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Lia Kantrowitz
Health


I WENT TO A HIGH-END PSYCHEDELIC RETREAT TO ADDRESS MY ANXIETY


As more people become interested in trying psychedelics, spa-like retreats are
popping up all over the world. Should people with mental health issues feel safe
trying them?

by Shayla Love
January 29, 2020, 8:13pm
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On a Saturday afternoon last year, I sat in a 100-year-old renovated church in
Zandvoort, a coastal town in The Netherlands, and ate about 30 milligrams of
psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

This was out of character. I haven't taken drugs since my early 20s. I relish
the feeling of being in absolute control, and recoil at uncertainty. Handing
over my brain and sense of reality to a fungus was terrifying. And yet I had
come to a legal psilocybin retreat to do just that.

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For the past year or so, I’ve been reporting on the resurgence of psychedelic
research. People with treatment-resistant depression, addiction, and terminal
illness-related anxiety have been finding what sounds like incredible relief
from these drugs. As someone with anxiety and OCD, I was curious if mushrooms
could release me from maladaptive habits, and the ruminating thoughts that seem
to stay with me no matter how many years of therapy I do.



I was not alone in my intention; the 14 others at the retreat didn’t travel from
all over the world to take shrooms recreationally. During our introductions,
many talked about wanting an improved mental quality of life, accessing higher
levels of spirituality, or finding ways to address a feeling that something was
missing. About half had never taken psychedelics, and had no interest in doing
so until reading about the resurgence of psychedelic medicine in outlets like
The New Yorker or The Economist. Nearly everyone mentioned being influenced by
journalist Michael Pollan’s recent book, How to Change Your Mind, a best-seller
that chronicles the recent spike in research.

Psychedelics may be infiltrating the educated elite’s reading lists, but taking
these drugs in a formal setting with doctors administering them is still
difficult. The trials in the U.K. have thousands of people on their waiting
lists, including people who already participated and want to do it again, said
Rosalind Watts, a psychologist at Imperial College London's psilocybin
depression study. “At the end of every lecture I give, there is a line of people
saying, ‘I really need to try this. Where can I go?’” Watts told me.

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In the face of this demand, psychedelic retreats are stepping in to fill the
gap. They are scattered around the world, usually in places with legal
loopholes. In the Netherlands, for example, truffles—the base of the
mushroom—are legal, and that’s what we consumed.

I went to a retreat called Synthesis. It cost $2,000 for three days (they waived
my fee, and VICE paid only for the transportation to and from Amsterdam). It
provided impeccably designed, modern accommodations—with a sauna, vegetarian
chef, and an ever-flowing supply of herbal teas. The retreat consisted of one
day of preparation, one day when we took the truffles, and a day dedicated to
integration, or processing our experience. There were four facilitators to guide
15 clients, and two of them were licensed mental health clinicians. There was a
medic present on the day of our trip.

The Lighthouse interior. Courtesy of Synthesis.

Retreats are advertised as places for mental transformation and growth. But the
experience at a retreat can be very different from a clinical trial. There is no
precedent for what a psychedelic retreat is "supposed" to be, or what kind of
support it’s required to provide. Synthesis is on the responsible and safe end
of the spectrum; there are other retreats with no trained psychologists or
doctors, where facilitators take mushrooms with their attendees. Some completely
lack sufficient screening for more serious mental health disorders.

As psychedelics continue to shed their dated, Nixon-era reputation, a new
generation of interested users will seek these drugs out. They are people like
me: nervous about taking psychedelics illegally or unsupervised, not necessarily
interested in the recreational effects, but excited about the medical promise.
Within this group will also be people (like me) with varying levels of mental
health disorders, who have come across ongoing psychedelic research and can’t or
won't wait for regulatory approval.

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As such, retreats risk becoming a testing ground for unresolved questions around
these drugs as treatment: How much support does a person need during a trip
intended for mental healing? Should that support come from psychologists and
psychiatrists—or shamans? Is it better to take these drugs in groups, or alone?
What’s the right dose? What about microdosing? Is a medical trip different from
a recreational one? Is there a way to predict who will have a difficult trip?

