Coming Home: the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences research project and newsletter

This month my colleagues and I are launching the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences research project. It will conduct research into difficult psychedelic experiences (ie experiences that lead to difficulties lasting longer than a day) and what helps people deal with them. You can find out more about the project here.

This is, at the time of writing, the only research project that is researching what helps people who have difficult experiences (by asking them). I hope a lot of other research projects will start in this area, which in turn will support harm reduction services.

I care a lot about this topic, having seen several friends suffer from bad trips, and having also suffered myself — I had a bad LSD trip when I was 18, and had no idea what I was experiencing or what I should do about it. The after-effects lasted for several years, until I figured out some therapies and practices that could help me. I have argued that the psychedelic industry should do a lot more to learn about, communicate and help people manage psychedelic risks, particularly by learning how best to manage adverse psychedelic experiences. I argued here that the industry should commit 1% of its investment or revenues to harm reduction research and services, and was interviewed in this Vice article arguing we need to do more to research psychedelic risks.

As part of the project, we’re launching a newsletter dedicated to covering psychedelic and ecstatic integration, including risks, ethical issues, adverse experiences and spiritual emergencies. You can read our first post here, which reviews a book that argues psychedelic therapy didn’t fail because of the hippy counterculture, but because trials failed to fulfil FDA requirements. Will the same thing happen again? If you’re interested in psychedelic and ecstatic research, do consider taking a paid subscription — all profits from the newsletter go into funding research. You can also make a direct donation to the research project here via Open Collective, a transparent fiscal hosting service used by charities and change organisations.

Also involved in the research project are Dr David Luke and Dr Oliver Robinson of Greenwich University; Dr Katrina Michelle; Rosalind McAlpine of UCL; Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner of Imperial College, Ed Prideaux of Perception Restoration Foundation; Anna Lutkatjis of Sydney University; and Amanda Efithimiou of Awaken.Science.