Returning to the Fire: A Story of Psychedelic Healing Across Time
From the first humans who painted visions onto cave walls, to today’s clinical trials with psilocybin and MDMA, our species has always sought meaning, healing, and connection through extraordinary states of consciousness. What we now call “psychedelic medicine” is not a modern invention—it’s a remembering. A return. A fire that’s never fully gone out. The story begins long before there were borders, empires, or even language as we know it. Across the continents, early humans gathered in circles, guided by dreams, instinct, and the natural world. In some of the oldest cave art found—like the mushroom figures painted 7,000 years ago in the Tassili n’Ajjer caves of North Africa—scholars see clues that our ancestors were already exploring plant-based altered states. These weren’t recreational experiences. They [...]
Humanizing Psychiatry and Alternative Treatment Options
Psychiatry can get a bad reputation as psychiatrists we are relegated to the role of pill pushers. I know many of us do work that way, with a quick conversation and then out comes the prescription pads. On some level, that has been dictated by the insurance industry, which will only compensate a short medication management visit and not compensate at all if medications are not part of the picture. I would like to try and put a more human face to psychiatry and change our role from drug pushers to actual health care providers. To me, humanizing psychiatry includes recognizing that everything that happens to us since we came into this world leaves a mark. Our responses can be adaptive, maladaptive, or just survivalist. [...]
Brave New Medicine: Ketamine’s Promise and Pitfalls
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes a futuristic society pacified by a daily dose of soma—a drug that ensures collective compliance and emotional numbness at the expense of curiosity, dissent, and authentic feeling. As an addiction psychiatrist and clinician who offers Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP), I often find myself reflecting on the parallels between Huxley’s vision and the rapidly expanding, commercialized use of ketamine in modern psychiatry. Ketamine has undeniable therapeutic potential Ketamine has undeniable therapeutic potential. When delivered within a structured, multidisciplinary framework—including careful preparation, guided administration, and integrative psychotherapy—it can be profoundly transformative. It offers individuals the possibility of loosening rigid patterns of thought, healing trauma, and reconnecting with meaning. However, when ketamine is prescribed or distributed without context—especially in the form of at-home [...]
On Time, Space, and Being Human
Space, Time, & Einstein Lately I’ve been reading Einstein’s biography, where he talks about space, time, mass, and energy in such creative ways. He describes how space and time cannot be defined without each other—how they are interwoven, inseparable. This led me to reflect on how we, too, exist within the fabric of time. Not just the hours on a clock or the phases of a life, but time as a living element we move through. The Invitation Our language is full of sayings like time is money, the early bird catches the worm, or love at first sight—little cultural scripts that shape how we value and measure time. But beneath those is something quieter and more profound: an invitation to consider how we want [...]
Integrative Psychiatry: Remembering the Soul of Our Work
The word psychiatry carries a history that most of us rarely pause to consider. Its roots trace back to the Medieval Latin psychiatria, which itself is woven from two Greek words: psykhē, meaning mind or soul, and iatreia, meaning healing or care. Built into the very language is an ancient understanding that this field was always meant to tend to the soul. And yet, somewhere along the long arc of scientific progress, we drifted from that. For decades—and in some ways, centuries—we leaned heavily into models that viewed human beings primarily as biological systems, fascinating and intricate, yes, but too often stripped of meaning, history, and inner life. My hope is that we are now in a season of returning. Returning to a recognition [...]
Summer Communitas
As the summer rolls along and I spend time gathering with others I have reflected on how good it feels. It conjures up thoughts from a book by anthropologist Victor Turner discussing the value of communitas. Here’s a definition: Communitas is a Latin noun that means "community" and can refer to a feeling of shared humanity, intimacy, and solidarity that develops among people who experience liminality as a group. And another definition: Liminality is a state of being in between two stages or places, or on the verge of transitioning to something new. That is a particularly potent concept now on a macro level and always has value on the micro level. Turner is an anthropologist and writes about the experience of discomfort within a [...]
ARTICLES:
Analysis of the concept of Psychedelic Integration and its practice. (15-20 min read)
https://www.frontiersin.org/