Here's What Psychedelic Therapies Get Wrong 

The rebirth of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAP) has been garnering a great deal of attention lately. Not only in medicine and academia but in the media and the public consciousness at large.

Many herald this renaissance after decades of legal embargo, but some have expressed a good deal of skepticism and caution. Is it time to move to a relational therapy approach?

A key concern around current PAP is that the field is being dominated by medical and research institutions (e.g., Imperial college London, John Hopkins University).

The Current Model of Mind: The Dominance of the ICC framework

The lion’s share of PAP research is based on the assumptions and language of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

From this standpoint, mental phenomena are best explained in terms of internal cognitive processing and the neurological systems correlated with such processing. 

Unsurprisingly the kinds of psychotherapy currently used in PAP are ones that share consonant assumptions and biases. Namely, the Cognitive-Behavioral group of therapies.

Classic CBT is what we might call the master psychotherapeutic theory of a group of therapies that come under the title of CBT (usually expressed in terms of ‘waves’). 

The core premise of classic CBT is that emotional and psychological suffering principally follows from irrational or erroneous beliefs, attitudes, or other cognitive structures that the person holds.

Why the individualistic, cognition-centric framework is flawed

These models are speaking the same language because they assume the same philosophical framework.

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