Emerging landscapes with Dr Bennet Zelner
My unofficial Vital Study Zine #8 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space
‘Liquidated Chanel’ by Zevs, works avaialble from Magda Danysz gallery
The final lecture in Vital’s first core module of five, Psychedelic Therapies: Historical and Current Approaches focussed on the future.
And not only that of psychedelic use, medical or otherwise.
Dr Bennet A Zelner is developing and applying ‘biomimetic’ solutions inspired by the natural world, to on-the-ground business practice. Right now he’s associate professor of business and public policy at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His research there includes a radical study on the impact of psychedelic insights on organisational leaders, with the petri dish being a local copper mine.
“Around 2013 I felt disconnected from work, marriage and life in general,” he explains of his psychedelic journey, "I put the blame on myself; after all, I had external measures of success supposed to fulfil me. I was reintroduced to psychedelics, this time in an intentional setting. The insight was that my profession was completely dysfunctional, which wasn’t supposed to happen.”
After examining this with his psychedelic circle, “Gradually I realised I could use what I had learned to possibly affect change. I started working with a focus on psychedelic assisted mental health treatment.”
Dr Zelner’s experience of the vastly successful Frome Model of healthcare in Somerset, UK provided the evidence for his economic solutions that integrate business, community, wellness and health.
“Pharma has leveraged the social and financial disconnection which contributes to mental distress”
He now advises a plethora of businesses and orgs, including the MIND European Foundation for Psychedelic Science and Europe’s Synthesis, where its first leadership retreats with Zelner and Sampson are underway. Dr Zelner is teaching along with fellow psychedelic academic, lawyer Rachelle Sampson. Plus, in the spirit of altruism he helps out with his local Brooklyn Psychedelic Society. Plus, he’s behind the investment fund trying to turn on business, Transformative Capital.
“Today, about 40% of Americans report that they feel isolated and don't have meaningful relationships,” says Dr Zelner. The pharmaceutical industry has leveraged this hyper-individualism, the social and financial disconnection, which itself is contributing to the mental distress they're supposed to be trying to address the first place.” And which it is holding at bay at very best, with big pharma profits tripling and patient numbers rising steadily.
“Frightening as it may be, the chaotic state of our systems holds the potential for true change”
This happens across the business sector. ’Extractive economics’ where resources and revenue are taken from a community and applied elsewhere, contribute to the sense of disconnection impacting healthcare, says Dr Zelner. “The CEO to worker pay ratio rose from 24 times to over two thousand, between 1980 and 2017. That’s one example; another is chain stores taking over local businesses, Main Street to Wall Street.”
Re-connecting finance and communities will benefit healthcare in and of itself, while bottom-up innovations in healthcare provide fertile ground for communities and local businesses to grow organically.
“The current chaotic state of our current systems, as frightening as it may be, I think, also does hold the potential for true change,” says Dr Zelner.
Here he is talking to London’s Psychedelic Society plus you can see more of Dr Zelner over in the New Psychonaut YouTube lecture hub.