I went to Synthesis not only to see what mushrooms could do for my life, but to
ask what the looming psychedelic wellness movement will look like—not just in a
clinical context, but as a burgeoning form of medical tourism and DIY mental
healthcare.

Over the three days, I did observe others having the kind of transcendent
moments I had read so much about. But what I went through was something
different. My trip was not fun. It was highly emotional, painful, and at
moments, approached being deeply therapeutic—but perhaps not as much as it could
have.

I’m far too anxious to have ever considered going to a different kind of
retreat—say, an ayahuasca retreat in the Brazilian jungle somewhere. That kind
of retreat is centuries old, and steeped in cultural meaning, but also includes
vomiting, sleeping outside, and eating unfamiliar foods. Synthesis was
different: It had amenities. Showers. A bed. Fruit-infused water. A Dutch chef
named Lotta, who brought in bushels of organic produce each morning.

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Synthesis is the first wave of a new kind of psychedelic retreat. It aligns its
mission with burgeoning science and research projects, not just the mystical.
Synthesis copies many of the practices at Imperial College London—one of the
world’s best medical centers working on psychedelics—when administering
psilocybin, and collaborates with researchers there, providing data on the
experiences of people who take psychedelics in group settings. But this creates
a somewhat confusing hybrid. Is it a spa? A vacation? A research study? A
doctor’s appointment? A therapy session?



This new breed of retreat is still substantially different from an actual
research trial. At Imperial, for example, participants go through an extensive
screening process, where they discuss their mental health, and also their
childhoods and past trauma, which starts to build trust with the therapists,
Watts told me. There are about five hours of one-on-one preparation with a
therapist. Subjects take psilocybin twice, with two guides assigned to each
person, usually a psychologist and psychiatrist. There are two hours of
integration following each dose, and three follow-up Skype calls, each an hour
long.

Watts acknowledged that not everyone needs that. The retreat setting is in a
group, with less prep time and individualized attention,which could be fine for
most people. "But some people might need more," Watts said. "Certainly for
people that have a history of lifelong depression, then they for sure would need
a lot more than that.”

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I met Gemma, a 31-year-old designer who lives in Portland, in the car that
brought us from the train station in Amsterdam to Zandvoort. She later told me
that she has had depression since she was a teenager. From 18 to 28 she was on
and off a variety of antidepressants.

Many of the newer psychedelic retreats don't recommend that those with serious
mental health issues attend. At Synthesis, every participant has to complete a
health screener ahead of time. Myles Katz, co-founder of Synthesis, told me they
turn away about half of the people who apply.

Synthesis's medical screener asked Gemma about depression, and when she was open
about her history, they asked her some follow up questions about her mental
health. “But I don’t really know where I am mentally, to be honest,” she said.
“I go to work every day. I go out and socialize. I’m not in bed every day and I
have not been institutionalized. However, I have lived feeling this way for so
long that I am in this space where I get used to the way I am.”

Though retreats are technically for so-called "healthy normals," on every
psilocybin retreat website I looked at, including Synthesis, they advertise
themselves as places of mental healing. (Along with a due-diligence caveat
saying that they are not providing official medical care.) “Your body and mind
knows how to heal itself; psilocybin allows us to trust ourselves again,”
Truffles Therapy in Mexico wrote. “The only requirement is your willingness to
surrender your ideas and let nature do what she does best.”

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Buena Vida retreat, also in Mexico:

> "Do you find that your regimen of mental health, therapy & SSRI medication is
> just helping you 'get by' but not truly BREAK THROUGH?…Have you suffered from
> depression, anxiety or PTSD for so long…you can’t even remember feeling
> good?…Those looking to heal chronic depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, lack
> of creativity, PTSD or even simply a lack of purpose in their lives are sure
> to benefit from a safe session with psilocybin mushrooms.”

