We Are the Medicine: Why Psychedelics Alone Won’t Heal You

Healing behaves more like a skill than a prescription. Lou and Josh describe breathwork, somatic processing, and belief work as practices you strengthen over time, not a fix you take once.
Why preparation and integration often matter more than the molecule itself: without support before and after, even a powerful experience can leave someone alone in the room with it.
The idea of a ‘sociological container’ reframes mental health as something shaped by environment and community, not by brain chemistry or willpower alone.

About the Expert

Alya Ahmad, MD, FAAP

Too Curious MDs

We are two and too curious physicians applying the lens of Narrative Medicine, exploring Integrative practices and psychedelic treatment in healthcare. Together with our guests we weave new learnings from stories, expertise, and the sciences. With the wisdom from holistic, alternative, and conventional medicine, we’are here to challenge the status quo!!!!We are curious about the connectivity and complexity between diverse fields of knowledge as they relate to consciousness, chronic illness, mental health, resilience, and beyond! Stories of illness in the context of caring for patients in psychedelic medicine, what emerges and what we can learn as health care changes.

Guest

Lou Dorian

Founder and CEO of Psychedelist

Lou Dorian is the founder and CEO of Psychedelist, a platform he describes as an ecosystem, or a ‘cyber city,’ for the psychedelic space: a directory of treatment providers, facilitators, educators, legal resources, and lab testing, built around harm reduction and responsible use. A mathematician by training, Lou came to this work through his own long and difficult history with psychedelics, grief, and trauma, and through the breathwork and somatic practices he credits with saving his life. He founded Psychedelist in 2021 and now works with clients, many of them veterans, on skill-based mental, emotional, and spiritual healing.

More from Lou Dorian on DrTalks

The combat things and the combat experiences that I was thinking were going to come up. That I thinking we’re going be the main focal point of my healing actually wasn’t what was coming up, what’s coming was childhood trauma.

What happened over the course of the next 20 months working with Lou? broke me free from the constraints that I had really set up in my own psyche, my mental health and the misalignment I have with my mind, body and spirit.

I was walking as three different people in a sense or even more, split personality issues. Welcome to the To Curious MD podcast. With the wisdom from holistic, alternative and these conventional medicines, we are here to challenge the status quo.

We’re curious about the connectivity and complexity between diverse fields of knowledge as a relief to consciousness, chronic illness, mental health, resilience and beyond.

Learning more about art and science of healing, or listening to stories of extraordinary healing. You’re in the right place. Let’s dive in. We have a podcast where medicine is more than science, it’s story, art, connection, and integration.

And specifically, we at the Two Caries MD talk a lot about the alchemy of the three sciences, the psychedelic medicine, integrative medicine and of course, narrative medicine which is the story art and using creativity and bringing them all together in healing.

Today we have two special guests. I’m from thepsychodellist.com, Josh and Lou. And I’d like for you to introduce yourself if you want to go first, Joshua, and then Lou would love to hear the background of the psychedelist and welcome to our podcast today.

Yeah, thank you for having us. I’d love to introduce myself. My name is Josh, executive director here at psychedelics.com. And yeah, we’ve been working on this project for quite a while that Lou introduced himself and go into the story and then I’ll circle back around.

All right. Yeah. Thanks for having us, Leah. It is quite a long story. We’ve been at building the platform for five years now. Began in 21 in June. The history of it is very lengthy because it has a lot to do with my history with psychedelics and the developing understanding of mental health through the experiences I had that led to engaging with, you know, psychedelic assisted therapy, facilitating for others, especially veterans, and, um, eventually through a winding path arriving at the idea of founding this platform that we’re building now.

Depending on how far you want to go into this, basically, I had a very deep and colorful history with psychedelics in the mid-1990s and early 2000s was when I was in an extreme explorative phase.

There was a very different culture back then of the Wild West emerging electronic music scene. And there was a lot of psychedelics around and people experimenting and exploring with them in unmentored, unguided, and unregulated settings.

What happened as a result of that was a very broad spectrum of different outcomes and experiences, some of which were quite negative and led to even death in some cases to a domino effect.

And in other cases, extremely powerful, positive life transformative experiences. Back then, we didn’t really have a framework and no metric to really determine why that was happening.

