Amidst an unfolding resurgence of psychedelic research, there is the opportunity to discuss new approaches for integrating psychedelics into both academia and society. In partnership with the newly founded Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) at The Ohio State University, the editors of this special issue convened the Psychedemia, 2022 conference as a rigorous interdisciplinary symposium for exchanging ideas, evaluating dominant perspectives, and critiquing current approaches to developing social frameworks for psychedelic use.

Psychedelic scholarship is racing forward in clinical research, neuroscience, and pharmacology. At the same time, academics in varied disciplines from history and philosophy to anthropology and the arts are developing new ideas and syntheses, drawing on the humanities to situate psychedelics within the settings of our cultural landscapes. Given that psychedelic experiences defy disciplinary bounds, there is great value in diverse academic perspectives for the co-creation of theory, policy, and methodology. As psychedelic scholarship breaks into mainstream acceptance, the psychedelic medical market has been projected variously to reach valuations in the billions within a decade (FinancialNewsMedia, 2021). In this context, academics play an important role in identifying and articulating the concerns of diverse stakeholders as new industries build systems for psychedelic access with social, legal, economic, and environmental consequences.

Our conference built on the vision of its first iteration, which convened at the University of Pennsylvania a decade prior with a $10,000 grant from the Perelman School of Medicine (Psychedemia, 2013). In 2011, a handful of graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania collaborated with community members in Philadelphia to found one of the earliest psychedelic societies. The following year, they initiated the first university-sponsored, interdisciplinary academic conference on the study of psychedelics since the return of human trials in the late 20th century, with inspiration from Breaking Convention in the United Kingdom. The first Psychedemia was an attempt to realize the vision of an interdisciplinary academic field of Psychedelic Studies before such a field was formalized. As Psychedemia's founder Neşe Devenot (née Şenol) wrote in “A Declaration of Psychedelic Studies” (2011): “At this inertial juncture in history, I propose the inauguration of Psychedelic Studies as an interdisciplinary field” (Devenot, 2013; Şenol, 2011).

Psychedemia 2012 constructed a rigorous, interdisciplinary foundation for the study of psychedelics as a potent catalyst of experience. At a time when clinical research on psychedelics was just reemerging, that conference was notable for giving equal weight to the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. By the time of its second iteration—ten years and thousands of peer-reviewed papers later—mainstream recognition of the significance of psychedelics had changed institutions, cultural practices, and conceptions of healing (Pleet, White, Zamaria, & Yehuda, 2023; Schenberg, 2018; Wolswijk, 2021). Psychedelic Studies—now actualized—remains at an inflection point, which heightens the stakes of facilitating cross-disciplinary communication about this field and its possibilities (Bartlett, Vallely, Williams, Nepton, & Feng, 2023).

Psychedemia, 2022 was organized at The Ohio State University in the broad interdisciplinary spirit of the first Psychedemia. Academic sessions convened on topics ranging from Phenomenology to Political Philosophy and Policy, from Attitudes and Beliefs to Terence McKenna. The session on Pedagogy provided a crucial venue for sharing and visioning the flourishing of psychedelic studies education. With keynote lectures from Alicia Danforth, James Davies, Yarelix Estrada, and William Leonard Pickard, Psychedemia showcased diverse voices with deep roots in psychedelia and perspectives that extend beyond it. Representatives from 10 psychedelic research centers participated, including the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Mount Sinai's Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research, The University of Texas at Austin's Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy, University of Wisconsin-Madison's Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances, UCSF's Translational Psychedelic Research Program, the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, the University of Toronto's Psychedelic Studies Research Program, Duke University's Center for Integrated Psychedelic Science, the NYU Langone Health Center for Psychedelic Medicine, and OSU's CPDRE. Each center sent delegates to the culminating panel of the conference: “Charting the Future of Psychedelic Studies: An Assembly of Psychedelic Research Centers” (Psychedemia, 2022). During the panel conversation about each center's mission and goals, common threads emerged emphasizing the significance of collaboration, open science, and rigorous peer review in advancing psychedelic research and education. While education was not a focus of all participating centers, there was consensus that education and research should progress in collaboration. Acknowledging the gap between the current state of research and ongoing popular misconceptions about psychedelics, the discussion emphasized that evidence-based educational initiatives will be crucial for evolving the theory and practice of Psychedelic Studies and of psychedelic-assisted therapy (P-AT), respectively. In this Special Issue, we share selected perspectives from and inspired by Psychedemia, 2022 in the spirit of interdisciplinary scholarship:

