Healing

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]