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Integration

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Psychedelic integration isn’t the ideal topic for water cooler chat with your line manager on a Monday morning.

Meditation, vegetarian diets, forest bathing and volunteering, all inspired by the cosmic visions on a magic mushroom trip. It all sounds suspiciously like hippy stuff, guaranteed to create even more disconnect between you, your news cycle-bedevilled colleagues, wine-guzzling borderline alcoholic partner, and rigid family. 

“Most of the people I’ve worked with have had a disappointing crash. Integration is partly about managing that disappointment. You can’t separate the drug from the therapy – and the community you go back to after a session,” said Dr Ros, AKA PsiloDep 2 clinical lead Dr Rosalind Watts at Psych Symposium’s integration panel earlier this year also featuring Ian Roullier, co-founder of trial subject support and campaigning group PsyPAN. 

“My colleagues think it’s extreme… whacky”

PsiloDep 2 trial subjects were given 35 to 40 hours of therapy, which is more than I’ve had in my life. But costs, for a start, kept post-experience integration services light. The trial subjects’ woe prompted Dr Ros to manifest ACER, her integration platform that “involves getting into nature and a closely bonded support group, that’s saved all of us during the pandemic,” says Roullier. 

Former international-level professional sportsman and Iboga advocate Rory Lamont was on the panel too. played rugby, a traditional contact sport that’s notorious for its conservative values. He only had the informal WhatsApp group set up by the folks on his retreat for succour. 

“I went through some difficult challenges post experience,” he told the panel, “The connection with the medicine is just the start: we want to embody the insights but if we’re not being met by our family and friends it’s isolating and can bring back the loneliness, and the depression.”

The new approaches his insights compelled him to take were nightmarishly distant from his existing lifestyle. “These medicines get to the root of our suffering, the trauma and disconnection from family, friends, society,” he says, “Instead we get a connection to mother nature and community, that brings about the profound healing.” After the experience is over though it’s straight back to ‘real life’, such as it is. Most of my colleagues think it’s extreme, whacky,” says Lamont.

“The worst part is when you feel the effect fading, and you can’t access it any more”

PsyPAN co-founder Leonie Schneider says psilocybin was “the start of a long healing process which I’m very grateful for, but it’s quite a thing to be involved in. I didn’t get the ego death, the mystical experience, and came out slightly disappointed. But I got some other, incredible things that we wren’t what I expected.” Schneider may not have been able to get those benefits without experienced integration support. 

Ian Roulllier also took part in Compass’ psilocybin trials, where “my depression came back as soon as the drug wore off. But there was a strong focus on integration with a group centred on Maudsley Hospital [where Compass and the UK NHS public healthcare provider are building a dedicated centre in woodlands of New Bethlehem AKA ‘Bedlam’ asylum].” 

The drugs are catalysts and require the integration to have long-term tangible effects, says Roullier. Trial subjects can’t breeze into Imperial for another heroic dose top-up, “The worst part is when you feel the effect fading, and you can’t access it any more.” 

Although there were moments of oceanic boundlessness. 

“The best is every now and then I check in, and just go out on the grass, and feel it under my feet,” muses Roullier, movingly and sincerely, “But I did get attacked by a swarm of wasps once. I thought, am I still tripping?”