Emma Stamm—now an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at SUNY Farmingdale—had not yet started graduate school when she attended the first Psychedemia conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. In her opening commentary, she describes the significance of both Psychedemia conferences for the broader field of Psychedelic Studies, arguing that each version of the conference reflected (and informed) a different stage of the field's development. Back in 2012, Psychedemia envisioned an interdisciplinary field that did not yet exist, to the extent that the first conference felt “technically impossible” as it buzzed with activity in its Ivy League surroundings. As Stamm notes, that feat was all the more remarkable for its emphasis on incorporating marginalized discourses from the humanities and arts, at a time when the resurgence of psychedelic science was just starting to acquire mainstream recognition. As a consequence of this incorporation, Psychedemia 2012 emphasized critical and reflexive perspectives on what it means to construct knowledge about a subject matter whose effects are deeply influenced by its contexts. The interdisciplinary implications of this question prefigured the range of topics explored during Psychedemia, 2022, which paired updates on psychedelic science with investigations of the cultural, sociological, and political dimensions of the field. Stamm's analysis ends by looking forward to the field's future, at a time when financial and ideological interests are competing to control the mainstream narratives. For Stamm, if we continue to embrace the multiplicity of possibilities that is inherent to psychedelics as non-specific agents of change, Psychedemia—and the now-actual interdisciplinary field it represents—will continue catalyzing new possibilities for knowledge generation through acts of solidarity.

In electing our keynotes for Psychedemia, 2022, we opted to invite some speakers who worked outside of the field of Psychedelic Studies whose expertise offered insightful perspectives for the field's development. James Davies was one such keynote, since his research explored how the poor treatment practices driven by for-profit incentives in global healthcare systems limited the effectiveness of SSRIs and other antidepressant pharmaceuticals (Davies, 2022; Ioannidis, 2008; Kemp, Lickel, & Deacon, 2014). In this issue, James Davies, Brian Pace, and Neşe Devenot extended this research to argue that psychedelic hype (Yaden, Potash, & Griffiths, 2022) works to mythologize, market, and institutionalize psychedelic-assisted therapy to fit a neoliberal medical paradigm that prioritizes profit over human wellbeing. Despite exuberant predictions that the broadscale application of P-AT will represent a sea change for mental health, they propose that narratives promoting P-AT nevertheless enact the same profit-maximization tactics that have been associated with undesirable outcomes for traditional pharmaceuticals. Further, they state that “corporadelic” actors are still positioning socially-determined mental distress as something best medicated, rather than as a signal for a necessary reorganization of society, despite claims that the approach is novel. As Davies explored in his prior research, powerful sociopolitical mechanisms have already undermined the effectiveness of SSRIs and other antidepressants by transforming mental and emotional suffering into that which is useful or nonthreatening to the status quo (Davies, 2022). Now, these authors argue, the same mechanisms are at work in the discourse of psychedelic medicine. Among these mechanisms, they posit that “depoliticization” protects the economic order from critique by offering P-AT as an antidote to its destructive mental health externalities. The authors propose that like SSRIs before them, market forces and private interests are in the process of “productivizing” psychedelics in a manner that helps capitalism run more smoothly, with the hyped rhetoric around microdosing and career-centered vision quests idealizing habits and activities that yield productivity and profit (i.e., “grindset”). The flipside of this, they argue, has been the effort by advocates of P-AT to exorcise the weird from psychedelics, pathologizing recreational use as frivolous and wasteful at best, if not outright dangerous. They infer that psychedelic hype has grown to hyperbolic proportions by mythologizing its powers to take patients on a heroic journey of personal salvation, which ultimately deemphasizes collective action. The authors warn that environmental determinants of mental distress cannot be medicated away and will not be fixed one P-AT session at a time. Instead, they propose that collective organization to build a more livable world would improve people's mental health far more than normalizing a few dosed sessions with a therapist.

