What "Psychedelic" Actually Means: A Conversation with Virginia Wright
The push for a new name came from a genuine insight about these substances, and there's a line I keep coming back to because it captures the whole thing: LSD isn't about a euphoric high. With any of the psychedelics, you might find yourself somewhere that feels like heaven, or somewhere that feels like hell. Researchers across the last hundred years, and now into this one, kept running into the same truth, and the name they settled on honors that double nature.
There was another reason, too. They refused the word "hallucinogen." To them, these drugs weren't manufacturing illusions. They were surfacing things that were already real, buried inside a person's psyche, tied to some wider and more open sense of the universe. The experience could link you to everything around you, and it could just as easily pull you down into the darker rooms of your own mind.
Stan Grof is the person who put words to this better than anyone. I mentioned him before. He wrote a number of books that aren't hard to track down, and there's a free paper online I'd point anyone toward on this subject: The Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. In it he walks through the history of psychology and locates where LSD, along with other substances, belongs inside that longer story. Coining the word "psychedelics" was the start of giving a vocabulary to something people had already sensed, that these drugs can carry us further along in our spiritual and psychological growth.
Because it was never a scientific or measurable term, people land on different definitions. At MAPS we're rooted in Grof's thinking, since the founder studied under him. One of the markers we lean on is whether the experience moves you toward a more whole, or as Grof would put it, holotropic state, where you come into better tune with yourself and with the world around you.
There's another trait that sets these substances apart from most drugs. The effect shifts dramatically from one person to the next, so the same dose of LSD plays out completely differently across two people. Stranger still, it shifts within the same person. Take an identical amount at two different moments and the results can diverge wildly. Very few drugs behave this way, and all the psychedelics in these groupings do.
That unpredictability is where the idea of set and setting took hold in the research, and it's a strong current running through the whole field. The drug isn't only a chemical acting on the body. What it does depends heavily on the space you're in and on the intention you carry before you ever take it. The setting part is plain enough. Picture a calm place, someone nearby making sure you have food and water, keeping you safe, with art and music and nature close by, people you love in the room. Now picture that same person taking the same dose somewhere harsh, full of pollution and angry faces. Two entirely separate experiences.