Virginia Wright on the Future of Psychedelics and Therapy
Near the end of the conversation, with Virginia heading off to another meeting, Erik asked if she had any closing thoughts she wanted to leave with listeners. She did. She said she wanted to return to a few points about where psychedelics and therapy are headed, things she had touched on already but felt were worth saying plainly one more time.
Her first point was about what psychedelics open up for therapists. She described them as one route into the transpersonal: states of higher consciousness, experiences that reach past a person's ordinary intellectual sense of themselves. Those states, she argued, are going to find a place inside psychotherapy. Among more traditional therapists there has been some wariness about going there at all. Having psychedelics available as a working tool, in her view, gives therapists a way to bring that territory back into the work rather than keeping it at arm's length. For anyone wanting to understand that approach, she pointed to Stanislav Grof, specifically his book on LSD psychotherapy and his paper on the psychology of the future.
Second, she expected the clinical promise to keep growing. Psychedelic psychotherapy, she said, has real application for anxiety, addiction, and conditions rooted in trauma, and its use will widen as these substances move off Schedule One and into Schedule Two or Three.
Third, she connected the research to the drug war, a subject she had raised earlier in the interview. Taking psychedelics seriously as medicine, and backing that with actual study, is part of what she believes will help bring that war to a close.
She was not hedging about any of it. The literature, she said, is exploding. New studies pile up almost by the day, and governments around the world keep approving more of them. A lot of people are going to be helped. Many already have been.
Erik agreed, noting the better-than-80-percent success rate reported so far for MDMA in treating PTSD, and thanked her for the work being done at MAPS and for helping bring her own community to the conference. Virginia closed by thanking everyone who had been listening.