In the process of researching that paper with Davies and Pace, Neşe Devenot discovered connections between the rhetoric of psychedelic and artificial intelligence (AI) hype that required a new paper. In “TESCREAL hallucinations,” Devenot argues that leaders within these nascent industries spin grandiose visions that position their products and services as solutions to myriad social ills—despite evidence that the proposed deployment of these “solutions” would exacerbate the root causes of those problems. While funders and thought leaders in these industries assert that both technologies can succeed at reversing ecological collapse, reducing political polarization, or curbing the proliferation of fascism, Devenot observes that these phenomena have been connected to wealth inequality. According to the author, this root cause of inequality could actually accelerate if the ideological constructs that are currently driving these industries succeed at monopolizing their respective technologies. The author asserts that instead of addressing the underlying causes of inequality, major backers are intentionally fostering wealth extraction through both industries. Devenot identifies an elitist and colonial set of Silicon Valley ideologies that justify this wealth extraction in both industries. These industries are encapsulated by the TESCREAL bundle, an acronym coined by critical AI scholars Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru to elucidate the overlap between belief systems linking transhumanism to Effective Altruism and longtermism. Devenot describes the TESCREAList worldview as tantamount to the “court philosophy” of the global oligarchic class, since it resolves material contradictions with illusory images of a brighter future, through inner space and beyond.

Drawing on embodied cognition, critical phenomenology, and neuroanthropology, Kai Blevins' analysis reads enculturation and socialization as intrinsically embodied processes—an orientation that resists the conventional binaries between biology and sociality and between body and environment. Since social categories (including race and ethnicity, age, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, kinship, and nationality) shape the structures of subjective experience, Blevins argues that psychedelic studies must attend to the ways that such categories structure the possibilities for psychedelic experiences. Approaching subjectivity as “a bodymind in context,” Blevins highlights how social categories inform the development of the body's sensory-motor systems, which in turn structure the possibilities for future experiences in an ongoing process of intersubjective socialization. In light of this argument, Blevins calls for structural changes to the field of psychedelic studies, as advocated by many of the presentations at Psychedemia, 2022. In particular, they argue that the field's historical focus on ego dissolution and other “peak” psychedelic states has often obscured the ways that embodied differences structure the possibilities for all lived experience, including these constructs.

Tahlia Harrison's study begins from the recognition that P-AT might amplify risks to patients due to the unique vulnerabilities associated with altered states of consciousness, citing instances of harm in clinical trials of MDMA. The stakes of adequately communicating these risks to patients is high, especially since P-AT is anticipated as a treatment option for PTSD, which disproportionately impacts historically marginalized groups with preexisting vulnerabilities to abuses of power and barriers to accountability in the event of harm (Viña & Stephens, 2023). To assess whether these risks are communicated sufficiently within clinical trials—research contexts that are contributing to standards for ensuring safety for any future FDA-approved treatments—Harrison set out to review Informed Consent Forms (ICFs) for clinical trials involving MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and ketamine. Harrison recounts her process of identifying and analyzing 19 available ICFs, with a focus on determining how safety protocols, accountability processes, and potential risks and benefits were communicated to participants. Although she found that ICFs were federally compliant, she identified consistent gaps in addressing “psychedelic-specific” themes pertaining to risks, benefits, safety, and accountability. For instance, some trials did not identify clear opportunities for participants to leave the dosing room in the event of harm or abuse by a clinician. Without explicitly accounting for this possibility, protocols risk re-traumatizing patients who feel trapped with an abusive clinician. Among the protocols that addressed the potential need for early termination, some required participants to identify a trusted support person to attend participant, while others offered supervision by a therapy team member or routing to a local hospital. Citing the diverse patient populations who may eventually seek out P-AT, Harrison identifies potential implementation barriers with these proposed solutions. To maximize protections against abuses of power, Harrison makes concrete recommendations for future clinical trial reporting, including publication of professional disclosure statements and a client bill of rights. Harrison emphasizes that many trials did not publish their ICFs, which presents a barrier to carrying out ethical analyses of these studies. As a result, Harrison's research makes a case for more consistent publishing standards on the full protocols and processes involved in psychedelic clinical trials.

