Dicey moment in history

An article in the most recent issue of JAMA Psychiatry raises the prospect that psychiatry, mostly known since the Twentieth Century as a medical specialty, will become an explicit and direct competitor of established world religions. My own hope is that such a turnabout will not signal any broad retreat or loss of respect for the scientific method.

Six of the eight authors are non-MD's, and all are affiliated with with Emory University in Atlanta. They observe that spiritual, existential, religious and theological experiences play a major role in psychedelic-assisted therapy, but these experiences have not been systematically integrated into the therapeutic models which accompany the use of psychedelic drugs. In other words, psychiatry needs to enter the business of religion in an organized way, because of psychedelic drugs.

JAMA Psychiatry is, of course, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for the specialty of psychiatry. JAMA has been published since 1883 by the American Medical Association. It is probably the most authoritative voice in modern medicine. The fact that their network has published a recommendation for psychiatry to intentionally, effectively become religion is startling.

In the Twentieth Century psychedelic drugs were the cause, or at least the catalyst in my own view, of seismic cultural changes. Western Civilization then took almost half a century to assimilate or "integrate" the impact of what is most often recalled as "the sixties", and now we have supposedly entered a "psychedelic renaissance".

Max Weber wrote of "the apotheosis of reason," perhaps to more carefully explain (an intention that would be ironic) Nietzsche's lament about humanity's murder of God. Such emotional currents in our culture became torrential in 1945, when the ruins of Europe, the atomic dust of Japan, and a billion human refugees around the world convinced us all that we must figure out how to never do this again.

Being obsessed with what must not ever happen again is probably a fundamental component of insanity itself, and maybe it's the single largest component. So, the world's gone crazy. But contrary to what many of my little green friends at EMHC might argue, any total demise of psychiatry as we know it would almost be an ultimate saving grace. That's because only an immortal spirit can ever rise above insanity, and psychiatry is a total denial of immortal spirits, in favor of brains which can be shocked or drugged into compliance for power and profit.

The value of science has been invalidated in our culture most of all by psychiatry, which is terrible, culturally destructive fraud. But science, since the middle ages, has saved humanity and allowed us to expand, flourish, and prosper across Earth even toward the stars. The psychedelic renaissance is a fascinating, dicey moment.