Psychedelic Press Blog — medicine

The Psychedelic Press is excited to be joining the global psychedelic community in Prague for Beyond Psychedelics 2018. Researcher from the National Institute of Mental Health (and founding member of Beyond Psychedelics) Rita Kočárová introduces the ideas underpinning the event: an exploration of beauty and diversity in psychedelic community. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can feel it in the air: many people say that we are experiencing a Psychedelic Renaissance. But, I think that our current situation more closely resembles a psychedelic chaos: there are no universally-accepted standards, no rules, and thousands of different ways of approaching psychedelics. The Beyond Psychedelics team are...

Author Ben Sessa is a psychiatrist, and his novel starts with a psychiatrist character, Dr Robert Austell, having a violent fantasy where he cuts a patient’s throat with a scalpel and nonchalantly watches her bleed to death. The reader can be forgiven for momentarily wandering just how autobiographical the work is, and indeed whether such things are the norm within the psychiatric profession! But of course this slasher opening is a piece of black comedy in order to set up the jaded, disillusioned Austell as someone who – like the majority of the working population – is bored with his job and...

When various State governments and international bodies made d-Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and numerous other psychedelic drugs, illegal in the mid-1960s, they single-handedly ended medical research and, apparently, politicised the psychedelic experience. Now, after a 40 year hiatus, human research with psychedelic drugs has tentatively begun again. But is the psychedelic experience any less political now than it was then? And, moreover, who has the right to dictate how the subjective effects of these substances are understood? To answer these questions, it is first necessary to return to the heyday of psychedelic research. The discovery of the psychoactive properties of...