Moral Psychopharmacology Needs Moral Inquiry: The Case of Psychedelics

Moving beyond a figurative psychedelic literacy: Metaphors of psychiatric symptoms in ayahuasca narratives

Metaphors, analogies, and similes commonly appear in narratives of drinking the potent psychedelic "ayahuasca", presenting an intriguing transcultural pattern. Based upon survey and field research at an ayahuasca healing center in Pucallpa, Peru, the article investigates conceptual metaphors in narratives of ayahuasca experiences made by the visiting international guests. Bodily metaphors and visionary analogies frequently appear in narrative plots where they can express the reappraisal, overcoming, and sometimes emboldening of symptoms diagnosed by psychiatry. Moving beyond the literal-figurative divide, the article explores the intrinsic "metaphoricity" of psychedelic experiences and advocates for a literacy of conceptual metaphors regarding both clinical and non-clinical psychedelic narratives. Developing this literacy can broaden approaches in psychedelic psychiatry that analyze and treat syndromes and disorders, while also being applicable to social science and humanities research that examine psychoactive drug use beyond medical frameworks.

Psychedelic unselfing: self-transcendence and change of values in psychedelic experiences

Psychedelic experiences have been shown to both facilitate (re)connection to one's values and change values, including enhancing aesthetic appreciation, promoting pro-environmental attitudes, and encouraging prosocial behavior. This article presents an empirically informed framework of philosophical psychology to understand how self-transcendence relates to psychedelic value changes. Most of the observed psychedelic value changes are toward the self-transcendent values of Schwartz's value theory. As psychedelics also reliably cause various self-transcendent experiences (STEs), a parsimonious hypothesis is that STEs change values toward self-transcendent values. I argue that STEs indeed can lead to value changes, and discuss the morally relevant process of self-transcendence through Iris Murdoch's concept of "unselfing". I argue that overt egocentric concerns easily bias one's valuations. Unselfing reduces egocentric attributions of salience and enhances non-egocentric attention to the world, widening one's perspective and shifting evaluation toward self-transcendent modes. Values are inherently tied to various evaluative contexts, and unselfing can attune the individual to evaluative contexts and accompanying values beyond the self. Understood this way, psychedelics can provide temporarily enhanced access to self-transcendent values and function as sources of aspiration and value change. However, contextual factors can complicate whether STEs lead to long-term changes in values. The framework is supported by various research strands establishing empirical and conceptual connections between long-term differences in egocentricity, STEs, and self-transcendent values. Furthermore, the link between unselfing and value changes is supported by phenomenological and theoretical analysis of psychedelic experiences, as well as empirical findings on their long-term effects. This article furthers understanding of psychedelic value changes and contributes to discussions on whether value changes are justified, whether they result from cultural context, and whether psychedelics could function as tools of moral neuroenhancement.

What good are psychedelic humanities?

The revival of psychedelic research has been dominated by the biomedical sciences. Yet it raises questions that cannot be answered by laboratory experiments and clinical trials alone. Among these are questions pertaining to the conceptual and practical frameworks that render experimental and clinical findings meaningful. Psychedelic humanities clarify the historical presuppositions, philosophical blind spots, and political stakes of different approaches to psychedelics. In this emergent field, many scholars evaluate such alternatives epistemologically, ethically, or politically. However, they could just as well refrain from offering normative orientation and instead increase the complexity of the observed phenomena by opening other possible perspectives, leaving it to their readers to reduce the resulting complexity in novel ways. This enables clinical psychiatrists, laboratory scientists, and other practitioners to use (or abuse) psychedelic humanities scholarship for their own purposes. The article concludes with a note on the institutionalization of such collaboration at The New School's Psychedelic Humanities Lab.

