Note: I do not offer underground psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Sean O’Carroll is the Head of Psychotherapy at Clarion Clinics. He is the former supervisor, lead psychotherapist and trainer with Monash University Clinical Psychedelics Research Lab and lead therapist and trainer on a Swinburne University Psilocybin/TRD trial. He is currently involved in developing and delivering training to psychotherapists working on a number of psychedelic research trials in Australia, and is also working as a therapist on three upcoming psychedelic research trials. He has completed the MAPS training in MDMA for PTSD. Sean has lectured in transpersonal psychology for over 10 years, and has a long-time specialisation in “bad trip” integration.
Learn more about the Wild Mind Institute’s Fundamentals of Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Workshop.
Below text is from 2020 and some details may be out of date due to a rapidly changing landscape.
The Emergence of Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that psychedelics are undergoing a resurgence in the world of psychology, in the form of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
The relationship between psychedelics and healing has long been an interest of mine. In 2015 I wrote an article for the publication psychotherapy.net entitled, “Ayahuasca is my therapist, or is it?”, in which I outlined some of my experiences, thoughts and concerns about the interface between underground ayahuasca ceremonies and psychotherapy. At it’s best, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy offers us way to blend these two healing modalities, taking what is best from each, while overcoming some of the limitations of each.
While I do not facilitate psychedelic journeys (see below), I have worked closely with members of the Melbourne underground medicine community - “psychedelic casualties” - in a psychotherapeutic capacity, supporting the integration of harmful/detrimental psychedelic experiences. You can read more about this in the aforementioned article I wrote for psychotherapy.net. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.
If you are a therapist interested in training in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and wish to be kept up to date with developments, please subscribe to the mailing list below.
Do I OFFER PSYCHEDELIC PSYCHOTHERAPY?
The short answer is no, and there are a few reasons for this. One reason is simple: I do not believe underground psychedelic psychotherapy can be practiced safely or ethically in the current - rapidly evolving - context. What is more, for the time being, psychedelic psychotherapy is illegal. (*Note: as of July 1st 2023 this is no longer the case) My psychotherapeutic work with clients is my life’s work - my vocation - and I am not willing to risk that by engaging in practices that could see me deregistered and unable to work.
Here is the longer answer…
Each week I am contacted by one or more people looking to undergo psychedelic psychotherapy. In general they have been suffering for quite some time, have tried working with psychologists, used anti-depressants or anxiolytics, but to little avail. They have heard about psychedelics, and see a potential antidote to their “stuck-ness”.
In these conversations I will start out by asking them what they think psychedelics can offer them. They share some of their story and experience of treatment. I hear about psychologists who tried to get them to do this or that, employing CBT or ACT. I hear about psychotherapy sessions that seemed to go around and around, but never achieve anything that felt like significant change. I hear about various fringe healing modalities that they have tried. I also hear despair, and their own sense that they are beyond “normal” help.
I will then share with them some of the ways in which I work, and the reasons I do not work with psychedelics. I will usually offer to work with the person without psychedelics, and sometimes they decide to give it a go. In the vast majority of these cases, we do good work, and the person experiences very real change over the next 1-3 months. On the whole, I rarely feel that a client of mine needs psychedelics to do the work - however complex their trauma or situation might be.
Working in a psychedelic paradigm - without psychedelics
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy - as it is emerging in trials around the world - follows a very different healing paradigm to mainstream psychology. Rather than seeking to manage, suppress or simply cope, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy aims at a deeper healing born of opening up and moving directly toward and through our pain and stuck-ness, in a safe and well-held environment. This way of working depends on a deep trust in the psyche’s own wisdom. One of the mechanisms of the psychedelic itself, is to radically soften defences and temporarily remove obstacles that stand in the way of the psyche’s own “inner-healing intelligence”. I would suggest that psychedelics are just one - very convenient and powerful - way of doing this work.
While the use of psychedelics can seem fairly radical from the perspective of contemporary psychology, the use of non-ordinary states in healing is as old as humanity itself. For more ancient - and land-based - cultures, psychedelics were but one technology among many that were used to access non-ordinary states. In the modern world, such practices are the domain of process work, depth psychology, and transpersonal psychology. Over the last ten years, alongside a traditional training in many schools of psychotherapy, I have studied, explored, and taught various transpersonal and “neo-shamanic” healing modalities including trance dance, nature-immersion, and psychedelics.
My work under the banner of Wild Mind is entirely informed by the recognition that psychological health and flourishing is directly related to the way in which we relate - consciously and unconsciously - to the wild, unknown and powerful places within us. Through this frame, mental illness is understood to derive from our unconscious control of the wildness (depression) or our unconscious fear of the wildness (anxiety). Often the two go together.
So, while I do not offer psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, I do offer a psychotherapy that is very aligned with the psychedelic paradigm. In this way, the psychotherapy I do with these clients often feels like a slow-burn psychedelic journey - with optimal preparation and integration.
I generally feel that clients seeking psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy are following a profound and accurate intuition. On some level they believe that healing is possible, but they also know that simply talking, or doing, or taking psych-meds is not going to get them there. They need a radically different approach.