OPEN Foundation

Annabelle Abraham

Dutch Psychedelic Practices Shaped by Culture and Law


From the Field: Lessons from psychedelic practices in the Netherlands is a blog series based on my qualitative research at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in collaboration with the OPEN Foundation. The study focused on the conception and practice of safe and beneficial use of psychedelics in group settings in the Netherlands: more specifically in counterculture, ayahuasca ceremonies and truffle retreat centers. Based on interviews with experienced practitioners, the series highlights and connects diverse aspects of psychedelic practices, from cultural influences through ethics to sensory stimuli.

Part 1: Lessons on Psychedelic Harm Reduction with PsyCare NL – From the field
Part 2: Dutch Psychedelic Practices Shaped by Culture and Law (current post)


As I delved into psychedelic research, it surprised me how few studies paid attention to experienced practitioners and the established practices they follow. To date, most research is concerned with future clinical therapeutic applications. In fact, the image of psychedelics as medication for mental health issues has by now become so prevalent, that the faculty did not see how psychedelics could be relevant for a thesis in Cultural Leadership. While psychedelics may become prescribed medications in the future, they have a rich cultural past and present. They stand at the heart of multiple indigenous cultures, the counterculture of the 1960’s and contemporary events like Burning Man; they were inspirational to the creation of numerous artworks in all artistic genres. And they are central to the lives of certain individuals and communities, here in the Netherlands too. 

Pairing with OPEN, we wanted to get an idea of how the current Dutch scenery looks like. As the field grows and more practices appear, we were wondering which existing group practices around the use of psychedelics are facilitated in the Netherlands (Q1). In addition to this bird’s-eye view, we dived deeply into the details of psychedelic practices with the help of well-known and esteemed practitioners. Our focus was on how facilitators envision and practice safe and beneficial use of psychedelics (Q2). To answer the first question, a survey was sent to the members of OPEN (n=112), inquiring about the practices they know and how they can be classified. For the second question, 60-90 minute interviews were conducted with facilitators. This article reviews the study itself, its main theoretical framework, set and setting, and the general Dutch context – the setting in which the practices and the study take place.

Academic approaches and muddy realities of psychedelic practices

In the academy, we strive to be exact: research questions need to be specific, categories methodically outlined, concepts accurately defined. To me, one of the fascinating things about psychedelics is that they do not fit neatly into any ontological box. They stand at various conceptual intersections, like body and mind, science and spirituality, individual and community, and highlight the boxes themselves. What we see is a reflection of our own thinking patterns in our striving to make sense of the world. In other words, we are constantly reminded that the map is not the territory

Being aware of this tension, my questions related to a psychedelic ‘practice’, in its simplest definition – the usual way of doing something. Instead of using ontological labels, like ‘recreational’, ‘therapeutic’ and ‘spiritual’ use in the survey, I opted for real-life vocabulary: psychedelic parties and events, retreat centers and ceremonial settings. The survey results confirmed my hypothesis that these were the three most prevalent ones in the Netherlands. Subsequently, interviews were conducted with eight experienced facilitators: three ayahuasca ceremony leaders, two retreat guides and three prominent figures in a psychedelic countercultural institution. Albeit my efforts to avoid definitions, I still had three supposedly distinct categories in my head. 

As the interviews unfolded, the outlines of these categories started getting blurry. For example, practices employed by the ayahuasca practitioners proved to be very different from one another, ranging from shamanic traditions to Western psychology frameworks. So the joint label ‘ayahuasca ceremony’ seemed to convey very little information beyond the drinking of ayahuasca. Some ceremonies shared more elements with retreat centers’ practices than with each other. So how can practices be distinguished from one another? What are the most important elements? This was the focus of one question in the survey. Respondents were given options like ‘the type of substance’, ‘the philosophy behind the practice’, ‘the setting’, and had to rate their significance to classification. So, for example, if ‘the type of substance’ was rated as the highest, it would make sense to have ‘ayahuasca ceremony’ as a separate category. However, the results only made things more complex: all suggested options were rated as almost identically important for the definition of practices and their classification.

The more I learned, the less sense it made to try and define the practices, certainly by relating to their differences. In addition to diversity between facilitators, many of them talked about changes within their own practice over time, so even the best of classifications was bound to lose its accuracy shortly in this vibrant and newly-awakened field. ‘Take your eyes off the map!’ I had to remind myself, ‘how does the territory look like?’ Then something appeared: some elements were brought up by all (or most) interviewees. So I chose to focus on the commonalities between practices, in a unifying rather than separative approach. Which elements are shared by all practices? What makes them so special that they were highlighted by all facilitators, and how do they contribute to safe and beneficial use of psychedelics?