Examining the views of those who would be tasked with implementing P-AT once approved, Stacey Armstrong, Adam Levin, Yitong Xin, Jordan Horan, Jason Luoma, Paul Nagib, Brian Pilecki, and Alan Davis investigated attitudes and beliefs about P-AT in social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists to better understand differences in beliefs among these disciplines. Given that medical psychedelic treatment typically involves interdisciplinary teams of healthcare providers, further elucidation of attitudes and beliefs about psychedelic therapy could help facilitate educational and training programs for future clinicians that provide P-AT. Using response data collected across three surveys, the authors tested their hypothesis that—due to the unique history and ongoing criminalization and stigmatization of psychedelics—mental health professionals would hold conservative views about P-AT. This is the first analysis of mental health professionals' self-reported understanding of P-AT and their beliefs about P-AT's potential to enable long-lasting improvements. Armstrong and colleagues' study revealed that although mental health professionals share similar levels of belief in the effectiveness of P-AT, other responses were inconsistent, both between and within professional groups. The authors reason that some differences in perception could reflect contrasts between how social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists manage their own clients and practices, which could influence assumptions about the provision of P-AT. However, they note that differences in opinion between these professions could also mirror ongoing disagreements about P-AT within and across these fields. Overall, the authors emphasize that their results highlight the degree to which cross-disciplinary education is required to meet the information needs of clinicians based on the current state of research on P-AT.

Robert Villa documents the biocultural (ecological and cultural) history and conservation challenges of the Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius, syn. Bufo alvarius). The toad was made internationally famous in the 21st century, decades after the 1983 discovery of its unique ability to secrete poison (popularly identified as "venom," secretions hereafter) containing potent and readily smokable quantities of 5-MeO-DMT. In this work, Villa documents the natural history and ecology of this long-lived toad, which is now complicated and threatened by high demand for its secretions. Villa relates how the origin of this demand started in 1981, when an archeologist's conjecture about toad remains inspired Ken Nelson to self-experiment by smoking the dried secretions of I. alvarius two years later. This first experiment led Nelson to comb through the biochemical literature, which demonstrated the tryptamine content of I. alvarius glands. Assured of both the active ingredient and its psychoactive effects, he published his experiences in a how-to pamphlet under a pseudonym. Notably, even this initial pamphlet warned that the identification of toad psychoactivity could threaten toad conservation, since the desire for venom would likely overwhelm a fragile desert ecosystem. As anticipated, readers of Nelson's DIY guide to toad milking tried smoking the resulting secretions themselves. Across diverse accounts, users reported profound spiritual experiences, often with therapeutic efficacy for substance use disorders. Scholars were quick to take these distinctly modern use cases as confirmation of psychedelic use in ancient Indigenous ritual practice. Still, despite its notable inclusion in Mesoamerican myths and iconography, evidence for a role of I. alvarius in the Mesoamerican pharmacopeia remains absent. Villa details the evidence that the present market for toad secretions is driven in part by a fabricated veneer of Indigeneity that unscrupulous facilitators have traded upon. Some such facilitators have left their charges traumatized, or worse—deceased. Villa asks that we consider contemporary toad psychedelia in this light: while its practices are experimental and potentially therapeutic, it poses significant dangers for both toads and those who use toad secretions. These stakes become higher each year, as global demand and endorsements from celebrity influencers are likely contributing to reported declines in Sonoran Desert toad populations (Kutz, 2021). With synthetic 5-MeO-DMT as a viable alternative, Villa argues that the sustainable path forward for the Sonoran Desert toad must take a biocultural perspective: one that makes use of strategic legislation, increased public awareness, investments in conservation sciences, and a commitment to ecological stewardship.