Psychedelics and Mental Health. Non-fiction by Gordon Phinn

Psychedelics and Mental Health

     Years ago, I had the great good fortune to come across a short yet comprehensive cultural history of madness and its treatments as a review assignment for a literary journal. Roy Porter’s Madness, A Short History, while barely 50,000 words, felt almost encyclopedic, such was the grasp of this professor of social history of medicine from University College, London. Later I discovered his Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A Social History of Madness (1987) to round out my already blooming appreciation of his talent and insight. In this current expedition into the land of neurosis, psychosis and the smorgasbord of treatments I shall quote from it shamelessly.

     The mad, not to put too fine a point on it, like the dismally poor and appallingly rich, have always been with us. For despite the optimistic jingles of those enamored of that post-enlightenment magic spell, progress, the apostles of the ever-onward and upward, the broad spectrum of societies — whether autocratic, democratic or barely surviving in shambles — repeatedly accumulate all manner of casualties, citizens unkempt and curiously off-kilter.  It’s the rest of us, strong willed and seemingly stable, who earn the privilege of where to park the eternal problem of ‘madness’ while we shirk and shop elsewhere. This is a privilege we can neither avoid or ignore.

     No fair might well be the righteous complaint, but the millennia-length trek through the mosaic of motivations and moves, from desperate and callous to empathetic and well-considered, convinced me that all solutions were temporary at best, and verging on hopeless at worst. This applies equally to all ‘solution,’ — whether outright denial, bemused toleration, familial restraint, varieties of exorcism, visitations by angelic spirits at the temple and genteel country lodge, the horrific city asylum, that barbed womb of restraints and ready cruelty, regimens of exercise, gardening and general community uplift, cooperative communities or sadistic incarceration, electroshock, lobotomies and drugs to repress, calm and stupify. What we end up with more often than not are zombies on the streets, suicides in the attics, loved ones straitjacketed with despair.

     Madness, as I discovered, like many a behavior, is as old as mankind. The Babylonians, Mesopotamians, and Greeks held to various forms of ‘supernaturalism,’ spirit invasion and demonic malice. The individual, that weak vessel, who’s prey to passions and wild impulses, was ever open to possession. If the psychic civil war from hubris and ambition didn’t get you, some badass dude from hell would. Epilepsy was some sacred disease, to be countered with praying and sacrifices at the right temple, despite Hippocrates treatise On The Sacred Disease (approx 400 BCE), where he insisted it was no more sacred than any other malfunction. Blaming the god Hera for convulsions and ‘goat-like behaviour,’ and Ares for kicking and foaming at the mouth, was just plain ignorant and naïve, Hippocrates concluded.

     By the 19^th century we’re well into ‘neurasthenia,’ George Beard’s brand of nervous breakdown, its draining of ‘nerve force’ — brought on by the newly hectic pace of American life, “the telegraph, railroad and daily press.” Nervousness was the product of civilization apparently, perhaps giving the nod to its modern manifestations: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and their variously flushed environmental cousins. You want to talk Gall and Spurzheim’s ‘phrenology’? It certainly had its day, positing the brain as the only source of mind, persuading its adherents that its contours and configurations actually determined the personality profile of each individual. Greed, pride and piety all had their own niche of bumps and squiggles to be expertly mapped by practitioners. Another step towards ‘medical materialism,’ like the ‘German somaticists,’ where battles went on to limit psychiatric practice to the medically qualified with funding for laboratory research.

    It can all sound a little pat until one comes across the current debate on the biomedical model and genetic bases for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and the various paranoias our contemporaries seem riddled with. Despite years of falling short, this set of beliefs has reigned with that stranglehold we have seen elsewhere as profit-making paradigms dig deep into psyche and society.

     Of the several recent books on the emergence of psychedelic therapy as the new cure-all for what ails you, Rose Cartwright’s The Maps We Carry: A Radical New Book on Mental Health (2024) spells it out with the greatest clarity, although Andy Mitchell’s Ten Trips: The New Reality of Psychedelics (2023) cuts its own provocative and precise swath. The initial charge was led by Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018), a work as influential with I-told-you old hippie stoners — raised on Huxley, Leary and Grof — as with middle-aged depressives and all-round exhausted-from-life gloomies who missed the boat first time around, fell for the opioid sales pitch scams, rescued themselves at the last minute, and now feel the radiant promise of paradise from the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms, presently almost as accessible as chewable multi-vitamins.

     Many magazine articles over the last few years have made it obvious, even to the casual reader, that governments and research facilities are increasingly intrigued by the possibilities of curative transcendence unveiled by psychedelics in both formal and informal situations, with patents secured and billions applied to research. The imprisoning shadows of a variety of addictions, anxieties and depressions, become illuminated and often dispelled by the ecstasies of the mushroom trance. An inner paradise is revealed, often triggered by nightmarish re-enactments of traumas buried since childhood, and the traverse from one hell to another heaven can be more rapid than reassuring.