The Dutch psychedelic Context: Sociocultural Set and Setting

Before taking that trip, let us pause to observe the context of the practices and the study. According to the theory of set and setting, psychedelic experiences are shaped by the setting in which they take place: the physical environment with all its components, and by the mindset of the person taking them, including their intentions, personality traits, etc. This is also true for ordinary human experience, since as Gregory Bateson noted, the phenomena of context and meaning are closely related. But during psychedelic experiences, these connections are enhanced. While many think of set and setting as immediate parameters confined in space and time, the concept has been broadened to include one’s sociocultural context and even the collective one. They can be thought of as different scales of influence on one’s experience. Taking the ayahuasca ceremony example, the ceremony itself would be part of the immediate set and setting, as well as where it is held, the other participants, my intentions and my mood on that day. On another scale, my cultural background plays a tremendous part: am I Dutch? Indigenous? How does my culture frame hallucinations? When I go back home after the ceremony, can I discuss my experience with family and friends? What language would be used to describe it? How does my culture conceive of reality? 

Legal entanglements

Where substances other than (psilocybin containing) truffles are concerned, illegality is part and parcel of the set and setting, influencing people’s experiences and the practice as a whole. This is why many retreat centers use truffles, offering both facilitators and participants a legal setting. When I was discussing challenging situations with a retreat guide, they shared a story about a participant who felt unsafe, as if held against their will. A worried friend and some misunderstandings ended in the police being called. When they arrived, it appeared that everyone was safe, the participant was free to leave, and no illegal activity was being committed. Had this happened during an ayahuasca ceremony, the exact same situation could have had significant consequences for the facilitators, the institution they represent and the hosting ground.

The legal situation has practical implications which go far beyond the rare ‘what if’ scenario. Operating in a legal environment, retreat centers often publish educational material on their websites, and their ‘about’ section can include the names, photos and bios of the team. With a few exceptions, facilitators of ayahuasca ceremonies typically work ‘underground’: the ayahuasca-related content is hidden on a password-protected part of their website, if they even have one. Some work with newsletters, carefully distributed among trusted individuals. General non-drug-related descriptions have to be used for payments; finding locations can be tricky. Above ground, producers of countercultural events often relate to drugs as the three wise monkeys: “see not, hear not, speak not”; the mushrooms on the invitation are only decorative.

Prohibition has consequences for participants’ safety as well. In counterculture, it concerns the limitation of prevention and harm-reduction practices. Some festivals, like Boom in Portugal, offer participants drug-testing services. This is because drugs may be cut using other, sometimes dangerous chemicals. If a pattern is discovered, all festival participants receive a message to their phone, alerting them of potential harmful drugs on the terrain. While drug-test services are available for the public all over the Netherlands, they are prohibited on festival grounds. The recently founded PsyCare NL is a new development in the field. Based entirely on volunteer work, the bottom-up harm reduction initiative supplies a safe haven for festival-goers in need.

Participants’ safety in the ceremonial setting benefits from well-informed facilitators and ethical practices. In an unregulated sea, where every facilitator is an island, this becomes difficult even for the best-intentioned practitioners. Here as well, it is mitigated by a bottom-up Dutch initiative. Liaan makes place for ayahuasca ceremony leaders to meet, share their experience, raise questions and doubts, and learn from each other. In the absence of formal guidelines, the network allows them to create professional standards inside the community.

Let’s talk about [beep]: conducting ethical research

Legal entanglements have consequences for research and education as well. To abide by the EU GDPR, survey respondents were asked not to include names or other personal information of practitioners and institutions involved with psychedelics. Only publicly available information, like websites, was allowed. This obviously had an effect on our ability to answer question 1, which existing group practices around the use of psychedelics are facilitated in the Netherlands, for any underground practice had to remain underground.

Most interviewees – facilitators with years, often decades of experience – preferred to preserve their and their institutions’ anonymity. Ultimately, the university’s Ethics Committee required that anonymity be granted to all interviewees without exception. My initial intention to present and discuss the research results with some of the interviewees in an OPEN online event proved unrealistic for that same reason. Instead, I am writing this series, in which my voice is the only one heard.

Culture is not your friend: The works of public image

During preparatory conversations with interviewees, it became clear that none of them were afraid of criminal consequences. Dutch drug policy and law enforcement are considered relatively tolerant. Festivals even work collaboratively with the police, with a mutual understanding that psychedelic drugs do not pose a threat to the safety of visitors. But practitioners know that cultural bias can be stronger than both science and the law. Alcohol is probably the best drug to demonstrate that. The WHO recently published that “2.6 million deaths per year were attributable to alcohol consumption, accounting for 4.7% of all deaths”, and yet not only is alcohol legal, it is completely socially-accepted, it is the norm.

