Specialist Panel - MEDICALISATION AND RECIPROCITY IN PSYCHEDELIC TREATMENT @Medicine Festival '21

'Psychedelics in a changing World: medicalisation, reciprocity and planetary healing' With: Ben Sessa, Gabriel Amezcua, Nick von Christierson, David Luke, Andrea Langlois & Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner.

This is a recording of a fascinating panel chaired by Chasing Consciousness in the talks tent of Medicine Festival programmed by Ruby Reed. It included psychologists, psychiatrists, psychedelic entrepreneurs and activists at the top of their field. The panel gave a nuanced and positive overview of the issues associated with the now inevitable medicalisation of these psychedelic compounds. With great sensitivity they approached the very difficult issue of how to honour the roots of this therapy in indigenous shamanism, without reducing it to just money or token indigenous board members. Despite positive predictions for the future it became clear by the end of the talk just how complex the issue of reciprocity is.

You can check our interview with Ashleigh Murphy Beiner of the Imperial College team on 'Testing psychedelics for depression' here. And look out for future interviews with panelists Dr. Ben Sessa and David Luke to come soon!

00:00 Introduction to the speakers

02:49 Medicalisation: Just a success story or are there shadows to call out early in the process?

03:10 Ben Sessa: safe, effective medicines as alternatives to long term pharmaceutical

05:00 Getting to the root cause of the problem rather than papering over the symptoms

06:40 'A psychiatric renaissance'

09:20 Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner: Learning from the shadow to confront worldwide depression

15:40 Designing ethical psychedelic treatment models that match its uniqueness

16:15 David Luke: Biomedical model VS subjective psychological model

18:00 Bio-Psycho-social-spiritual models may not work with medicalisation

21:00 Nick Van Christiersen of Woven Science

22:00 Being inspired by Indigenous models: Diagnosis, preparation, peak experience, integration in community

23:00 Psychedelic treatment is a threat to big pharma

24:00 Andrea Langlois: Keeping the door more widely open than just to medicalisation

25:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Accessibility, decolonisation, inclusion of indigenous people in the medical process

28:00 Andrea Langlois: The indigenous idea of Reciprocity. The ailments of modern society like depression and climate change are a call to come back into a relationship of reciprocity with Gaia

31:00 Risk of hijacking of reciprocity, to green wash profiteering

32:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Giving and getting, participation, engagement, respect not money

36:00 Do you think they really want to be ‘preserved’!?

39:00 Nick Van Christiersen: reparations before reciprocity

42:00 David Luke: Is it our right to give them to have a seat at the table!?

45:00 Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner: We have so much to learn and adapt from the indigenous methodology

47:00 The newly founded Association for Psychedelic Therapies

48:00 Ben Sessa: Reciprocity between carer and patient

53:00 Andrea Langlois: Indigenous knowledge should be understood as science and decriminalised

59:00 Ben Sessa: Getting it over the line - decriminalisation

1:01:50 David Luke: Changing our whole world view through psychedelics, to reboot the culture of a species in crisis

1:06:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Psychedelics are confined mostly to privileged white people when they are most needed by vulnerable minorities

1:08:00 De-Regulation of substances, accessibility for poor communities with trauma and PTSD

1:11:00 Andrea Langlois: Earth practice and our own western relationship with plants and the natural world

1:18:00 Closing comments