The current, much heralded "psychedelic renaissance" signals a darkly ironic evolution of psychiatry away from its long-successful branding as a medical specialty, toward a more explicitly quasi-religious quest for mystical enlightenment to simply override mental disorders as they were previously understood, or to "break on through to the other side."
This is almost certainly prompted by the abject failure of Twentieth Century efforts to raise humanity toward a higher plain through decoding the "secrets" of the brain. The future that Jeffrey Lieberman predicted for his guild in 2014 has not materialized. In fact its prospects now look vanishingly small.
The truth is, psychiatry was always more religion of the brain, than science of the brain. And that's why psychedelics are psychiatry's perfect bridge to oblivion.
Ayahuasca, LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, Ketamine, etc., are used in psychedelic assisted therapy ("PAT") to scramble a person's mind and produce ego death. Then counseling attempts to integrate the terrors and the epiphanies (or the spiritual, existential. religious and theological ("SERT") insights) from the psychedelic trip, into a reconstructed, improved personality capable of functioning better in a practical world.
There's just no way this is anything but a spiritual quest. When it is attempted by psychiatrists, the quintessential ambassadors of an ultra-materialist, mechanistic view of the human mind, it becomes profoundly dangerous.
A recent leading textbook, Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness, by Marc B. Aixalà (Santa Fe & London: Synergetic Press, 2022) contains a fascinating statement that dramatically illustrates the religious nature of this activity:
The psychedelic induced mystical experience is probably the best corrective emotional experience that can occur.... In some ways, it resembles the resolution in the biblical Book of Job; after suffering countless tragedies, Job asks God the reason for all of it. God's response is transcendental and places Job in front of the greatness of the universe and creation, highlighting the insignificantly significant role that Job plays in all that drama. Thus, psychedelics often give us the same response that God gave to Job.
(Pages 126-7.)
So after getting nowhere, utterly failing to move the needle despite spending $20 billion in taxpayers' money during the decades of Tom Insel's reign at NIMH; after unsuccessfully bullshitting the public through five editions (including Allen Frances' own) of a "diagnostic manual"; after the proclaimed "Decade of the Brain" and continuous legal authority for most of a century to force the public to be its customers; the guild-cult of psychiatry will now end in the panic of a bad trip, turning on, tuning in and dropping out!
They figure they might just as well play God.
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