Psychedelic therapy has a sexual abuse problem
qz.com
qz.com
http://psychwatch.blogspot.com/2014/11/this-woman-went-on-to...
It is by the patient leveling these accusations. It paints an excellent picture concerning why I hate the "junkies and crazies" explanation for homelessness. Her care providers doped her to the gills to allegedly try to fix her while not really doing anything to help her.
If she had taken that much medication by choice without a prescription, she would be called a junkie. Defying her doctors to get off the drugs got her called delusional and accused of oppositional defiant disorder.
Prior to reading the above, I had a different line of thought in mind for commenting here. Sexual situations are incredibly complex and I generally dislike the way discussions of them typically go. In this case, I will suggest that's sort of the least of the issue. The amount of drugs she was on was potentially life threatening and I'm horrified we are only reading about this because her therapist had a sexual relationship with her.
We prescribe drugs too casually and pass out the label "junkie" too cavalierly. If you seek help for your problems and they don't really help you, they just dope you to the gills instead, is it any wonder we have a drug epidemic going on in the US?
We would almost expect to see an antidepressants<>shootings correlation:
- mentally unwell people are given drugs
- mentally unwell people shoot other people.
That isn't causation.
Here is also interesting excerpt from the book "Nutrient Power: Heal Your Biochemistry and Heal Your Brain":
Most of the school shooters exhibited a unique and unusual history, compared to the thousands of behavior-disordered persons we have studied. A major difference is the absence of violent behaviors until the teen years, and many cases of excellent academics. Typically, the school shooters developed anxiety and depression after puberty and were treated with SSRI antidepressants. These drugs have helped millions of persons, but psychiatrists have known for years that a rare side effect involves development of suicidal ideation and in some cases homicidal tendencies. There is considerable published literature that indicates young males are especially at risk for this side effect. More than 90% of the school shooters we studied were treated with SSRI medications.
Mainstream psychiatry’s “treatment of choice” for depression is use of SSRI antidepressants aimed at increasing serotonin activity in the brain, perhaps coupled with counseling. However, as described in Chapter 6, depression is not a single condition but an umbrella term that encompasses several quite different disorders. Figure 6-3 shows the five major biochemical types of depression, including a low-folate phenotype that is associated with intolerance to SSRI medications. It seems likely that most school shooters had the low-folate form of depression and experienced an adverse reaction to antidepressant treatment.
These persons respond better to benzodiazepine medications, and also benefit from nutrient therapy to elevate folate levels. Another danger of antidepressant drugs is sudden non-compliance. There are several cases of school shootings in which the crime occurred soon after the offender stopped SSRI medication.
Recommendation: Doctors should perform blood tests prior to prescribing SSRI antidepressants for young males. Inexpensive blood testing for histamine, serum folate, and/or SAMe/SAH ratio can efficiently identify persons at risk for suicidal or homicidal ideation following use of SSRI antidepressants.
We prescribe drugs too casually (South Park's ritalin episode, the current opioid epidemic, young hiphop performers promoting Xanax) and at the same time the war on drugs is still going on, and the "establishment" doesn't really want to accept effective drugs that have "immoral" side-effects (eg. look at the story of how ketamine treatment for severe clinical depression went down, it passed FDA review, but it requires a separate clinic, it uses the "boring" version of the molecule, and thus might not even worth the cost).
That said, yes, every type of therapy has an enormous risk, because people lay their minds bare at someone's feet, expecting help, and this creates a situation with almost the vulnerability as a parent-child relationship. Abuse in these situations is terrible.
The rule of having a second therapist there (or just have a review session every half a year) is [ought to be] common sense. There's too much paperwork for drugs and too little real outside review/control. But that control factor has to be independent of the therapist. (For example in this case it was her husband. WTF. And yes, I know it's important to have someone the therapist can work with well, but that's exactly why it should be the other kind of control, where the patient gets debriefed in a 1-1 session.)
I was talking to someone recently about medical marijuana on our state. We have it, but it's supposedly a complex process. He brought up something about "having to exhaust all other treatments for a condition before trying for a medical card". I hope this isn't true, because it seems absolutely irresponsible to prescribe opioids or benzodiazepines for a conditon that could treated with a less dangerous drug.
The transactional institution that doctors, therapists and mental health hospitals represent can only provide a foundation and safe environment for such opportunities.
Talking to people who have or had similar life experiences, who truly know how the pain one suffers feels and what it means to live that way from the inside is of the highest value.
And I'm saying this because my gut feeling sort of agrees with you, but so far MAPS' FDA approved studies doesn't seem indicate that there's this risk factor.
Who knows what will happen if it hits mainstream though. (As with any other therapies, at first everything is magical, because truly motivated people practice them, then it just becomes something done by certified professionals, then it just becomes a big section in a regular textbook.)
That said, there is very good chance that even if it's risky, it has at least the potential to do real work. ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ )
I'm not an expert on intimacy by any means, but I think there's a difference between "feeling understood" and "being understood", and the former strikes me as being the more important of the two.
Not that this is impossible to achieve with a therapist (especially if they are experienced), but when they never had ones own perspective, communicating, actually being and feeling understood and achieving that change can be difficult.
If only feeling understood mattered, one might as well talk to a a pet or an inanimate object, say your favorite plushy.