We were all pretty young and taking a lot of big risks and large doses in these unregulated, unmentored settings. And then as time progressed, I got to experience life that everyone does.

So my father passed away and that is the beginning of my first mental health challenges. tell it to people is that my experience with psychedelics is the inverse of what we’re seeing now in this modern era and reemergence.

So maybe some people might call it the psychedelic renaissance is, that nowadays people are coming to psychedelcs for treatment, for growth, or ways to address what it may have been.

Classical psychiatric treatments is not seeming to work, frustrated with those, what they might call treatment resistant conditions. And so that’s where we’re seeing a lot of people coming to psychedelics from that direction.

We’re also seeing sports people looking for optimized mindsets in performance and professionals in business spaces and intellectual areas who are interested in boosting their performance.

So all of that is going on. When I was doing it, that wasn’t really what the focus was. And so I came through this massive exploration, experimentation, and then experienced some tragedies, some difficulties, things like that, experienced the hardships of life.

So then I had a real winding road with that. That allowed me to have a I would say a pretty tempered and balanced experience in perspective on psychedelics that I might not have had, had I not had those experiences that went through.

So I experienced a really negative time with seeking out Western classical psychiatric medicine myself. After my father passed, I was experiencing very resistant depression and panic attacks, anxiety disorder.

It was quite severe. I wasn’t even not able to be functional in my career at the time. I was studying mathematics, and then I received a job with the government.

But anyway, through that period, I, was in a very dark place because of the psychiatric medicine. The classical approach, the SSRIs, of neuroleptics, you know, anti-anxiolytics.

All that stuff. They were trying to prescribe me Xanax. One of scary ones that I know is directly linked to at least a couple of deaths of friends of mine was Seroquel.

Even though I didn’t have a history of psychosis, They seem to prescribe that pretty readily, and I didn’t take that one. I actually didn’ t last with the psych meds for very long at all.

And I attribute that to my very lengthy and deep experience with psychedelics, because when I ingested those medicines, it didn t feel right to me. They fell off, they felt wrong, and I immediately discontinued.

And so I was introduced to Chinese energetic breastwork, Qigong, through the International Institute of Medical Qi Gong and a teacher that I had there named Bernard Shannon, taught me this breast work techniques and processes of somatic awareness and healing through that.

And that saved my life. I was actually suicidal for a bit there. And then because of the experiences, I lost a lot of whatever minimal faith I had in our societal functioning systems and institutions.

So I joined the cannabis and trafficking areas of life and illicit. product procurement, you could say, and I got in a lot of trouble doing that. I’ve got into some very violent situations or robberies.

And that exposed me to another side of the conscious experience, I would say. Certainly that adds pressure to maintaining mental health when you’re in those circumstances.

So I was in the hostage situation in 2007 where we were going to be killed by the assailants in that situation. Then I began to develop a system for securing transactions that weren’t, you know, exactly authorized by the banking systems and things like that.

Even as cannabis became legal, there was still a gap there between banking and the ability to pay for and obtain product for stores and stuff like. And it was a very dangerous time period.

So I went through that and then I met someone who was just a pivotal, you know, extremely important person in my life. I, I had met a woman who I fell in love with almost instantaneously, but it turned out that she was deeply affected by her own trauma and her first love had been murdered in front of her.

And so she wrestling with deep traumas and we spent six years traveling the world together and having this magical romance. But sadly in 2014, she succumbed to a drug overdose.

She had a binge relationship with substances. And so when the guilt and the grief and unresolved trauma from the murder would emerge, She would revert back to old habits and binging with the substances and sadly had an opioid overdose So that brought me full circle to considering mental health and then once again I call them life splitters.

I’m not the one who coined that term, but one day your life is one way and the next your will never be the same. And so I got involved with trauma-informed therapies.

I utilized and was introduced to a book by a woman named Brandon Bayes called The Journey and Practical Guide to Healing Your Life and Setting Yourself Free, which was pivotal for me.

and I began practicing with friends. Actually didn’t seek out licensed professionals because I had had such or experiences in the past. So I read the book, there weren’t any seminars at the time that were available in my area.