Cyberdelics in context: On the prospects and challenges of mind-manifesting technologies

The concept of cyberdelics emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as an umbrella term denoting the nexus connecting cybernetic (digital) technologies and psychedelic (mind manifesting) drugs. Cyberdelic technologies, in particular the then newly emerging field of virtual reality, were touted by psychedelic cultural icons including Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna as auguring a new era of digital mind-expansion where psychedelic experiences will be recreated online inside virtual worlds. Cyberdelic culture waned in the 2000s. However, recent years have seen the return of the cyberdelic imaginary, following on the heels of a psychedelic resurgence and a renewed interest in virtual reality technologies and their use in therapy. Cyberdelic advocates speak of the necessity of creating transformative technologies that steer humanity away from mindless consumerism and distractedness, and towards expanded states of awe, presence, and transcendence. Nevertheless, much like psychedelics, cyberdelic technologies are seen as running against the grain of current sociocultural arrangements and economic models which threaten to quell their transformative potential. Research on psychedelics within the humanities over the past decade has emphasized the role of cultural set and setting: the significance of the cultural embeddedness of these psychoactive agents and the dependence of their effects on surrounding sociocultural conditions. Building on the notion of information technologies as mind-manifesting technologies, this paper sets out to consider what psychedelics can teach us about cyberdelics: how the principles of set and setting and current discussions within the psychedelic humanities can inform our understanding of the resurgence of interest in cyberdelic media, its prospects, and challenges.

Psychedelics and Desistance From Crime: Lessons From the Concord Prison Experiment

Recent investigations of naturalistic psychedelic use purport that psychedelic therapies may be useful in criminal justice contexts for reducing recidivism. The present study applies interactionist theories of desistance to critically explore how psychedelic therapies could facilitate agentic self-transformation to support desistance from crime. Psychedelic experience reports written by inmates as part of the “Concord Prison Experiment” (CPE) were collected from the New York Public Library. Reports from 29 participants were then analyzed using a qualitative content analysis that employed both conventional and directed approaches. Participants frequently reported on changes in emotion and sense perception, interactions with other participants, and self-knowledge. Reports of self-knowledge often emerged from cognitive shifts that led to reflexive thought and novel insights regarding crime and criminality. These findings demonstrate how psychedelics can facilitate cognitive shifts in meaning conducive to inspiring desistance from crime. However, shortcomings of the CPE indicate that the social environment can hinder integration, by constraining the potential to enact changes in one’s life or realize meaningful insights through prosocial relationships. The combination of potentially harmful prison environments and the vulnerable states of consciousness generated by psychedelics should preclude investigations among actively incarcerated participants. Without addressing common social and structural barriers to successful reentry such as housing and employment, the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy as a recidivism reducing intervention will be limited. Alternative approaches might explore how psychedelic therapy can address the psychological impacts of incarceration.

Will psilocybin lose its magic in the clinical setting?

Psilocybin as a novel treatment for depression is garnering a lot of attention from both the mainstream media and the academic community. Although phase 3 trials are only just beginning, we feel that it is important for clinicians to consider what psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy might look like in the clinical setting. In this narrative review article we have considered the difficulties that may arise as psilocybin emerges from the research setting, which may hamper its progress towards becoming a licenced medication. Psilocybin has its own unique challenges: the expectation patients come to dosing with having read overwhelmingly positive media; patient suggestibility under the influence of psilocybin and requirement for specialised therapists to name a few. We have also made some recommendations for measures that should be taken in both the phase 3 trials and with clinicians to try and minimise some of the issues raised. In doing so our hope is that psilocybin will continue towards becoming a licenced medication that suitable patients are able to access with relative ease. Practicing psychiatrists need to have an awareness of the potential pitfalls of psilocybin as they will be responsible for prescribing it in the future.

Psychedelic Epistemology: William James and the “Noetic Quality” of Mystical Experience

William James proposed in 1902 that states of mystical experience, central to his idea of religious experience, can be identified based on their ineffability and their noetic quality. The epistemological category of the noetic quality, modified by W. T. Stace in 1960, plays a central but somewhat confounding role in today’s biomedical research involving psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD. Using scales based on James, it can be shown that psychedelics “reliably occasion” intense subjective states of experience or mystical states. It is debated whether these states are necessary for the wide range of possible mental health therapeutic benefits that appear to follow. This paper reviews what James said about the noetic quality and its relationship to religious experience, epistemology, and states of mystical experience. It explores how the noetic quality is measured in today’s research, addressing a growing list of concerns that psychedelic science can be epistemologically biased, that it is hostile to atheistic or physicalist views, that it injects religion unduly into science, or that it needs to find ways to eliminate the mystical element, if not the entire intense subjective experience altogether.