When one thinks of psychotherapy, typically an image of the "client" lying on a couch, talking to a psychologist, taking notes, comes to mind. Most of psychotherapy is language (conversation) oriented, but there are many other modes of sensation, being and action. So one shouldn't restrict oneself conceptually to considering only these two-person, fixed-place, conversational/analytical interactions as 'true' psychotherapy.
But the basics are important too. Knowing yourself, talking about your problems, analyzing them, your life, etc.
[0] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/584a381a8419c2... - just a random image to illustrate the effectiveness.
The whole guided trip was an amazing experience and I am glad I have done it. Guides were very professional and made me feel safe. However, the potential for sexual misconduct on both sides is something that is not really being talked about, but needs to be addressed.
Since this article talks about MAPS, here is a MAPS source on explaining it [1].
So it's a mild psychedelic at best and not a psychedelic at worst (excuse my English, non-native, not an intended value judgement).
And the truth probably is that the word psychedelic is used for attention grabbing purposes only. I get that, but I do want to make that clear.
I'm simply summarizing the source.
[1] https://maps.org/news/multimedia-library/5545-mdma-the-movie...
"at most" and "at least" would work and be more neutral.
It's a subtle effect, dominated by the stimulant and empathogenic effects, but it's decidedly there, especially when you close your eyes.
I suspect such doses are well beyond what's used in therapy though.
Hmm... I forgot about that part. I remember having super vivid memories basically as strong as lucid dreaming.
Interestingly, this is sort of homomorphic to the viewpoint that drove George Orwell to write Animal Farm. There the belief was you shouldn't point out the flaws in the USSR because you might set socialism (a desirable ideology to his associates) back some amount of time.
It's sort of an interesting view. I, for one, want most of these drugs made available to me easily. I'd like to have trusted MDMA or LSD, purely for recreational purposes. But there's no way I want that to come with the baggage of abusive therapists and all that crap. It's absolutely unacceptable that we can put people in positions where other people are exploiting them. And I think we should make these things just as public as they deserve precisely because of what they are and what they say about how we do things.
Essentially, I think this trickle-down illegal->medicinal->legal route is just ripe for abuse since you're giving too much power to the people who can let you have the thing. I wish there were an 'accredited investor' for drugs. Most people are unable to handle drugs. But I'm different. I've used. I've gone half a decade without using. I've used again. And I'm healthy by any metric you could consider.
On the contrary: being professional and transparent, removing bad actors will be a good approach. You won't convince anyone that's against psychedelics on principle, but you also won't turn anyone away by dealing with rape accusations like every group should. Granted, it's should, there are very few communities where that ever happens, it's mostly about how powerful the victim and the perpetrator are.
I like the idea of accredited user, but it's hard to decide. With investors, you can look at account statements and say "okay, crossed the threshold, thanks". For personal stability, that's a very different and much more complicated issue where you'd hand whoever decides a lot of power.
I do think we should have legal drugs anyhow, the harm reduction alone is worth it.
And I assume they do so for very similar reasons. The difference between a church and a cult is its size & power, if you're large enough, you become a church and then a religion. If you're small, you're a cult that believes in obviously imaginary stuff.
I don't think we should have the Pope or some Hollywood star in charge of medical treatments, and everyone should be skeptical if musicians promise them a cure for cancer as well.
To that end, I think I'm willing to accept it as "pay into this insurance fund that will cover you if you need care" so that you remove the societal cost that you impose and then when you legalize you remove the externalities like the drug lords and all that.
So all it's going to do at best is make a client artificially imprint on the therapist - because the client would experience intense emotional closeness after it was administered, followed by a real downer after the session.
I'd consider that abusive by definition. It's certainly not going to have the much broader and risky but potentially more productive ego softening effect of real psychedelics, which would focus much less on the therapist and more on the client's interior world.
People seem unnaturally enthused about low dose ketamine recently, in mental health circles. I can't help thinking, that it has the potential for something kind of similar to the opioid crisis. It may be too paranoid, but I sometimes imagine there are forces in the shadows that want this, because having lots of legitimate prescriptions out there would make it easier to victimize people.
The intoxication involved is slightly more than a couple of beers. It's not habit forming, apart from being profoundly effective.
Some people get addicted to alcohol, some to opioids, some to chocolate so it wouldn't be surprising if Ketamine filled spot for some people. This shouldn't stop us from using it though.
Compulsive behaviour with regards to a stimulus isn’t addiction on its own, but it is bad!
Maybe not. I wasn't expressing any concern about that.
Who would organize/benefit such a conspiracy? The opioid epidemic was brought on by pharmaceutical corporations trying to make more money, while ketamine is likely already available as a generic that won't make anyone rich.
Being able to imagine some way this could be a scam isn't enough. Some kind of evidence us needed as if you're wrong, people will continue to suffer without the help they need.
1. The article specifically details why psychedelics are a relevant factor (because the patient is literally intoxicated, which is not usual in therapy).
2. The author acknowledges and addresses the fact that abuse happens in other forms of therapy, but notes that there are specific, relevant differences. For example, the protections offered by traditional therapy vs psychedelic therapy (trials including non-licensed 'therapists', the illegality of non-approved sessions etc.)
3. Not all of those situations are at all the same. There are different considerations when it's teachers/students, boss/employees etc. If you generalize enough, there's no difference between a human and a chimpanzee - it's all about the desired level of investigation.
I think you’re conflating two different issues here.
Quartz needs a new editor.