This text first appeared in The Jesuit Post on Aug. 24, 2022.
The way to Change Your Mind, the documentary miniseries now streaming on Netflix, is just the most recent sign that the cultural landscape is shifting around psychedelics. Based on Michael Pollan’s Recent York Times bestselling book, the documentary was inspired by a recent resurgence in the sector of psychedelic research. Could psychedelics—a category of mind-altering substances that trigger non-ordinary states of consciousness—be a tool for helping people find healing?
Each episode of the four-part miniseries is oriented around a specific psychedelic, giving a few of its history and possible therapeutic uses. Episode 1 discusses the promise of lysergic acid (LSD, also generally known as “acid”) within the Fifties as an aid in helping people overcome addiction, until Nixon made it illegal in response to its appropriation by the counterculture of the Nineteen Sixties. Episode 2 takes us into the history of psilocybin mushrooms from their ritual use in various indigenous American cultures, through their suppression by the Catholic Church within the sixteenth century, to their “rediscovery” by the Western world after a 1957 article in Life magazine. The episode also addresses recent clinical studies which have used mushrooms to treat anxiety and depression for people coping with a terminal illness. Within the third episode, Pollan explores the remarkable success of MDMA (also generally known as “ecstasy”) in helping individuals with PTSD. Episode 4 treats mescaline-bearing cacti, which like psilocybin mushrooms have enjoyed an extended history in indigenous healing rituals and spiritual ceremonies.
Could psychedelics—a category of mind-altering substances that trigger non-ordinary states of consciousness—be a tool for helping people find healing?
While today we associate these substances with rebellious young people and hippies, that chapter of the story only began within the Nineteen Sixties, when the counterculture made its notorious discovery of psychedelics and drew the scrutiny of the Nixon administration, which in turn made them illegal. However the series treats the culture war as a form of red herring, the din of demagoguery obscuring what had come before: a decade of promising research into the therapeutic uses of those substances. As Pollan puts it, psychedelics “escaped the lab and the therapy room and entered the counterculture.” These powerful substances were used frivolously, under the banner of Timothy Leary’s slogan to “activate, tune in, and drop out,” and ideologized as a weapon for the dissolution of conventional society. Pollan documents how within the last twenty years, because the ‘60s recede within the rearview mirror, scientists at major research institutions (Yale and Johns Hopkins, amongst others) are confirming old studies and asserting latest ones that show remarkable promise for psychedelics as a tool for treating mental health.
What Does the Church Say?
Unsurprisingly, The Catechism of the Catholic Church doesn’t mention LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, or mescaline, nor does it mention the word “psychedelics.” It does, nonetheless, mention “drugs”:
The use of medicine inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. (CCC 2291)
Except on strictly therapeutic grounds. All of using psychedelics that Pollan documents within the miniseries is “strictly on therapeutic grounds,” with the exception perhaps of using mescaline-bearing cactus in a spiritual ceremony of the Native American Church. (Its use on this context was legalized by the federal government within the Nineteen Nineties.) Pollan’s point is precisely that the recreational use of psychedelics within the Nineteen Sixties impeded their use (and credibility) in a therapeutic context to heal. Scientists who had been studying substances like mushrooms seriously were forced to stop when the gears of the culture war ground their projects to a halt.
As Catholics, we must always take seriously the chance that psychedelics are morally permissible in a therapeutic context.
As Catholics, we must always take seriously the chance that psychedelics are morally permissible in a therapeutic context. One major study found that 80% of terminal cancer patients reported lasting improvement with depression and anxiety after a single high-dose of psilocybin. MDMA has been so promising for helping people overcome PTSD that it’s more likely to be the primary psychedelic approved by the FDA for therapeutic use. The outcomes of a recent study, Pollan tells us, could be enough to push MDMA over the legal edge: after three guided, clinical sessions with MDMA, two thirds of patients qualified as quite simply not having PTSD.
It should interest us as believers not only that psychedelics heal people, but how they do. The prevailing model for understanding depression has been a mechanical one. Brain functioning was considered impaired by low serotonin levels, which called for a every day pill. This paradigm has worked well for the pharmaceutical industry: the worldwide antidepressant drugs market was valued at $15 billion in 2020 and is barely projected to grow in size. But a major latest study suggests that the chemical understanding of depression, from which the necessity for a every day pill is derived, lacks clear evidence. Psychedelic therapy, in contrast, operates on a unique, more meaning-based model. Somewhat than having to take an everyday pill, the patient is run a single, high dose of a psychedelic (or perhaps as many as three doses, over the course of several weeks) to explore, under the care of a therapist, an area of their experience which may be harder to access in an strange frame of mind. The patient and the therapist are looking for insight, attempting to shake loose a number of the fear and stigma that prevent past traumas from being delivered to light and healed. As believers, we all know the facility that love and forgiveness have to rework people’s lives. In his documentary, Pollan gives us reel after reel of clinical footage where patients experience just that: a reconciliation with themselves and with others that enables them to maneuver forward in freedom with their lives. Unfortunately for the pharmaceutical industry, the patient doesn’t walk out of the door with a mushroom or MDMA prescription, to be filled and refilled indefinitely. The experience has made its mark, and the insights remain.
Psychedelics may not be a part of the issue of drug abuse, but a part of the answer—in other words, not only one other drug, but a medication.
The Problem with “Drugs”
Beneath the query of what’s therapeutic, there may be a deeper one: What’s a drug? That is from the paragraph before the Catechism’s warning about drug use:
The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every form of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine. (CCC 2290)
Lining up paragraph 2290 and 2291 next to one another, the implication is that alcohol and tobacco aren’t drugs. Why? Alcohol kills 95,000 people per yr in the US, making it the country’s third-leading explanation for preventable death. Tobacco claims greater than five times that number, in response to the CDC—about one in all every five deaths within the country, annually. Every parent with young children knows that sugar acts on the central nervous system and modifies human behavior: how many individuals that suffer from obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease have had their lives ruined by sweets? Against this, psychedelics are low in toxicity, or just non-toxic.
Alcohol and tobacco are more harmful not only because they’re more toxic, but additionally because they’re more addictive. The Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care released a document in 2001 called Church: Drugs and Drug Addiction geared toward addressing “the terrible problem of drug abuse on the earth.” The documentary tells us that while MDMA has had particularly promising leads to treating PTSD, it can also prove successful in helping people overcome addiction (click here for one such study). Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, credited the start of his recovery to a robust psychedelic experience he had in 1934. For many years afterwards, Bill pushed for psychedelics (LSD particularly) to be incorporated into AA’s recovery program, only to be overruled by other leading members who felt it will be inconsistent with the organization’s message. Psychedelics may not be a part of the issue of drug abuse, but a part of the answer—in other words, not only one other drug, but a medication.
The third episode of the documentary contains a veteran whom MDMA helped overcome PTSD. In pondering the query of what’s a drug and what’s a medication, we’d consider his words: “good drugs led to an opioid epidemic, and bad drugs heal PTSD, so I believe our definitions of those need to alter.”
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This text isn’t a blanket endorsement of psychedelics, neither is it a suggestion to exit and check out psychedelic therapy: that’s the province of health-care professionals. Nevertheless it is an invite to look at the documentary: at the very least to this amateur viewer, the research is compelling. The conversation about socially sanctioned use of psychedelics is occurring, and we as Christians may need something to supply, whether by means of admonition or encouragement. And it’s hard to return away from The way to Change Your Mind feeling that the inherited pondering on the topic equips us adequately for such a conversation, as a people committed to the reality, and to the care of every others’ souls.
Watch The way to Change Your Mind on Netflix.