This framing can end up attracting people who have mental illness histories. As
Gemma approached 30, she started to explore natural and alternative medicines,
seeing naturopaths and getting into yoga and supplements. Her naturopath asked
if she had heard of microdosing, and she started to read about psychedelics,
right around the time Michael Pollan’s book came out. One Friday night, home
alone, she came across the Synthesis website.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing.’ You read about all this stuff, but
here’s a place I can go and I can do this,” she said. “People say it was almost
like this cure for depression. I know it doesn’t specifically say that on the
website, but you read so many positive things and it starts to make sense. I was
like, ‘I have to do this.’ I remember feeling a real sense of like, Wow, my
future could be so much different.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Watch more from VICE:

Using LSD, MDMA and Psilocybin to Treat Mental Health

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We were welcomed to The Lighthouse, as the renovated church is called, by our
guides, Adam, Valerie, James, and Odin. They were dressed, as one might have
expected, in flowy clothes, and had peaceful, earthy vibes.

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Adam, an American yoga instructor and certified Reiki Master who lives in
Berlin, was our lead facilitator. Valerie, a regal brunette from Oakland, is an
LMFT from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), a
psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy certification program; CIIS trainees go to
retreats for hands-on experience as part of their curriculum. Valerie and James,
a British man with a low ponytail and a gentle voice, were the only licensed
therapists at the retreat.

Shortly after arriving, I milled around the cavernous kitchen and living space,
saying awkward, earnest hellos to the other guests. (For their privacy, and so
as not to interfere with the effects of the program, I am only including
testimonies of those who consented to interviews two weeks after the retreat
itself.)

On our day of "preparation," time stretched out long in front of me, and I
itched from anticipation. We talked as a group about our intentions, and the
following day’s plans, or as Adam called it, our “Flight Instructions.”

There was a lot of emphasis on “leaning in” to anything that we might
experience. Adam said to “trust, let go, and be open.” If we were looking for a
mantra, he suggested that we breathe in to “Let,” and exhale to “go.” He assured
us there was no such thing as a bad trip—anything that happened would teach us
something.

The next day, we enacted a kind of tea ceremony, crushing truffles with a mortar
and pestle along with lemon and ginger. We went to the "ceremony room," a large
white room with a skylight and heated floors. There were mattresses for us to
lie on, blankets, and eye shades—to encourage an internal, introspective journey
(this is what most research protocols call for as well). My hands were shaking
as I drank the mushroom tea and spooned the mashed up truffles from the bottom
of the teapot into my mouth. I lay back, and put my eye shade on.

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The ceremony room. Courtesy of Synthesis.

The first hour was completely physically overwhelming. It was as if I was in a
kaleidoscope that someone was shaking rapidly. I felt dizzy and panicked. At one
point, I opened my eyes and saw Adam sitting next to me. It must have been
obvious that I was distressed because he put his hands over me—not touching me,
but doing Reiki. It felt hot, painful, and I didn't like it. I tried to push his
hands away, and he told me to breathe and lean into it. This had the opposite
effect of being calming: I became frantic, and it was suddenly urgent for me
that someone else sit with me instead of him.

The day before, Valerie had told me that if I started to feel overwhelmed, I
could look for her. I asked Adam if he could get her, and he told me that she
had gone to lunch.

I couldn’t understand how that was possible. For a moment, I thought I had
hallucinated it, which terrified me. I was no longer sure of what was going on
around me. I couldn't figure out where I was, or how long it had been—and it was
all rooted in a confusion around Valerie leaving to go out to eat. (I found out
later that all the guides were taking quick 20-minute lunch breaks.) I thought
that my brain was hiding her from me, that it was my own fault that I couldn’t
see the one person who could help me. I existed inside this despair,
self-hatred, and confusion for what felt like hours.

Eventually, Valerie did return from her break, and when she sat down next to me,
I started to cry. I wanted her to hold my hand or touch me so that I could know,
even with my eyes closed, that she was there, but couldn't figure out how to ask
for that.

