Ten quotes from the new psychiatry

I realize that many or most of my readers will say that psychedelic assisted therapy is yet a very long way from being the new psychiatry. But it seems so obvious to me that "PAT" is on the rise, and that 20th Century concepts of medicalized psychiatric mental health have so thoroughly crashed and burned (the simple summary being, "Diagnosis is bullshit and treatment sucks!"), that any aspiring mind doctors will have little choice but to become shamans or priests of some sort. 

I remember rather well the emotion, or the spirit, or the set and setting, of the sixties. When I was seventeen years old, I was quite certain I would never live to be thirty. (People think that's an exaggeration, but it's not at all, I remember.) Now we live in interesting times again, for the second moment since the Civil War, or perhaps the third moment since the French Revolution. After more than half a century, the lessons of my adolescence return to haunt me just a bit.

Readers may or may not know from my earlier articles, what my own opinion is about the "psychedelic renaissance." I'll be clear: I believe it is the single most dangerous and evil thing since nuclear weapons. I believe it will destroy psychiatry as we know it (which is the only silver lining), but the collateral damage may be catastrophic for our entire culture and for human civilization.

Psychedelic drugs scramble the mind. They make an individual human being insane, and they glamorize insanity in society. The religious cult of psychiatry sees this as their opportunity. They will promote psychedelics as a route to salvation, when they are actually the high road to hell.

The following is a simple list of verbatim quotes from Marc B. Aixalà's textbook, Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness. I offer this list merely to demonstrate what a radical departure psychedelic assisted therapy is, from any familiar model of scientific medicine, and to imply that we are absolutely back to zero on mental health. At least, psychiatry is dead.

This decade saw the beginnings of a line of research which was unthinkable just a few years earlier: research on the prosocial effects of MDMA, followed closely by LSD and psilocybin.. Prosocial behavior includes positive social behaviors such as altruism, empathy, cooperation, or the ability to recognize emotions and intentions.

 

The interest in psychedelic plant medicines... is an interest--and a quest--for health systems and knowledge systems that are not limited to the plants, but related to the ontological framework in which they are used. A search for well-being that has to do not so much with pleasure as with self-care, where the people who provide medicine are not the doctors, the psychiatrists, or the psychologists, but representatives whom the larger community has validated as experts, not because of their academic degrees or diplomas, but because of their expertise as technologists of the spiritual world.

 

The fact that hallucinations are a symptom of psychiatric disorders does not mean that they cannot also be a symptom of mental empowerment. The work with these substances consists precisely in taking advantage of the hallucinations in their healing sense.

 

The therapeutic mechanism that was singled out from the multiple studies carried out under the psychedelic paradigm seems to be the mystical experience happening during the LSD session. 

 

Here we see another paradox of the integration process: the multiplicity of interpretation that the same phenomenon or experience can have. The paradoxical nature is inherent in the psychedelic experience and the mystical and transcendent dimensions of the psyche. The integration of paradoxical experiences is only possible through the process of finding higher logical levels, such as metaphors or the "Koan" of the Zen tradition....

 

Psychedelics are also used for their potential to induce mystical and spiritual experiences; they have religious applications; and they are potential tools useful in social conflict resolution.

 

Four levels of reading and interpretation or exegesis exist in the Jewish tradition.... Similarly, a psychedelic experience can be read and interpreted from multiple levels.

 

Spirituality and the psychedelic experience are inseparable. 

 

When faced with our perception of symptoms--be they thoughts, emotions, or behaviors--we tend to mistake human psychological constructs with reality, in this case the so-called "mental illnesses." The psychiatrist or psychologist diagnoses a mental illness as if it were something that really exists, effectively creating a second-order reality that can have devastating effects for the person being diagnosed. Once the construct is accepted by the patient and by his social and family circles, it can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

These psychonauts, the navigators of the soul, use non-ordinary states as a tool to know internal and external reality and create their conception of the world. Psychonautics could be understood as a path, a spiritual practice, as is the case for some groups such as the psychedelic festival community or some neo-shamanic communities that routinely organize psychedelic ceremonies.

 (More to follow...)