And I just began practicing with what she outlined, which I would somewhat describe, I guess, as a mixture of different things, guided meditation, hypnotherapy, and gestalt therapy might be a way.

I’m sure you could add probably some IFS in there a little bit. There’s probably several things she mixed together. It’s very effective, her scripting and the way she does it.

I spent over close to three, four hundred hours practicing the techniques that she had in that book, and I emerged quite changed, actually. And when it really made the differences, then I started to realize, well, I had a question.

Why were these psychedelic experiences in my history with friends and people in the time period Why did some of those experiences end up in negative outcomes and why did, some, of them end in positive outcomes?

And why were some in a spectrum of areas in between? I emerged at the concept of skill development in relation to mental health. So prior to that, I think my perspective, and I would say probably a good portion of the Western world with a classical psychiatric perspective is that mental luck of the drawing.

You got unlucky, you had some maybe bad experiences that you have as a kid and maybe some neurotransmitters are a little off and so we’re going to give you some top therapy and throw some chemicals at you and just pray and hope that it works.

This new perspective for me was one of building skills and of course I had that background with Qi Gong and breath work and realizing that that was only one skill set and that there were many others, including now this new one that I was engaging with, which was trauma-informed therapy and somatic process.

So processing stored emotions and traumas and memories in the body. And that was a game changer. Then I had the idea of what if I merged this process with psychedelics?

And so then we started to engage with psilocybin and LSD again, only in a very different context from when we were much younger. That was night and day game-changer.

Through that, I then emerged at a point where I kind of distilled it down to eight root fundamentals of mental, emotional, spiritual, skill development and healing and growth.

And that became the foundation for how I approach everything. It’s how i assess other facilitators, it’s, how, I assess my own mental health, It is how assess people who are clients and individuals seeking to engage in psychedelic assisted therapy with me.

I do do facilitation from time to time, although less now that I’m really busy. Joshua is one of those folks, as he mentioned, we began with building skill development around mental health skills.

And I am sure that was also new for him. He was coming to the table with a lot of psychiatric medications in his bloodstream. he was going through PTSD and childhood trauma and many things mixed together in one.

So we went down that journey together. Then I think that began somewhere around in probably 19 or end of 18, I think 19. Then by 2021, that was when we started having the conversation of, hey, let’s make this available to more people and let get this ethos out there, this change of perspective.

Psychedelics and especially, of course, us, the ones that are building it, we certainly respect and see great potential and value in the plant medicines, in psychedelics, and the chemical tools, as I refer to them.

but I don’t see them as what’s actually primary. To me those are their vehicles and I see this for all substances even ones that are not psychedelic and this is a big important topic for me because I See sociology as most often the primary factor and individual psychology as a resulting factor of the sociological container.

Correct. Yeah. Wow, what a journey. I am so grateful for what you just shared, and it really resonates with a lot of the stories that I hear on a day-to-day basis.

The struggle, first, the curiosity, it sounds like. And I’m just going to summarize what I heard. This, I guess, curiosity early in life, that you were seeking your truth.

There was something you was seeking even early on. happens to most people but the depth of your trauma and still finding that source and not seeking it in conventional medicine and finding it and whatever means necessary and to the extreme as well of course the taboos around this has been there for a long long time and here you are and I was going to ask you the question why is this so important to you and i think you definitely answered this questioned very, you know, which really resonates with so many people’s story that this is important to you.

You have lived through this experience in so much facets of it that not a lot of people know the incarceration, the death of your most loved one, and to have to overcome some of those big grief and trauma.

And then sourcing the root. So you’re really looking at nature, looking natural, but sourced the roots of that. What is the root? And we talk about this at our center, root cause consciousness based medicine.

And that’s a word that in conventional medicine, people will say, what? What are you talking about? Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s important that people hear this.

This is, the work that you do really represents who you are as a person. Josh, earlier before we started, tell us a little bit more about your story and what brings you to the psychedelics and the world.

Thank you for re-inviting me into the conversation and Lou, thanks for sharing all that. I know I’ve heard that many times and each time I just feel it more and more from your stories, so I really appreciate that Yeah, like I started to allude to my story a little bit to help out.

I’m a veteran. So I’ve had, uh, had some, some experiences with the veteran community, a combat veteran, so I served overseas. Uh, I was engaged in combat and once I came home from that, and I noticed like right away I would have problems.