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After some undetermined amount of time, I managed to request if we could leave
the ceremony room for a break from the music playing over the speakers, which I
found to be overpowering. We went into the living and dining room, where Lotta,
the chef, was chopping food.

Listening to a woman preparing food, and feeling reunited with Valerie, my mind
started to dwell on my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother—the
matriarchal line of women in my family. My mom is Chinese and grew up during the
Cultural Revolution. I had spent time in therapy before talking about the trauma
she went through and my relationship to it. But on shrooms, I started to
experience this in a tangible way that I never have before.



I felt literally connected to all of my female relatives, and started to think
about the stories that I had heard about their childhoods and lives. Snippets
came and went—my great grandmother running her dumpling shop, and then being
forced to become a maid for her husband’s family. My grandmother running away
from home at 12 and living alone in the attic of a library. My grandmother in
the labor camps during the Cultural Revolution. My mother's nanny stealing food
during the Great Starvation.

With my brain going in and out of Communist China, I told Valerie about my
great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother. I felt the searing loneliness
of their neglect, and the starkness of them having to push aside everything
except their survival.

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But while I was experiencing all of this, I also had some level of understanding
that I was not supposed to be out of the ceremony room. Valerie was not supposed
to be only sitting with me. She was one of four people there to take care of 15.
I was taking her away from the group who also needed to be taken care of.

In a moment of lucidity, I looked through the window at the backyard and saw
Gemma, sitting and crying—she looked distraught. I felt horribly guilty for
taking away one of the people there to help her. That knowledge made my journey
harder—and even more so since I was grappling with the themes of care, and my
often-suppressed desire for others to take care of me. Here I was asking for
care, but knowing deep down that I was asking for too much given the context
that I was in.

While I spent most of the day crying, Christopher, a 50-year-old from Monterey,
California, spent it laughing. He said the mushrooms told him he had spent too
much of his life crying and now it was time to laugh, and not feel guilty. In
his journal he wrote, “I’m just going to laugh the whole time. I fucking deserve
it.”

Even within that pleasure, family history came up for him. “I realized very
vividly that my mother is living inside me, and not only is she living inside
me, but the people that live inside of her are in me as well," he said—a
sentiment that reminded me of my own journey. Another line from his journal
read: “I wonder what a fun childhood is like.”

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Two weeks after our trip, Christopher noticed some subtle changes in his life.
He used to react intensely to adverse circumstances, but now finds himself
pausing before he responds. He said he felt a greater sense of connection to
people—even those he doesn’t know. He was not the kind of person to marvel at
the interconnectedness of all things before, but said that now, the instinct to
do so came easily. “I’m not talking about a massive transformation that has
occurred and I’m changed forever,” Christopher said. “It’s a slight shift. It’s
opened up new ways of looking at things and ways of behaving and ways of
responding.”

Ed was 72 when at Synthesis, and is 73 now. He’s a lawyer in Manhattan who had
tried to get into meditation, but there was always some block that he couldn’t
get over. “I thought that this was an enabler to get me over that,” he said.
“All of the answers in the material world weren’t enough. I thought, there has
to be more, but I hadn’t found the more yet.”

Ed also left Synthesis with a great sense of connection. “I had a sense of
knowing, surety, and a sense of peace and great comfort that there is a unity
between me, other people, nature, and the world,” he said. “There was an
overwhelming sense of gratitude for just being alive in this place. Gratitude
for others, and love.”

During his trip, he told me he went to the Ganges with a guru, and conducted a
symphony, hallucinations he experienced in a dream-like fashion.“There was so
much joy during the course of the journey,” he said. "It was this happiness and
joyfulness that had been buried for so many years inside of me. And it was all
coming out. There was this big smile on my face, and the experience of ecstatic
joy— it was overwhelming.”

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The ceremony room. Courtesy of Synthesis.

Gemma's experience was more like mine. She saw some visuals at the beginning,
swirling nature-like things, that made her smile. But after awhile, she wasn’t
completely sure where she was, and was feeling physically very uncomfortable.
“You know that kind of feeling before you get a bug," she said. "You wake up in
the middle of the night and you’re like, something’s wrong with my body. I’m
going to be ill.”