During my PsyCare training last summer, the head of the First Aid services explained that they consider the festival a low profile event. Typically, his team might have to treat two serious medical cases during a five-day long festival, whereas at an average city marathon some 50 people might be rushed to a hospital. Comparing this statement against the public image of psychedelic festivals and that of sport events organized by municipalities, blew me away. But what hit me even harder was my colleagues’ and my own surprise at this, which demonstrated just how powerful public images can be; and that being knowledgeable and even working in the field does not spare you their effect. In a recent episode of Psychedelics Today, Rick Doblin talks about why he thinks Lykos and MAPS failed to get FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. A big part of it was their assumption that science was more important than culture, underestimating the impact of media and public opinion on the FDA.

Regulation is also conducted by civil bodies deterred by the stigma around drugs. Among the interviewees, one institution was afraid of losing its permit if the municipality associated it with drugs. Another had already lost its bank account due to the same reasons, and feared losing their new one, or worse, being blacklisted by all banks in the Netherlands. At the same time, the Dutch government is making impressive steps towards regulating therapeutic use of MDMA, and perhaps other psychedelics in the future. If psychedelic-assisted therapies become legal, it will surely help in changing public opinions around these substances. However, if they are prescribed as medications and boxed in a clinical setting, most of the study participants might remain in illegal territory rather than becoming the leading voices of this change.

These trends do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of even larger cultural contexts: Dutch, European and Western culture(s), and ultimately the world in which we live in. Dutch practices are part of similar psychedelic practices taking place in other parts of the world and in other times in history. Currently, they are hosted against the backdrop of neoliberalism, capitalism, globalization, secularization, the climate crisis, technology and digital culture, the mental health crisis, and what John Vervaeke described more globally as the meaning crisis. Keeping this broad gaze in mind, the coming articles will zoom into the practices themselves. They will focus on the role of music, nature, sensory stimuli (or lack thereof), agency, care and community; the seemingly separate components shared by all the studied practices.

Lessons on Psychedelic Harm Reduction with PsyCare NL – From the field

“From the Field: Lessons from Psychedelic Practices in the Netherlands” is a new blog series stemming from my qualitative research at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in collaboration with the OPEN Foundation. The study focused on the conception and practice of safe and beneficial use of psychedelics in group settings in the Netherlands—specifically in the counterculture, ayahuasca ceremonies and truffle retreat centers. Based on interviews with experienced practitioners, the series highlights and connects diverse aspects of psychedelic practices, such as cultural influences, ethics, philosophical beliefs, rituals and sensory stimuli. This article is based on my personal experience as part of a new PsyCare NL team, launched last summer (2024) at a festival in the Netherlands.

The Launch of PsyCare NL: Safe Psychedelic Substance Use at Festivals

The PsyCare facility is a calm, safe, cozy and grounding environment for participants in need, playing a crucial role in prevention and harm reduction at festivals where psychedelic substances are commonly used. Visitors are welcomed by experienced psychedelic peer support “sitters” with a deep understanding of mind-altering substances and a relaxed, non-judgmental approach towards difficult and challenging experiences. Ideally, a team is composed of sitters with different professional backgrounds, gender, personality and language skills to ensure the most appropriate support for all visitors.

PsyCare NL was restarted by Cato de Vos following years of volunteer work with international psychedelic support services like Kosmicare at Boom Festival. Developed with her colleague and friend Raoul Koning (who, like Cato, is part of the OPEN team), the pilot was implemented with a team of 11 members. In total, we received 41 guests over three days. Most cases were drug-related and, typical to a festival environment, involved a variety of drug types and doses, with a dominance of LSD. Other cases involved general agitation or overwhelming feelings from the festival. Some guests could not communicate their feelings or which substances they had consumed (if any). Looking back at the stats reveals strong diversity in other parameters as well, such as how guests arrived at PsyCare or for how long they stayed.

So, how can you help someone through a challenging experience with such a wide variety of cases?

Creating a Safe Haven: The Role of Psychedelic Support Services

With the exception of medical issues—which are determined by the First Aid team—we hardly followed any strict protocols. There are handy guidelines, training and even manuals for this complex and challenging work, but much of it is carried out in an intuitive manner. Like humor or the psychedelic experience itself, this sort of knowledge does not lend itself easily to words and numbers. Nevertheless, in this article, I will highlight essential aspects of PsyCare practice as they emerged from our collaboration with First Aid, feedback from guests and visitors and my own experience as a participant-observer and part of the team.

the core of psychedelic Harm Reduction: Being Present

Being present is probably the single most important element of PsyCare, and it begins with the place itself. The festival production supplied us with a Moroccan tent and a yurt, which we made cozy and aesthetic. With mattresses spread around, warm lighting and decoration, PsyCare became both a part of the festival and a peaceful haven away from it. This already had an effect, as by-passers stopped to take a look inside and ask about PsyCare. Some mentioned that they were relieved to know it’s there. 

