Acid Test

05/06/2024

After two decades of extraordinary and extraordinarily successful clinical trials using M**A and psychotherapy to treat otherwise untreatable PTSD, overseen from start to end by the FDA, an “independent” panel has advised the agency to throw out the positive results of three phases of trials with several thousand subjects and deny approval. The panel’s reasoning is that though the trials showed the vast majority of subjects had significant and lasting improvement, those results could not be trusted, for two reasons. One: They claim the fact that the doses of M**A were combined with a what they described as a grab bag of therapeutic techniques made it impossible to know how much of the improvements might have been due to the talk therapy and not the effects of the drug. Two: Since like all psychedelics, M**A has a unique impact on consciousness, most trial subjects knew whether they had been given M**A or the placebo, making a double-blind (in which neither the therapists nor the patients knew which subjects were given the test drug) impossible to attain.
To the first point, it was not a grab bag of therapeutic techniques, but one highly delineated approach documented in a treatment manual and inculcated in extensive training for all study therapists. Secondly, and perhaps most important, is the criticism of the failure of a full blinding. If a drug impacts conscious experience in a unique and unmistakable way, there is no way to disguise it. Should that mean that any such drug, no matter how beneficial, should be banned because of it?
There is still a strong possibility the FDA, which as mentioned earlier has closely monitored this research through all three phases of trials and has consulted on the design from day one, will dismiss the panel’s recommendation when it meets in August, approving the M**A therapy model. If they don’t, accepting the panel’s recommendation, they are dooming millions of Americans to suffer from a debilitating and sometimes life destroying illness who might otherwise find relief from a process that has proven to be effective and remarkably safe over two decades.

04/05/2024

Twenty-five years ago, Simon and Schuster published ‘Old Souls: Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation From Children Who. Recall Past Lives.’ The book considers the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, a University of Virginia psychiatrist who, in the last four decades of the 20th Century, traveled the world — from Lebanon to India to the American suburbs — investigating and documenting thousands of cases of small children who spontaneously spoke of previous lives. They pined for mothers and husbands and mistresses from another life and knew things about the people they claimed to have been that there seemed no normal way for them to have known. Despite files full of first-hand accounts corroborated by multiple witnesses and official documents, Stevenson’s work was essentially ignored by mainstream scientists. In the late 1990s, I spent months investigating Stevenson’s cases, and accompanied him on several extensive field trips, the first — and last — journalist ever to do so. Initially anticipating I would find him to be either a fraud or an incompetent, what I saw persuaded me he was neither, and though I was not absolutely persuaded that reincarnation was real, no matter how hard I tried, I could find no convincing alternate explanation for this strange phenomenon. Twenty-five years later, countless more of these cases have surfaced, as evidenced by Caitlin Gibson’s terrific story in The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2024/05/02/children-past-lives/)
but there is still no good scientific explanation for them, other than an unscientific insistence that reincarnation is impossible and therefore these cases must be frauds or delusions.

Barely a month goes by without an invitation for me to speak on somebody’s podcast, and I still get dozens of letters from both readers and people who know a child who seems to speak about previous lives. In all these interviews, and most of the correspondences, there is one consistent point of curiosity: After all I have seen, and all my research, what did I personally believe?

I have never answered that fully, until now. Simon and Schuster is republishing Old Souls in a 25th anniversary edition June 3. For that, my editor asked me to write an afterword that would lay that question to rest. It took me a lot of soul-searching and five thousand words, but I believe I finally got there.
An adaptation of the afterword will run in Psychology Today in July. I’ll post that here when it does.

What happens when your toddler is haunted by memories that aren’t hers?

17/02/2024

There's an interesting article https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-psychedelics-produce-some-of-the-most-meaningful-experiences-in-people-s-lives/ar-AA1kQ4of?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=20640f60e6b74788b55ae26e095bf4c5&ei=43 on how psychedelics seem to infuse the world with meaningful experience.
It includes this passage:

Like in bouts of psychosis, psychedelic-induced meaning can be found everywhere and anywhere. It’s no longer dependent on an external trigger that the sober mind would also find meaningful, like the birth of a child. On psychedelics, I could stare at tree bark for three hours, or dirt, or the back of my eyelids, and feel that I’ve discovered the hidden order behind all phenomena. It seems like it’s not particular things that are imbued with meaning, but the whole of perception itself. “I might call it a misattribution of meaning, where everything gets imbued with a sense of meaningfulness,” Manoj Doss, a research fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “A lot of times I can attribute the noeticism I’m getting to a memory. We’re usually good at aiming these feelings of knowing. But sometimes they get cut loose. Under psychedelics, I think there’s this misattribution process, where the prefrontal cortex is sending that off in all kinds of different directions where they don’t make sense.”

