In this intimate conversation, Dr. Charis Cladouhos shares her personal and professional experiences of harm and harm reduction in psychedelic treatment. We consider the variety of difficult experiences – from challenging material that emerges during journeys, to direct harm perpetrated by facilitators, to spiritual emergencies – and why it’s important to know the difference.

Integral to Dr. Charis’s work with KAP is her commitment to the reintegration of trauma and psychoanalytic practice. She recalls how she was taught to see many of her patients with unremitting symptoms as “too sick for psychoanalysis,” and how the lens of trauma positively changed her work. We discuss the importance of enactments and the re-experiencing of prior trauma that can happen in altered states. Dr. Charis also affirms the reality of adult onset trauma and the importance of not assuming all traumatic experience came from childhood. Lastly, she touches on Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy as an emerging treatment for adolescents.

Dr. Charis shares why she continues to offer Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy after enduring harmful experiences of her own. She offers a hopeful message that, with proper training and psychoanalytic methods, KAP can reduce harm and potentiate treatment breakthroughs.

Links:

• “Wounded by Reality” article by Ghislaine Boulanger that Dr. Charis referenced https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00107530.2002.10745806

• Aby Calder on safety in psychedelic research https://psychedelicreview.com/from-screening-to-integration-harm-reduction-in-psychedelic-research/

• Johns Hopkins research on Challenging Experiences https://www.hopkinspsychedelic.org/measures

On this episode of The Psychonaut Show, we talk with psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Mona Jain. Among many other things, Dr. Mona maintains a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy practice in Western Massachusetts. She discusses with us the ongoing history of racial oppression in psychedelics at the collective scale. Rather than taking a pessimistic view, however, she also guides listeners in how to honor and connect to traditional practice instead. Dr. Mona shares with us the intentional, grounded principles of her psychedelic practice, starting from her identity as a South Asian woman and rooted in the natural landscape of Western Massachusetts. She considers how, on an individual level, psychedelics can facilitate greater connection to ancestors including both racialized traumas and ancestral strengths. Dr. Mona passionately encourages listeners to think about racial justice, equity, and interconnection at all levels of psychedelic experience.

Links:

• Dr. Mona’s psychedelic clinic in Western MA https://satyapsychedelics.com/

• The Ethical Principles of Traditional Indigenous Medicine to Guide Western Psychedelic Research and Practice that Dr. Mona mentioned as an ethical framework

• Culture and Psychedelic Psychotherapy: Ethnic and Racial Themes from Three Black Women Therapists paper that Dr. Mona cited

In this episode, we sit down for our second reflective Journey So Far retrospective. Weaving in rich insights from our last three guests, Dr. Larry Fischman, Dr. Diana Moga, and Dr. Harold Kudler, we explore how psychiatric diagnoses can be re-examined through the lenses of psychoanalysis and spirituality. We also do a deep dive into the productive tension of our own clinical backgrounds, contrasting ego psychology and drive theory with relational and depth psychoanalysis, and share how our understanding of each other's traditions has deepened by holding space for patients in non-ordinary states of consciousness.

We consider how a therapeutic relationship and an inner healing intelligence are both part of healing psychedelic journeys. The relational aspects of psychedelic transformation are uniquely addressed by psychoanalytic approaches. We distinguish this from the role of ceremony, which is seen as also highly important.