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Psychedelics and Psychiatry
A Brief Survey
The following is a brief investigative report on some of the research surrounding the history and potential therapeutic and psychiatric applications of psychedelics. Neither non-exhaustive in scope nor to be taken as medical advice, the following serves as a primer for those who may be unfamiliar with the subject but who would like an introduction. The works cited at the end will provide a list of resources for further research. If you have any additional resources on this subject that you would like to recommend, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.
In large part due to the war on drugs in the United States, various substances have not only been criminalized, but culturally demonized. Among these, psychedelics — substances which trigger non-ordinary states of consciousness — have been, until relatively recently, tossed out with the bathwater. Thanks in large part to the research of institutions like Johns Hopkins and the activism of grassroots movements like MAPS, interest in psychedelics is gradually reviving, leading to numerous potential applications — including in clinical and otherwise therapeutic contexts.
Though psychedelics are, culturally speaking, largely perceived as an idiosyncrasy of the mid-twentieth century, the use of psychedelics in fact dates as far back as 10,000 years, utilized in…