     Both Cartwright and Mitchell endured long-term addictions to hard drugs and alcohol in their years of OCD, depression, and paranoia on the verge of self-harm and suicide. Their embrace of psychedelic therapy is therefore more than tinged with desperation for a cure to lead them out of the maze of psychiatric counselling and anti-depressants; it’s not the giddy playfulness assumed by an earlier generation of psychonauts (in which this author was a card carrying member), moving the chess pieces and clown outfits of their personalities around until the button of enlightenment could be pushed with ease.

    Both works are deeply honest revelations of the character flaws and hidden motivations that inevitably rise to the surface during the years’-long search for illumination and relief from the dark threats ever roaming and contaminating the subconscious. Scathing condemnations of self-pity and drama queen operatics are not uncommon as they journey through weekend retreats in suburban homes, downtown condos, and remote jungle villages.  In these not-inexpensive treks it is acknowledged that such adventure in search of therapy remains a privilege of the middle- and professional classes. Neurosis and psychosis comes packaged as one of the perks of wealth, while the desperate poor, unemployed and culturally marginalized have to suffice with a monthly lecture and increased prescriptions for mood suppression.

            As Mitchell notes, “Psychedelically assisted addiction retreats, a tributary of the international wellness industry, are set to be worth $1.2 trillion within the next five years.” When one checks online, one sees the following: “Images of palm trees, frisbee tossing, water sports and chia seed smoothies, rather than filthy needles, rotting teeth and deep veined thrombosis. The reality of addiction for most has nothing to do with wellness retreats. Most of the homeless addicts I worked with in Leeds had never seen the sea. And the only retreat center the vast majority of addicts will ever see is a prison.” Even the families who can lash together the money for “the exotic treatments like a week-long anaesthesia to bypass withdrawals, discovered that whatever the efficacy of the treatment,” the situation would revert to a return to the streets, “more humiliated and more impoverished by the latest expensive failure.”

            Cartwright makes the rounds of the new gurus and maverick psychiatrists, interviewing the likes of Pollan on the difficulties of conveying mystical experience in language and that holy grail of the trip, ego-dissolution, where the recognizable self, that control freak who organizes perceptions, reactions and the panoply of personas rotated throughout the day, is torn into shreds and let fall. In Pollan’s case, “it burst into confetti, little post-it notes, that I knew had just been detonated.” His observing self, not his usual self, “was completely untroubled by what I was witnessing.”

            The other prong of the problem seems to be a paradigm collapse in psychiatric practice, where situations like childhood experiences are now seen as more of common denominator than brain malfunction, chemical imbalance, or the random triggering of genetic variants. All excited by the development of neuroimaging technology in the 90’s, which led psychiatrists to believe their field could become as scientifically rigorous as other fields in medicine.  An era that George Bush apparently pronounced “The Decade of the Brain.” This brought on the debates between “the anti-psychiatrists, who emphazised the social cause of distress,” and members of the old school, who felt that “pushing the science would eventually lead to the biomarkers or genes that underpin diagnostic categories.” It would seem that the disease model is slowly but reluctantly being cast aside, despite the profitable pipeline of the pill pushers.

               While the authors both feel and report a lessening of symptoms and a rebirth into a measure of serenity and stability, they know how easy it can be to be caught in the throes of the journey, where the mood swings relieved by one trauma uncovered can be deposed by another further down. As Cartwright observes, “Don’t let the search for trauma become your identity. Keep shedding each new skin before it hardens. Infantilise as much as you need to connect to your child-self but live like the resilient grown-up that you are. Stop doing the work and start living.”

     To quote from Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (2013), a buried treasure not often cited: “When you get the message hang up the phone.” Whether the crowds of would-be initiates that will follow, as psychedelic therapy is further loosened and legalized throughout the world, as seems likely, will absorb that advice remains to be seen. Some I suspect, will step off the cycle while others will not, thus swapping one addiction for another.

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Gordon Phinn has been writing and publishing in a number of genres and formats since 1975, and through a great deal of change and growth in CanLit.  Canada’s literary field has gone from the nationalist birth pangs of ’65 – ’75 to its full blooming of the 80s and 90s, and it is currently coping as well as it can with the immediacy and proliferation of digital exposure and all the financial trials that come with it. Phinn’s own reactions was to open himself to the practices of blogging and videoblogging, and he now considers himself something of an old hand. His Youtube podcast, GordsPoetryShow, has just reached its 78th edition, and his my blog “anotherwordofgord” at WordPress continues to attract subscribers.

Phinn’s book output is split between literary titles, most recently, The Poet Stuart, Bowering and McFadden, and It’s All About Me. His metaphysical expression includes You Are History, The Word of Gord On The Meaning Of Life.