At the start of the ceremony, Gemma tried to let go. But it wasn’t clicking. “I
kept saying to myself, 'Your body will only give you what you can handle.' And,
'What are you trying to teach me?' I wasn’t getting any of those answers," she
said. "Did I have a bad trip? I didn’t see myself dying. I wasn’t terrified or
having horrible visions. I was just quite fearful and anxious.

Out of our group, only Gemma and I had trips that I would define as "difficult."
Is it because we both had pre-existing mental health issues? From Watts’
qualitative work, she’s found that there is a difference between groups of
people that do psychedelics who have psychiatric or traumatic history. “It makes
sense that you have to go through those layers first,” she said.

People take psychedelics every day and don’t have licensed therapists with them.
We don’t require that everyone at Burning Man bring their therapist when they
take a tab of LSD. But these retreats are not just another place for
recreational use. They are intentionally set up for people to have deep and
healing experiences, and by doing so, could be attracting people with mental
health concerns that they want to heal. And in that setting, shouldn't there be
someone present who is an expert at dealing with that?

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A retreat in Jamaica, Mycomeditations, says on its website that while it confers
with clinical psychologists and therapists before and after retreats, there is
not always a therapist present. Also, about half of the facilitators take
mushrooms with the guests. “They have identified as their [sic] 'sweet spot,' as
they are able to empathize and assist with guests who are in the mushroom space
more effectively,” the site reads. Synthesis does not allow their facilitators
to take psilocybin, and is against the practice. What's considered acceptable
from retreat to retreat can vary widely.

Psychedelics Today, which interviewed the owners of Mycomeditations multiple
times on its podcast, recently released a statement withdrawing its support of
the retreat, saying that “The team seems to have great intentions, but there are
some missing pieces around safety that have made us not willing to endorse the
company any further.”

An embittered discussion ensued on Psychedelics Today's Facebook page from
people who had gone to the retreat and had different experiences. Some felt that
the retreat was accepting people who were too vulnerable and weren’t able to
provide the proper support, and others had incredible and healing experiences.

Katherine MacLean, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins who volunteered as a
facilitator on a Mycomeditations retreat, said that she witnessed one to two
potential medical emergencies on each of the two retreats she went to, including
several hours of severe vomiting and diarrhea—beyond what she said is normally
seen with mushrooms—and one person who lost consciousness and fell, hitting
their head on concrete.

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Also, the retreats accept people who are at “significant risk of harm, including
people with physical and psychological conditions that would almost always be
excluded from other remote psychedelic or meditation retreats, and certainly
screened out of clinical trials.” She became “uncomfortable offering prep and
integration support for people with extreme depression, anxiety, suicidality,
substance dependence … and voiced my concerns about taking on such serious and
vulnerable cases.”



A founder of Psychedelics Today, Kyle Buller, said that when he went to
Mycomeditations, people took the mushrooms out in an open field. "Everybody was
invited to bring their own music and you know, sometimes it just felt really
loose," he said. “Some of the facilitators were great even though they were
under the influence. They did a really great job holding space, but sometimes I
would wonder, whose experience is this? Is this the facilitator's trip or is
this the participant's trip?”

Matthew Johnson, a psychiatrist and the associate director of the Johns Hopkins
Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, said that though he believes
deeply in the promise of psychedelic therapy, he cannot recommend any retreat in
good conscience because of the wide amount of variability and lack of
professional oversight. He said that these drugs are generally pretty safe, but
there are still risks. In a clinical setting they’re best equipped to handle
those risks—be they physical or mental.

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Further, he worries about what impacts a rise in retreats might have on ongoing
research. If no one is guiding what they're doing, bad outcomes or experiences
could color the reputation of the science that's taking place.