And most of the problems I having were relationship problems, So I was having issues with my spouse and that grew over years and then I actually got out of the military.

And when I got outta the army, that didn’t get better, which is something that’s pretty common with people. I laugh now because I can. It wasn’t fun when i was going through it, of course.

is actually very numbing for me at the time. And that was part of the problem, I think, that I eventually found. When I got out of military, did I start seeking different types of medicines and eventually wound up taking about 13 different medicines from the VA, whether it was psychiatric medicines or a combination of a cocktail of different, different medicines of migraine medicines, medicines for this symptom, medicine for that symptom.

Medicines because this medicine caused this other symptom things like that. And eventually there’s just this pile of medicine that was sitting in my lap every day.

And that’s a lot. That’s lot for me to take. And I was at a young age actually when this was, when we first met, I, was in my early thirties and I can’t, can believe I got to all these medicines just to have like a normal life.

This isn’t right. I started questioning things and as I began to question things, a, lot of my other parts of my life were falling apart. Year issues, outbursts, fantasies, dreams.

I had night terrors, all kinds of different things, bad headaches, migraines, I was sick all the time. And that was causing me to have really poor communication with my family, with, uh, my loved ones.

In isolation, hide out a lot. And as I began to look at that, my wife’s going to leave me, I have a few kids, they’re scared of me all the time. And I looked in the mirror and I constantly was saying how much I disliked that person, all of the way to the point where I hated that that I was looking back at in a mirror.

I’m like, there’s something wrong with me. I really started questioning that and I internalized a lot of those emotions. And then one day I was getting my haircut and a buddy of mine that I actually served with, he’s a fellow Marine.

He was in my unit. I didn’t deploy with him, but he deployed at a different time. But we knew each other. and, I saw that he was cutting hair in the area.

he still around. i was already out of the military and started getting, my hair cut from him. I was getting my hair cut from him for quite a while and, you know, he’s a tough guy.

He’s tough marine, so what I’m about to say wouldn’t make sense that I listen because this tough person that’s in my life generally wouldn’ t say anything.

This guy wouldn’t really say much to me, but when he did and he said, hey, Josh, I’m really worried about you. I worry about the fact that I think you may hurt yourself or you might hurt somebody else.

And I am concerned. And I’m like, I kind of taken aback by that a little bit and I was like what are you talking about? What are, what do you, What’re you trying to tell me?

And he’s like yeah, it’s just that and you’re worried about you. And, and, wow, for this person, uh, said this in my mind, like for that person to say that to me, maybe there is something really wrong.

I am already questioning it anyway. So that there’s this like positive, positive affirmation for me to get help. What’s happening in the universe. He’s, he got a buddy of mine that’s really into this stuff with helping people.

And it’s not attached to the VA or anything like that. He just really wants to try to help people. And he didn’t really give me a whole lot of other information.

You know, he did say a little bit about kind of the modalities that he uses, but he said, that’s really his main focus. But if you really want to, I’d like to introduce you to him.

And within, you know, about a two week period, maybe a little bit longer. Cause I think Lou got hurt sometime around that time. He got a motorcycle accident.

So we were kind of dancing around his injury there. And I met Lou and the first thing that we did was we actually didn’t begin working on plant medicine.

We didn, we didn’ work on psychedelics. It was actually far from that. The very first thing that I did with Lou was we met and we had a conversation. And what we did in that conversation was that we explored belief.

Well, we got to know each other too, but yeah, really what were doing was exploring beliefs and belief systems. I feel like if Lou had little bit longer to talk, he’d talk a lot more about belief system.

That’s one of the main starting points that he works with. And then from there, we did do the Brennan Bayes work, the type of hypnotherapy. And we do that.

What I was discovering, which I, again, was a little shocked, I guess, is that the combat things and the experiences that I thought were going to come up, that were thinking were gonna be the main focal point of my healing, actually wasn’t what was coming up.

What was going up was childhood trauma. And as we began, Lou and I have talked and spoke with other groups and have been educating on this a little bit.

That’s actually really common in the military community that the the, military members often have early childhood, trauma, whether they’re sexual or violent.