Festivals with an established PsyCare tend to offer a 24 hour per day service. In this pilot, our official opening hours were from 16:00 to 8:00, with the night hours (1:00-6:00) being the busiest. In practice, we never said ‘no’ to someone in need, and at 10:30 in the morning we welcomed our first guest. We often remind our guests that drug effects are temporary, or as the wise old saying goes: “this too shall pass”. Yet different drugs – and people – require different amounts of time. Guests’ duration of stay throughout the pilot varied from 5 minutes to 14 hours, with an average stay of 3 hours per guest.

Being present in space and time extends to the personal. Often the most meaningful thing you can do for someone who is overwhelmed is just to be there; to stay with them through this difficult moment, fully present with your attention, patience and calm, no matter what comes. Applied within the PsyCare team as well, mutual care and team spirit were vital to the success of the pilot. 

    Community Values: “Psychedelic Peer Support”

    Festivals in this counterculture make room for spontaneity, experimentation, rule-bending and non-conformist behavior. PsyCare emerged from within this community and seems to share with it some core values that came up during my interviews, like non-judgment. In PsyCare, this is applied as refraining from value judgments of people’s experiences, behaviors, thinking processes, or beliefs. Each person’s freedom and autonomy are respected—a principle overridden only in case of imminent risk to oneself or others.

    Embracing Equality and Non-Hierarchy

    The principle of equality, or non-hierarchy, is another unique feature of PsyCare stemming from counterculture. As volunteers in their own community, PsyCare sitters do not operate from a position of superiority or authority in relation to visitors. They are temporarily holding space for temporary “guests”, as their name suggests. This approach carries a multitude of implications. For example, a guest can bump into their sitter from yesterday at the bar or on the dancefloor. Furthermore, yesterday’s sitter can become today’s guest. Accepting such potentialities involved conscious discussions among the team: how do we ensure guests’ privacy? Are we ‘sitters’ outside our shifts? What does this mean in practice?

    On the last evening of the festival, I met a guest with whom I spent three hours in the PsyCare tent. Our guideline in such cases is to let the guest determine what happens. They smiled at me and stretched their arms for a hug. We chatted and danced together for a bit, and then they moved on. For me, this short incidental encounter on the dancefloor supplied closure and reinforced our positions as fellow festival-goers.

    Such liminal cases are exactly where non-judgement and non-hierarchy shine, and have the power to turn an otherwise awkward or embarrassing situation into a meaningful, connecting and supportive event.

    Awareness of Shame and Vulnerability

    Coming to PsyCare requires admitting to being in need, a feeling which can be challenging for many in itself. Guests may realize that they have taken more than they can chew or even completely lost control. Exposing “weakness” is never easy, but in small communities where many people know each other, shame can become a real barrier. Considering these complexities, any authoritative position, even of ‘a professional’ or a ‘responsible adult,’ is unlikely to contribute to PsyCare as a safe haven. This is why, where other emergency services typically wear a uniform, we wore our regular (low-key) festival clothes and a name tag with a little heart on it.

    Early on in the festival, I was called to check on a disoriented person and try to bring them to the PsyCare facility. Despite their highly confused condition, I managed to establish trust and we were quickly holding hands on our way to the PsyCare tent. At the same time, a First Aid worker in uniform approached us and asked if everything was alright. The guest’s state of mind changed instantly. They released their hand from mine, flinched and asked anxiously: “Did I do anything wrong?”

    Following this case, we came to an agreement with the First Aid staff that they remove their jackets before entering PsyCare, notwithstanding their white uniform was chosen for its non-intimidating character. This policy was found useful by both teams.

    Embracing Care: The Heart of PsyCare

    Here is how Ann Shulgin described the ideal MDMA therapist back in 1995:

    “[S/]he has to be able to feel something very close to love for the person [s/]he is guiding. There should be real caring and it cannot be simply an intellectual concern for the client’s welfare; it must be deeper than that, at the gut level.”

    The relatively long experience with mind-altering substances in counterculture is often disregarded or looked down upon by academics, even those studying psychedelics. Some of it is pure stigma, but there is also a genuine conflict of approaches. As PsyCare sitters, we benefit from ‘subjective’ experiences at least as much as from ‘objective’ facts. Both theory and metaphor were used in our training and we followed values and approaches more than rules and protocols. Above all, PsyCare takes place in a vibrant, dynamic and sometimes chaotic setting, which is almost the opposite of a ‘controlled environment.’