You don’t have to go far back into the history of psychedelics to find examples
of dosing gone wrong, he said. “I’m pretty obsessed with the lessons from the
past in this area, and I’m doing my best to shape the field so that we continue
to absorb those lessons,” Johnson told me. “There were so many dimensions where
boundaries become blurred surrounding psychedelics. We’re concerned about it.
Like, if the law passes in Oregon and some life coach is overseeing a session
and someone runs out and gets hurt, people will say, oh that psychedelic
research is not so safe.”

I asked Johnson if a potential solution would be to separate out people like
Gemma and me—provide different levels of support—so that I could have had a
person—or two—with me the whole time. He's not sure. He said that even if we
could create a delineation between “healthy” and “unhealthy” people, there’s
still a certain amount of unpredictability.

"You’ve got to be driven by the higher need for care,” Johnson said. That’s why
in the clinical setting there are psychologists and psychiatrists who have built
relationships with their patients, and are experienced with trauma, depression,
and anxiety.

He recalled a psilocybin study he conducted with participants who were
experienced meditators; people with tens of thousands of hours of meditation
under their belts. “You’d think this person has all of their ducks in a row, you
know?" he said. "Like, they’ve sorted out their childhood issues and whatnot.
Well, guess again. This stuff comes up with any human being, even without an
explicit history of trauma. We’re complex and I personally think that every
human being has some level of unresolved trauma, whether it’s diagnosable or
not. I don't think there’s a person alive where you could say, 'Yeah, they’re
going to have a high dose of a psychedelic and no deep issues are going to come
up. I don’t think that person exists.' Humans are very deep.”

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Right after my weekend at Synthesis, I went to Berlin for a conference on
psychedelic medicine hosted by the MIND European Foundation for Psychedelic
Science. One panel discussion was titled: Therapists versus Healers:
Requirements for Training and Personality of Psychedelic Therapists.
Predictably, the clinicians on the panel felt that some kind of official
training was important to guide a person on a trip, while "healers," like an
experienced mediator, felt it was not—that a deep understanding of these drugs
was more important.

Johnson said that he doesn't think there is going to be a clinical benefit for
someone who spends the whole time feeling like they don't know what they got
themselves into, or that they can't trust the people around them. “You’re
probably not going to completely surrender psychologically into the experience,
which is what you really need to do to reap the benefits," he said. "You can’t
surrender when you have second thoughts, like ‘What is going on here?’”

A difficult trip at a retreat could still be healing, but it could also be
re-traumatizing, especially if someone has issues of abandonment, said Gita
Vaid, a ketamine-assisted psychotherapist, who also took truffles at Synthesis
with me. “If someone is not available in those critical moments, it’s not only a
lost opportunity, it could be triggering.”



Elizabeth Nielson, a psychologist and psychedelic researcher who focuses on
integration, said that she often gets calls from people who went on retreats,
and are struggling afterwards. They haven’t always had a “bad trip” but
sometimes what they experienced is hard to grapple with when they return to
daily life.

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Nielson has heard stories of people walking away with life-changing experiences
too, she said. But she likened it to going to a farmer’s market and buying a
homemade herbal remedy for something. It may or may not work, but it’s
unregulated. “[Retreats] may not be doing anything illegal, they’re also not
working within the structures of the existing mental healthcare system, which is
very different,” Nielson said. “I think that a lot of people don’t really
understand that.”

A lot of clinicians are getting approached by their patients with questions,
Nielson said. “They’re being looked to as authorities on this topic because it’s
mental healthcare,” she said. “But there isn't a lot of formal training or
continuing education training for them to look for.” To that end, she recently
helped develop a program for clinicians to learn about harm reduction and
integration in clinical practice in relation to psychedelics.

One issue is cost. If every retreat staffed licensed clinicians it would cost
“like 10,000 pounds, or something," Watts said. "We are all going to have to, at
some point, think about: What’s the minimum safe and effective framework for
people?” Another is that just because someone is a trained therapist doesn't
mean they have experience knowing how to help someone go through, or cope with,
a psychedelic trip.