And unfortunately I have both. And there’s no doubt in my mind that anybody that had that is going to struggle in life. Especially with those skill sets that Lou was talking about.

Of course, one was belief. Two is just self-importance. My ego is through the roof and in a lot of ways that might’ve been because I was putting myself last all the time.

and not taking care of myself properly. So I was struggling with all these things. And what happened over the course of the next 20 months, working with Lou, broke me free from the constraints that I had really set up in my own psyche, my mental health and the misalignment I have with my mind, body and spirit.

You know, I walking as three different people in a sense, or even more, you know split personality issues. You know, like the angry Alpers and as, as we began to do that, my, all those three things that are so important for somebody’s, you know daily walk or their life began, to come closer to one another.

And it was because I was building trust, and then after, after we did that Lou had that idea to start psychedelics. and I thought, wow, that’s really important.

As we begin to, start that what I, was noticing was my journey of healing wasn’t over. That was just beginning. And as we began to work harder and harder on this project, we noticed more and more that there were so many important things that we have to working on constantly within ourselves.

So I did IFS work, not with Lou, with somebody else in the community. I just got done with six months of ketamine therapy and that was actually through the VA.

There’s these different modalities that you can experience as a veteran going through VA system if you know how to navigate. Most of us don’t know. Most are just like, okay, I guess we’re going to get pills.

We didn’t even know that we can advocate for ourselves. Or maybe it’s just too many no’s. Well, i learned not to take no for an answer when it comes to my mental health.

And one of the things that Lou and I, and i’ll leave it at this. One of things we really started saying was to really need permission to heal. Yeah. That’s a great question.

Wow. I feel like we’re having a doctor-patient relationship here and of trust and openness and vulnerability. And I’ll speak from my own vulnerability here as a physician.

Our hands are tied. There’s so much systems issue in healthcare right now. 10 years overseas and came back to America after. working in global health and did a lot of good work and in complex medicine and different situations overseas, learned a lots, came back and I said, what happened to America?

It’s like a mental health epidemic, even before COVID was bad. So yeah, the system is broken, to be honest, and the options are very limited. We know evidence of this arise by the time there’s a fourth drug, your efficacy goes to 7%. That’s just nothing.

It’s all guesswork a lot of times. There’s this biological model that you’re trained in, and then there’s the pharmaceutical, hey, you’ve got to try this and try that.

And there is this emphasis on medication, prescriptions. You’re limited by the 15-minute visits and you have to get to do all these things. Then there are all of these other things to as well, which is orders and labs.

What I really want to honor here is what you talked about, Josh, is moral injury, coming back, relation, the childhood trauma, and the complex PTSD that shows up in your life, not in early childhood, but later.

The impact was then. How many of us are missing that? So many are. pediatric hospitalists for many, many years and now look at adults and say, wow, everything that happened happened in childhood.

And that was the first hit and that developmental arrest and then it becomes a trauma response. So I think this is important for the audiences to hear this, the story, and the connection that is needed in healthcare, whether it’s the healthcare that you sought on your own through natural medicine and all of the other tools and resources.

And I do have to also give credit to the VA, which is the largest healthcare organization in the world. And it does provide therapies and options for veterans.

Ketamine-assisted therapy, we also take care of patients. When we first started treating veterans, it was, wow, really complex. history, 13 medications you described.

You know, you’ve actually counted honey medications at a young age that you’re taking, and it’s a sad system that we’re in. So I can see now why psychedelics is even more valuable.

Tell us more about where you are right now with psychedelists. It’s community. it seems like to be a network. tell us about what where do you take this work that You’ve done and how you put it into the psychedelic platform you created.

Yes, psychedelics is an ecosystem. That’s what I like to describe it. We used to call it cyber city. It’s, it’s an eco system of many different things, right?

So, so one of our sections that we have is the treatment providers. Actually, when you type it in, that’s the first thing that comes up. And the reason that’s so important for that side, and I’ll let Luke talk about the other sides, just also allow him to be in the conversation here.

But the reasons that we have the main focus on the treatment is because we think that that is the most important thing. Skill set development beyond anything else.

Because even when I was in my ketamine assistant therapy, sometimes I didn’t get the psychotherapy. Sometimes I just was just in a room with the medicine all by myself.

