psychedelic use (Williams, Reed, & George, 2020).…”