Kool-Aid Corner #13
To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life
Graph of the Week
How a glutamate ‘surge’ (it’s more of a mediation than a wave) works through the nervous system:
From: Ketamine and Serotonergic Psychedelics: Common Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Rapid-Acting Antidepressants, by Bashkim Kadriu, Jessica R Gilbert, Ioline D Henter, Christoph Kraus published in The International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology November 2020
My bookshelf weighs a ton
Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy
Grabbed it for £16 price now pushing £37 but bargains exist
‘The First Lady of LSD History’ Dr Erika Dyck says, “There is no other historical account that offers this degree of breadth on the topic.” Psychedelic Renaissance author and medical thought leader Dr Ben Sessa wrote in the British Journal of Psychiatry, “Shines a fascinating light on a discipline that is neither pure pharmacotherapy nor pure psychotherapy… Oram shows how LSD's unique position has been, and still is, its potential undoing when it comes to obtaining formal licensed approval.”
Published by John Hopkins University Press during the dark days of the early 1980s, Matthew Oram’s examination was undertaken away from hype or disapproval. The writer points out that the issue with approval is not only the ‘randomised controlled trial’ process that insists on a placebo, but also statistical compromises that arise from therapy provided alongside.
That’s still causing issues to this day. Imperial College’s PsiloDep 2 is criticised because 35-plus hours of therapy were provided alongside the psilocybin. Oram writes that researchers were concerned about this in the early 1960s, when treatments combined physical, psychological and psychiatric methods as a matter of course.
That didn’t last. Speaking in an interview for historian Andy Roberts’ book Acid Drops, 1950s British LSD researcher Dr Ronnie Sandison says, “When I started using LSD in therapy over 40 years ago the split had already started between general psychiatry and psychotherapy, and that divide has gradually widened into psychotherapists and psychoanalysts and an increasing number of lay-psychotherapists, all doing very good work. And then you have the general psychiatrists who have become more and more a victim of the drug companies. I really believe you can be a psychiatrist these days without having much knowledge of the mind, if you hand out the right pill to a patient.”
Maybe he’s right. But psychedelic evangelists in the therapeutic frontlines are also better off considering why psychotherapy might not appeal to the customer, at least initially. I’d posit that expense and time off work are the main reasons, followed closely by disappointment in non-psychedelic assisted talk therapy sessions, where narrative psychoanalysis insists on a universal worldview that contradicts a patient’s lived experience.