I’m hooked to a monitor, so they’re monitoring me, but not inside the room. And there’s some really difficult experiences in there. Without the skillset development, I would have a really extreme problem with this.

Sometimes my heart would race over 150 beats per minute, 160 beats for minute. My blood pressure would spike. and in that I had to learn how to let things go.

I learned how breathe, I learn to sit still. Learned these different things that really were practiced when I was practicing these with Lou early on in the early stages of my healing journey and then just carrying them into these things.

So that’s why the treatment section is the first section that pops up because it’s the most important thing. Now we don’t even have just people that are focused in psychedelic therapy.

We have sound healers, we have We have these different therapists there that are licensed that aren’t really into psychedelics, but they do believe in the mission and they believe the movement.

They’re supporters of it, it’s not a requirement to be on the site and be involved in psychedelic. It’s just, we feel that these people are needed. That’s so valuable.

I want to kick it over to Lou so we can talk about some of the other features on there. If you want say anything further about the treatment side, Lou, please do.

Well, I’ll kick over you. Yeah. So I think it’s a good time to talk about the name psychedelics too, in relation to what we keep harping on a bit here.

And it is because we feel so strongly about skill development. We are a very large community support platform, listing, et cetera. We’re a directory listing.

we’re an advertising platform. And so the name psychedelist in that context is pretty simple, quick play on words. and obviously there’s a director listing there with all sorts of.

services and products and informational opportunities. But beyond that is this real focus on the skill development side. And that’s why these speaking opportunities are so important and this ability to get our brand ethos out there and the true messaging of what we’re about, because you can miss it if you don’t hear us speak about it.

There are other categories that are labeled for people who are dedicated to building skill sets. scientists, dentists, physicists, violinists pianists.

Right. So many of those, all of, those are categories that are meant to, you know, describe someone who has spent a long time, dedicated hours, many dedicated building a skill set.

And so psychedelics falls in that pattern of language and is meant to indicate the same thing. So we’re hoping that one day as the brand ethos gets out there more and psychedelic becomes a more common household name that people may refer to themselves as psychedelists.

That’s the true idea behind it. You miss that if we don’t talk about it and you don t know that that’s where that name comes from or what that name is meant to me.

And so, yeah, the whole project really is embodiment of the skill development journey. The thing about it and why it’s so important is it is not necessarily the sexiest message.

A lot of people that still come to our platform, come me, and come for questions, Not all of them, but there’s still a good amount of people out there who want to just take a psychedelic in the same way as taking an antidepressant, in same ways taking some other form of medication, whether it’s an antibiotic or a blood pressure medication or whatever it is.

Almost what I mean is a set it and forget it idea. I’m just going to microdose. Oh, you know, I going do this experience and that’s going fix me. And I just actually saw a post somewhere on social media, on Facebook about some very lifelong practicing meditators in, uh, believe in India.

They were Hindus, but these were master level practitioners, 30 years of nonstop meditation were exposed to DMT-5MAO and their comments were interesting.

They said, yes, this is the truth. This exposes you to the Truth and the reality of our universe and our spiritual existence. However, it’s just a glimpse.

It’s a window. The practice of a lifetime of meditation is not a glimpses. creating it through a built effort in yourself. It’s no longer something that you depend on, something external.

And that’s what’s so important in what we’re talking about here is that people are so much out there looking for what is the one thing? What is this thing that I can find out that it’s just going to eliminate my suffering?

And I don’t know if that is a factor of great marketing and propaganda and just the instant gratification, marketplaces, and things like that, but eventually people get tired of it once they realize it doesn’t work.

Once you go through enough of that and you’re like, wow, none of this is working, then you discover something that does work, that actually works. Yeah, it takes work!

You have to put in daily practice, you have put some discipline and some effort. but it actually works. Once you’ve had enough failure in your life and enough times where you tried the medicine, you try the supplement, the gimmick, whatever it was and it didn’t solve the problem, then you start going, okay, I’ll do whatever is takes.

And that in a way I think is humbling. That is the humility that comes eventually. And I’m going to put in the work I want to do. If this might work, I am going try it.