Vaid had attended Synthesis to see what other frameworks for psychedelic care
were out there. She told me that she was impressed by our three days, even
though it was very different from her own practice—she works with much lower
doses of ketamine that are personalized for each patient.

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Her setting is much more like a therapy session. Synthesis was more spiritual,
including components like meditation, breathwork, and body work. Having a
mystical experience, research shows, is a predictor of a positive outcome from
the drug, but it's not known how much that should come from the setting itself.
I am personally not a spiritual person, at least in the traditional sense. I
find rich meaning in human emotions, psychology, art, music, chemistry, biology,
and nature. But things like crystals, energy, deities, and spirits don’t move
me, and so when Adam held his hands over me, in an attempt to soothe me with
Reiki, it felt not neutral, but hostile—like an affront to my personal beliefs.

My experience was so focused on the women in my family that I found I couldn't
sit with anybody but a woman. Valerie was the only female facilitator there
during my weekend at Synthesis. Johnson said most of the research trials include
a man and a woman for each subject because they're learning how important
diversity is in being able to support people reliving different kinds of trauma.



Katz, the Synthesis cofounder, and I had a conversation about my experience, and
I shared some of these thoughts. He was receptive, and said he's aware that
retreats are still a work in progress. He said they're now trying out
individually-geared doses, and offering women-only retreat weekends. And they
usually do try to have a gender balance otherwise—on my weekend, the group was
supposed to be led by a woman named Nataja who got sick. As their customer base
continues to grow, they’ve encountered a bottle-neck with facilitators, Katz
said. At the moment, they’ve paused the number of customers they are accepting
to hire and train more. “That was an example of where we weren’t equipped to be
flexible when someone cancelled last second," he told me.

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Synthesis just had their 500th customer, which is hundreds more than some of the
clinical trials. “At the same time,” Katz said, “It’s only 500 people.” The
research isn’t able to readably predict what makes a trip go one direction for
one person, and a completely different one for someone else.

“We’re just one organization working with one particular method of using
psilocybin,” Katz said. “And we're doing the best we can to uphold the medical
safety and best practices that we believe can help data-driven decisions about
what will make things better."

In November, Synthesis announced that Robin Carhart-Harris, the Head of the
Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, would be joining
their advisory board. It's a continuation of a collaboration that already exists
between the two groups—Synthesis provides data to Imperial College's Ceremony
Study, which tracks ceremonial use of psychedelics. But Katz hopes that
Carhart-Harris's presence will help them further advance their screening
process, how they support their guests, and perhaps even using data to try and
predict what kind of experiences a person might have and have the right kinds of
support ready. "Being able to legally operate with customers and psilocybin is a
unique advantage of Synthesis, and we believe there is a lot more potential than
simply the retreat business we have started," Katz said.

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HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND WITH PSYCHEDELICS

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I asked him if he thought that, through their alliance with Imperial College and
their dedication to following best practices, they might specifically attract
the very kinds of people that need more support, like me—people who they’re not
necessarily equipped to help.

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Katz said it's possible, and it's a tough position to be in. He knows that when
Synthesis rejects someone, they go to another retreat. “That’s not a great
scenario, because we’re basically saying it’s not safe, and they’re like, ‘I
don’t care, if this other person will accept me,” he said.

“There’s truly so much more that we don’t know than we do know,” Katz said. “It
sounds a bit harsh, but it’s essentially trial and error, and growing. Saying,
okay that doesn’t work. Shift.”

I was interested in taking shrooms because it seemed like it could "reset" your
brain. Watts said that now-infamous notion comes from a quote from an interview
that she did with a participant, which was picked up by the media. While it rang
true for that person, she said people can get too excited about the metaphor. In
their screenings, many people reference that sentiment, telling Watts that they
want a brain reboot. People with that expectation can resist going into
difficult emotions during their trips because they thought it was just going to
be a "reset"—effortless.

What's often missing from the psychedelic health stories that we read is that
psychedelics are a tool. They can facilitate psychological work, but it's still
work—work that isn't always easy or fun, and can be very painful.

