Community Strategising about
Psychedelic Therapy in Aotearoa
An 18-month project to explore what psychedelic therapy in Aotearoa New Zealand could - and should - look like.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy is currently being developed as a mental health treatment that combines psychedelics with therapeutic support.
Psychedelics include certain plants, fungi, and synthetic chemicals that can produce profound changes in consciousness including experiences of awe, love, a deep sense of connection, and spiritual insight.
Over the last 10 years, psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) has shown great potential in the treatment of a range of mental health conditions, including addiction, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, research suggests that psychedelics are non-addictive and relatively safe - though greater understanding and awareness of their distinctive harm profiles is needed.
Today, a growing number of pharmaceutical companies are turning psychedelic-assisted therapies into scaleable mental health interventions. But the use of psychedelics is not new. The medicalisation of PAT is happening atop a long history of Indigenous, religious, and underground clinical traditions of psychedelic use. Expertise about psychedelics is shared amongst all these groups.
Community Strategising about Psychedelic Therapy in Aotearoa is an 18-month project to cultivate relationships within and between communities who have a stake in psychedelic-assisted therapy. The goal of the project is to collectively strategise about what psychedelic-assisted therapy in Aotearoa New Zealand could and should look like.
The kaupapa (ethos) of this project is to be inclusive, participatory, and capacity-building.
We hope to support discussions about psychedelic-assisted therapy that build the capacity of communities in Aotearoa to set the terms of what it could and should look like.
In doing so, we are committed to harm reduction, valuing multiple forms of expertise, and tino rangatiratanga (Indigenous self-determination).
The communities we are strategising with include:
People with lived and living experience of the mental healthcare system – including the dangers of over-medicalisation and the over-hyping of newly healthcare treatments;
Harm reduction practitioners – including experts in holding space for those experiencing challenging psychedelic experiences, or ‘bad trips’;
Rongoā practitioners – experts in traditional Māori healing;
Experts in spirituality – from tōhunga of wairua to spiritual chaplains;
Psychedelic therapists – from underground therapists and healers to those setting up new and emerging professional therapy training programmes.