I actually am putting in some serious effort and see where that leads. It might take an enormous amount of effort to become a master at something. But it doesn’t take that much effort, to notice incremental change though.

And I think that incremental change is the positive feedback that helps you keep going. I felt better today, I did some breath work, 15 minutes of breathwork, wow, that changed my day just that little bit.

You know, set aside time for meditation, for just five minutes in nature, whatever it is, and I feel different. Those little feedbacks, those little pieces of data that come in for someone who’s been suffering a long time, it starts to add up and finally you start to see some change in folks.

So that’s the idea behind psychedelics. It’s definitely where the real work is. We talk about integrative practices at our center and building that in.

And you, Josh, also talked about facilitation and how important not being left alone in the room. To me, I’m amazed. I am surprised and sometimes shocked by the deep experiences that patients have, and they’re left along in a room and there’s no processing.

Even we have a group, Ketamine Now, going with veterans. And there’s so much to be learned from each other, too, and from that processing. And the platform that you’ve created, I think, is a very important one.

I was executive director at the UCSF Psychedelic and Theagenic Academic Council, which was for the same purposes, bringing everybody onto this platform, researchers, scientists, students, artists, the community, indigenous healers that are out there, the sciences of indigenous, you know, there’s science in it, why have we ignored that?

And bringing it all together, I think it’s important that people look at your site, thepsychodelist.com, because I see the wealth of resources that you’ve developed and put here, When it comes to ethics, the ethics of caring, and at our center, we always have to keep in mind that is this the right thing for the patient?

What’s the timing? what’s is the pacing? And what is going to be the approach? Because each person is individual. And you can’t cookie cutter this either.

When you cookie-cutter it, it will become a problem. So what are your thoughts on the Renaissance and this? I can see that there’s this passion for, and it’s speaking to it, but definitely demonstrating this, passion to share this.

Passion to, to really from your own experiences and taking it to such a deep, extensive model. Where do you want to take this next? What’s your, what’s the way forward?

I think that there’s a very broad view and dream and picture of a changing world. And I thing a lot of people in this renaissance are hoping for a global level of consciousness shift that changes our interaction with each other and our environment.

When I’ve mentioned it now twice, I mentioned that I see individual psychology as a result of the sociological container. That means that, really, feel that the social logical container is really as important, if not more important.

You can address unnatural, toxic, unhealthy environments through skills and through use of proper PPE, let’s say. analogy, right? We can go to Mars, we can deal with toxic environments and nuclear radiation, whatever analogy you want to use.

And it requires a high degree of competency and skill in order to manage that. But the truth is, When you’re thinking of 8 billion people on the planet, it’s not a reasonable expectation of everyone.

We need to start changing our sociological container to be healthier. And where this, I think, has been shown in some of the strongest areas is with substance abuse and understanding of addiction and dependency to substances and what the impingements are that cause it.

This idea that Unfortunately, for a very long time existed of drugs cause addiction. I really did a lot of harm and of course led to our current war on drugs.

It’s still going, although I think the war drugs now is at such a level that many people are admitting it’s just game over. The scary thing there is when we’ve got into the analog chemicals, we got now into industrial engineering and changing of research chemicals and things like this to a point that It’s so much more dangerous of an environment because we kept choosing the wrong sociological direction.

And now what do you do? When you see the models that have worked, when you places like the Netherlands that went through their heroin addiction problem in the 70s and 80s, and then you look at them, they don’t even have fentanyl hitting their streets because they didn’t choose these models.

That are founded in profitability, unfortunately, this profit driven over a well-being of the populations, of individuals, the people involved for the sake of whether it’s ego, whether its power, financial gain, whatever those reasonings are, they very much exist, especially here in the United States.

And we’re seeing that with this huge opioid crisis and what’s happening here. wanting to change people’s minds around the sociology and understanding of even criminal justice, how you can take a human being and you do this to almost any species.

Place that species in an environment that is sociologically toxic to that specie or physically toxic or any type of toxicity you want to add and your going to see negative outcomes in behavior, in individual health, and so many areas for that specie.

It’s a really tough message to get across to people because they feel like there’s a sentiment of reduction in culpability and responsibility to the individual, and that is not the case.