It was interesting to me that the writer referred derisively to the experience of staring at tree bark and discovering the hidden order of the universe. I've had that exact experience -- looking at the bark of a tree, I saw the tree pulsing with life, breathing. I didn't experience it as a semi-inanimate chunk of wood, but a living, breathing being. Ask an arborist which is the more accurate impression -- chunk of wood or living being. There's no question which is the reality, and it ain't chunk of wood. Likewise when I perceived the simple light of day not as mundane reality, but as a substance pouring from the sky, an inexhaustible gift of life-giving energy free to all, it was not "a misattribution of meaning," it was a psychedelic assisted insight into a profound truth to which we are so often blind.

No doubt, people emerge from psychedelic experiences with all kinds of crazy ideas. But I would argue that's not the fault of psychedelics, it owes not to the experience itself, but to a not fully prepared or integrated attempt to interpret it after the fact. Psychedelics allow you to glimpse a more profound view of reality. Making sense of that is the work of a lifetime.

17/02/2024

There's an interesting article https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-psychedelics-produce-some-of-the-most-meaningful-experiences-in-people-s-lives/ar-AA1kQ4of?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=20640f60e6b74788b55ae26e095bf4c5&ei=43 on how psychedelics seem to infuse the world with meaningful experience.
It includes this passage:

Like in bouts of psychosis, psychedelic-induced meaning can be found everywhere and anywhere. It’s no longer dependent on an external trigger that the sober mind would also find meaningful, like the birth of a child. On psychedelics, I could stare at tree bark for three hours, or dirt, or the back of my eyelids, and feel that I’ve discovered the hidden order behind all phenomena. It seems like it’s not particular things that are imbued with meaning, but the whole of perception itself. “I might call it a misattribution of meaning, where everything gets imbued with a sense of meaningfulness,” Manoj Doss, a research fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “A lot of times I can attribute the noeticism I’m getting to a memory. We’re usually good at aiming these feelings of knowing. But sometimes they get cut loose. Under psychedelics, I think there’s this misattribution process, where the prefrontal cortex is sending that off in all kinds of different directions where they don’t make sense.”

It was interesting to me that the writer referred derisively to the experience of staring at tree bark and discovering the hidden order of the universe. I've had that exact experience -- looking at the bark of a tree, I saw the tree pulsing with life, breathing. I didn't experience it as a semi-inanimate chunk of wood, but a living, breathing being. Ask an arborist which is the more accurate impression -- chunk of wood or living being. There's no question which is the reality, and it ain't chunk of wood. Likewise when I perceived the simple light of day not as mundane reality, but as a substance pouring from the sky, an inexhaustible gift of life-giving energy free to all, it was not "a misattribution of meaning," it was a psychedelic assisted insight into a profound truth to which we are so often blind.

No doubt, people emerge from psychedelic experiences with all kinds of crazy ideas. But I would argue that's not the fault of psychedelics, it owes not to the experience itself, but to a not fully prepared or integrated attempt to interpret it after the fact. Psychedelics allow you to glimpse a more profound view of reality. Making sense of that is the work of a lifetime.

Everything seems profound on psychedelics. Scientists are starting to ask why.

29/01/2024

The latest confirmation of the efficacy of psychedelic therapy in the treatment of trauma disorders.

A new study offers big clues about where psychedelics’ superpowers come from.

16/12/2023

The day when psychedelic therapy will become a powerful tool to alleviate human suffering is drawing closer.

MAPS Public Benefit Corp. is seeking FDA approval of M**A in combination with therapy to treat PTSD, in what would be the first treatment of its kind.

17/10/2023

A pioneer of the psychedelic renais gone, but what he accomplished is only beginning

The drugs had been the third rail of scientific inquiry. But in a landmark study, he saw them as a legitimate way to help alleviate suffering and even to reach a mystical state.

28/08/2023

Tennis is one of the great loves of my life. I really enjoyed the opportunity to write about one of my favorite players for the Times.

The people who coached Frances Tiafoe as a child said they could see even then that he would become one of the world’s top players. But how did they know?

21/08/2023

In a way, this was the most unusual interview I’ve ever given. I thought he’d want to talk about one of my books, but I’m not sure they were even mentioned. Which made it a lot more fun.

‎Show My Wakeup Call with Dr. Mark Goulston, Ep Ep 539 - Tom Shroder - Aug 21, 2023

05/08/2023

A nicely done story on one of the burgeoning number of studies showing the value of psychedelic assisted therapy.

A Rockville cancer clinic is at the forefront of new efforts.

08/02/2023

Considering the fear and loathing with which psychedelics were viewed by the mainstream when I began working on writing Acid Test 15 years ago, this reads almost like science fiction:

Many women hope to treat their depression, anxiety and trauma with therapeutic psychedelic medicine.

14/01/2023

Prince Harry said something really insightful about how psychedelics helped him overcome depression. In fact I believe it’s the key to their healing power. “They didn’t simply allow me to escape reality for a while, they let me redefine reality.”