“This is an intense therapeutic process,” Watts said. "This is a journey into
the deepest parts of yourself and potentially might be very challenging. I think
the messaging around psychedelics, it would be helpful if that changes a bit.”



Perhaps for some it is like a reset. But I bet that there will be others, like
me and like Gemma, for whom it is not as simple as ripping a bandaid off.

“I want my time to be explained to me a bit more,” Gemma said. "I know you
shouldn’t compare to anybody else’s journey, but I’m like: has anybody had a
situation like this? Am I the only person to go through this retreat and do
this, or is it common? You really question yourself when you leave it. Everybody
says this is the most amazing thing in their life. And you’re like, ‘Oh god. Is
there something really wrong with me now?” Johnson said that actually, it's
common: people blame themselves and thinking they’ve screwed it up, and
squandered their experience.

I don’t think we can blame individuals for not having a good experience, or
point to them "not letting go," or "surrendering" as the only thing that went
awry. “From my experience as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, it’s really
difficult to change your character and change your mind even when you’re
motivated and have intention to do so,” Vaid said. “Psychedelics are not the
magic bullet for that. It’s a process and you can gain insight. But most of us
know that when you have insights and a big 'A-ha' moment, how much that actually
translates to real change is limited.”

Vaid thinks the relationship part of psychedelic therapy is not talked about
enough. Much of the advertising for the retreats focuses on how taking these
drugs is an opportunity to change your mind, including sciencey terms like
"deactivation of the default mode network" or "neuroplasticity." But “the
relationship and therapy piece is no less significant than the medicine itself,”
Vaid said.

I wonder what my experience would have been like if I had had a dedicated person
to sit with me, like in a medical study. Watts considers having a hand to hold a
bare minimum for psychedelic work. What if I hadn’t had to worry whether Valerie
had to be somewhere else to take care of other people?

"To need the support of someone and for it not to be there can be like a kind of
repetition of primary wounds in childhood,” Watts said. “That’s another reason
why we love having a male and a female therapist, because it’s a reparative
situation for people who haven’t had a loving mom and loving dad dote on them
all their childhoods. We all crave it. In a way, it’s almost like a
mini-reparenting exercise.”

The dining table at meal time. Courtesy of Synthesis.

Looking back, what I did experience was profound. I've talked about my mother
and her history in therapy before, but not with the depth of feeling that
occurred during my psilocybin trip. I was, without judgment, able to dive into
those emotions in a way that I never had. There were times I was hysterically
crying and gasping for air, and I don't cry in front of other people. I'm very
careful to control my behavior around others, and here I was, in front of a
stranger, really letting go.

I'm unsure if I had any lasting effects from my trip. I've since dwelled on the
themes that came up for me, especially around care and abandonment, more than I
would have otherwise. But not in ways that feel necessarily productive or
healing—it's more like a wound was reopened.

I did not feel blissful, I did not walk away from my trip with a deep connection
to the universe. If I were to summarize my takeaway in one sentence, it would be
that that life is full of suffering, and that we are forced to sacrifice our
softness to have the strength to face that suffering. I am curious if my
takeaway would have been different with more support.

I don't know if I'll do psychedelics again. I wouldn't rule it out. I did learn
a lot about what kind of support I might need if I did it again in a therapeutic
context, and about parts of myself, my family, and my past that could be deeper
wells of pain than I previously thought.

As psychedelic retreats increase in number, it’s going to be key for them to
recognize the experiences that don’t involve beautiful visuals and the
love-is-universal revelations. People with mental health conditions and people
with trauma may have different journeys on psychedelics. If only the good
experiences get talked about, there's less room for the idea that difficult
experiences can be transformative too, with the proper support and integration.
The clinical framework seems to allow for that, and expect it. It's almost a
given that people will experience difficult things. The question is whether
non-clinicians will figure out how to make them worthwhile.

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Tagged:psychedelicsdepressionanxietypsilocybinmagic mushroomspsychedelic
retreatlifestyHealth


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