Instead of giving the system a pass, it’s holding the systems culpable as well. It’s not letting anyone off the hook, its actually bringing more responsibility, the entire picture, to global situation of what is causing people to want to poison themselves.

what causes a person to want to commit suicide and end their life and self-harm. What causes these situations is very much a sociological container that’s extremely contaminated.

So, yes, we at Psychedelics, on the one hand, give people the skills to manage in the toxic environment, to be able to go into the radioactive Chernobyl unit and sustain in there.

But that’s not really the most passionate area that I see. I want to see our society at a systemic level start to address changes that would become more harmonic with our environment, which is in very deep jeopardy.

Changes within our interactions with each other and harmony as a whole. And there is just a lot of programming, thousands of years of propaganda and generational trauma that is holding us in this kind of stalemate right now.

And, uh, and it, it really is to some degree similar to, some of these movies, the Matrix, Star Wars, you know, The Force and the, You know the light and dark, those are, they’re real.

They’re not real in the way that those movies portray them. But those movies are great metaphorical examples of exactly what we’re experiencing. And so my concern is that if we don’t find a way to change the sociological container to something healthier, that we won’t start to embrace our fellow species and embrace the environment in each other in a more holistic and harmonious way that that, we couldn’t even face extinction.

a much bigger deal than just individual mental health. This really is, what is the future of humanity? What is a future homo sapiens? And what does the feature of the other species on the planet?

They’re going to suffer because we’ve made these choices to do what we’re doing now. So that’s the big vision, really. Aliyah, you’re on mute. I love that we’re going to close on that note because the bigger vision is, I call it, where I tell patients, we are not treating conditions, We’re treating social injustice.

We are treating the social disparity of your life, of what you’ve experienced. It’s not medicine. it’s really systemic, as you said. Started early. Babies are now born, paranoid, schizophrenic or suicidal.

Or homicidal. Or sexual predators. They’re born perfect. Perfect. And that’s a miracle as well. Thank you. As we close, I’d like to ask, and this is what we ask.

What’s the curious question you have for the next podcast or the question to me or to the audience? Hmm, that’s a good one. I think there was something that came through on social media and it has me thinking when you asked that question.

What was said was like, it was about ketamine therapy. And what was in the post was ketamin therapy doesn’t work. And that’s really curious. And this would be the question, I think.

Is it the ketamine therapy that didn’t work? Or was it a lack of preparation, integration? Was it to lack going within and then working on the self to positively affect?

the other, is it those things that was missed? And that’s why that person who posted it thought this doesn’t work. Because when I work in this space, one of the things I was taught doing ketamine assisted therapy was we are the medicine.

Yeah. We are the change and it starts here. Incredible. We’re the medicine. Lou, anything you’d like to ask? You know, I’m just curious about people’s own journeys and how it feels for them.

Like, what is it like? you know, going from maybe just their individual stories are always important to me. I’d like to know more and have people be willing to share more with us their stories of all modalities, everything they’ve been through.

And I don’t want it to sound like I’m demonizing. Western care, Western classical care. I think that it’s evolving as well, and we’re meeting more and more doctors that are more integrative in their mindset.

And I’d like to hear from other people their journeys, their stories, how they’re experiencing this journey we are all on, which is towards further consciousness and awareness.

That would be my most curious. Well, we talk about that on this podcast. We do bring story. Story is healing, storytelling is killing. And we used to do that when we were off our phones and we’d just sit around in a fire and tell stories and what we learned from each other from storytelling.

It’s been an art and a science for centuries and millennia. Thank you. That’s a great question. And yes, and if you want to hear more story, please listen to our podcasts.

Patient stories matter. Every day I learn. I’m seeing you today between two patients that I have the privilege of working with, And I get to listen their story and really support their change.

So, as I’ve witnessed and I heal, I say this way, heal every time you heal. This has been a healing conversation for me. and I hope it was for you as well, and hope that it will be for our audience.

Thank you. We challenge you to ask us those unasked questions that you’re curious about in your medical practice, condition, health and wellness. If you enjoyed the podcast, don’t forget to subscribe, share it with somebody just as curious and leave us a review.

It helps us keep the curiosity alive. Post or comment with a question or curious inquiry that have and seek to explore or learn with us. Stay curious, and we’ll see you next time.