Psychedelics – International Psychoanalysis

ROUNDTABLE ON 3/12 AT 2:30PM EST: CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR SPOT IN ZOOM AUDIENCE
Psychedelics Saturday 2:30 PM EST 12 March 2022

Neuroplasticity: it’s what our brains do. We alter our minds when we engage with the world and with the people in it. But, of course, when we think of “mind altering drugs” we refer to something else. That there might be a shortcut, a wormhole, a portal to some new and improved state of mind has long held our fascination. Yes, that includes alcohol, but while alcohol can affect mood and anxiety and augment sociability, there is something especially appealing about opening a window onto a whole new view of reality itself. Hence the new question born in the 1960’s: “are you experienced?’.

Psychedelics have been featured and feared, romanticized and reviled, lauded and suspected since the earliest epochs of human history. In many tribal ceremonies certain substances with “mind expanding” properties were invoked as communal invitations toward the transcendent. In battle, various plants, herbs, and potions were reputed to make warriors assassins, berserkers, or heroes.

From Greek roots meaning “mind manifesting,” psychedelic refers to a range of mind, mood, and consciousness altering effects – cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and behavioral – deriving from a varied array of compounds. Following the 60’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” popularity of recreational psychedelics, by the early 1970’s it was the risks associated with psychedelics that gained a hold on popular opinion and on the research community.

Times are a changing. With renewed interest, medical research is now exploring psychedelics for the treatment of mental illness, pain management and mental soothing in terminal states. With care given to providing a safe physical space and emotional support throughout, psychedelics can create feelings of union and of breaking free from time and space, often accompanied by visual hallucinations, illusions, and synesthesia. But, in “micro-doses,” doses too low to bring on a “trip,” hallucinogens are now being studied and in some instances found to ameliorate the suffering of PTSD patients, to treat obsessive-compulsive symptoms, body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia nervosa, headache, and substance abuse.

Medical alchemists believed their mixtures could act as poison or panacea. From communal traditions and now clinical research, hope is emerging that there is something in psychedelics that can help to sooth suffering souls and provide safe and effective treatment of some neuropsychiatric disorders.

This roundtable will also be streamed live and can be watched on Youtube (youtube.com/helixcenter) or on our website (helixcenter.org/videos)

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The Participants
Patricia Dailey is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Co-Chair of the Affect Studies University Seminar, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Council, and the Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies. Her book Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts (Columbia University Press, 2013) looks at the way women’s mystical texts of the Middle Ages offer us an embodied sense of “living the way one reads.” Her current research focuses on the experience of poetics and the ubiquitousness of what we think of as “the literary” in early medieval England (ca. 800-1100). Having translated works by Negri, Agamben, and Lyotard, her teaching and research involve contemporary philosophy and critical theory, including what these fields might teach us about the nature of psychedelic experience and its relation to memory, trauma studies, and ecstatic experience.

Elias Dakwar, MD, is an Associate Professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and a board-certified addiction and general psychiatrist. He has been researching novel treatments for addictions for over a decade, with the support of several grants from the National Institutes of Health. A special focus of his research has been evaluating sub-anesthetic ketamine infusions for cocaine use disorders in both laboratory and clinical settings, as well as investigating ketamine infusions as an adjunct to mindfulness-based treatment, mind/body practices, motivational interviewing, and other behavioral frameworks for alcohol, cannabis, and opioid use disorders. He has a more general interest in the impact of contemplative and non-ordinary experiences, and of the interventions that might occasion them, in the cultivation of well-being.

Neşe Devenot, PhD (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS) at the University of Cincinnati; an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research & Education (CPDRE) at The Ohio State University; and the Medicine, Society & Culture Research Fellow with Psymposia. She previously completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Bioethics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the function of metaphor and other literary devices in narrative accounts of psychedelic experiences, in addition to studying bioethical approaches to psychedelic medicine. They have been teaching Psychedelic Studies courses since 2012, and they are teaching the field’s first course on Psychedelic Bioethics at The Ohio State University in 2022. They were awarded ‘Best Humanities Publication in Psychedelic Studies’ from Breaking Convention in 2016, and they received the Article Prize for best publication in Romanticism Studies from European Romantic Review in 2020. They were a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where they participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences.

Alex Kwan is a neuroscientist whose work is focused on the neurobiology of antidepressants. He is known for using sophisticated optical imaging methods to study how drugs such as ketamine and psilocybin modify the structure and function of brain circuitry. His research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals including Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and Biological Psychiatry. He has a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University.

You can follow Alex on Twitter at @kwanalexc. For further reading, he and his colleagues have written an introduction to psychedelics, intended to be concise and accessible to everyone. Details of his research can be found on the website of his research lab.

Stephen Ross, MD, is Research Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Dr. Ross is a founding member of the NYU Psychedelic Research Group and is currently associate director of the NYU Langone Health (NYULH) Center for Psychedelic Medicine and director of the NYULH Psychedelic Medicine Research Training Program. In 21 years at NYU and Bellevue, Dr Ross has been involved in a variety of leadership roles in administration, teaching and research. He previously served as Director of the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in the Psychiatry Department at Bellevue Hospital Center for 12 years, Director of Addiction Psychiatry at NYULH/Tisch Hospital, Director of the NYU Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship, Director of the Bellevue Inpatient Dual Diagnosis Training Unit, and Director of the Bellevue Opioid Overdose Prevention Program. Dr Ross’s main research interests focus on developing novel pharmacologic-psychosocial approaches to treating: addictive disorders, including the intersection between pain and addiction; psychiatric and existential distress associated with advanced or terminal cancer; major depression; PTSD; and personality disorders. Dr Ross is principal investigator or co-principal investigator on several ongoing and completed psychedelic-focused studies at NYULH including: phase II RCT of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in patients with life-threatening cancer-related psychiatric and existential distress, phase I/II RCT of LSD-assisted psychotherapy in advanced cancer pain syndromes, phase II RCT of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in alcohol use disorder, phase I/II controlled trial administering psilocybin to religious professionals, and phase II RCT of psilocybin treatment for Major Depressive Disorder. Dr Ross also acts as a co-investigator and study therapist for phase II/III trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, and is an expert in cannabinoid therapeutics and PI of a NIDA funded study of CBD administration in patients with chronic radicular pain on chronic opioid therapy.

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