    The fear of intellectual uncertainty and making mistakes cannot be entirely avoided, but PsyCare consciously makes room for other ways of knowing. To describe positive attributes of an effective sitter, our training instructor Daan Keiman, who leads OPEN Foundation’s upcoming education programme in psychedelic therapy, shared the following metaphor:

    If a person is immobile, shut, or stiff like a rock, we should be soft and fluid like water. If they are floating and formless like water, we would have to be their rock.

    Furthermore, presence and care ought to be practiced delicately: sitters do not attempt to pull guests out of their experience but offer them a hand to grab on. Curiously, it’s the little things that have the greatest impact: a welcoming smile, a cup of tea, a blanket, holding someone’s hand, offering a hug, listening to their story, laughing with them.

    In one word: Care.

    An attuned caring presence can turn loneliness into a feeling of being held, and a nightmare into a meaningful experience. Like ‘love’, ‘care’ might be difficult to define or even comprehend intellectually; but luckily, this is not necessary in order to give it. Being in a festival setting, I could not help but think of it in terms of the dance floor: there are no steps, but if you listen carefully to the music and let it guide you, there will be a dance.

    Continuing the Conversation on Psychedelic Support in Recreational Settings

    A broader look at PsyCare will be discussed in an upcoming OPEN event (3.10.24) moderated by PsyCare NL founder Cato de Vos and featuring international Psychedelic Support Services experts Amanda Guzinska (PsyCare UK) and Valerie Beltrán (Zendo Project). Click below to register.


    BEYOND SUBSTANCES: WHEN CULTURE GOES INTO THE LAB

    Photo by By Andre Vas

    BEYOND psychedelic SUBSTANCES: WHEN CULTURE enters THE LAB

    Brendan Borrell’s recently published New York Times article The Psychedelic Evangelist, about Johns Hopkins University’s late pioneering researcher Roland Griffiths, joins a series of blog posts, news articles and academic papers discussing problematic aspects of psychedelic science. Some of these concern personal misconduct, but others are rooted much deeper. Psychedelics bring together human psychology and chemical compounds, science, metaphysics and cultures. They are explored by pharmacologists and philosophers, anthropologists and psychiatrists, all trying to study what’s in a psychedelic, each with their own vocabulary and worldview. Some of the problems which arise from psychedelic research represent old schisms between the sciences and the humanities, and questions about knowledge as a whole. Here too, psychedelics seem to have a revealing effect, exposing our own thinking mechanisms.

    Mystical science

    The concept of “mystical experiences” has been one of these subjects of ongoing discussion. According to the Cartesian view, the spiritual and the experiential are in principle beyond the bounds of science, as they can neither be confirmed nor refuted. Thus uncomfortable feelings around their appearance in scientific articles can be easily understood. In The Language of Metaphysical Experience, Alan Watts relates to a similar problem encountered by physics in relation to unknown fundamental entities. While these cannot be explained and remain mysterious, they can be related to in quantitative terms for prediction purposes. For example, we can say that “dark matter makes up 30.1 percent of the matter-energy composition of the universe“ without knowing what ‘dark matter’ is. In the same way, we can put ‘mystical experiences’ on a scale, and measure how many subjects experienced them, their level of intensity and so forth. Even if such information enables prediction, ontologically such statements remain meaningless, or as Alan Watts puts it: “By admitting a few numbers, even ‘Jabberwocky’ may become scientific”.

    ‘Mystical’ is surely an eye-catcher, but psychedelic literature is abundant with what Bateson called “heuristic concepts”: concepts which bring to the table more fog than clarity. Consider for example ‘connectedness’, ‘awe’, ‘oneness’, ‘ego-death’, ‘oceanic boundlessness’, or even basic terms like ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’. Do we really know what they mean? Humanities scholars thoroughly discuss and contextualize such terms, like the mystical in religion studies or awe in art and philosophy. As they travel to the hard sciences and find themselves in quantitative questionnaires, they can become inaccurate and biased.

    These are differences within disciplines in our own culture; stepping outside reveals a deeper abyss, but it could also help in bridging gaps. In the same essay, Watts elaborates on differences between Western and Asian conceptualizations of metaphysics and their purposes. In the West we see metaphysical statements as conveying positive information about Reality. In Asia they are treated as remedies to frustrating human psychological ‘unreal’ problems, while Reality itself is ineffable. There is indeed something paradoxical about using objective terms and methods like observation to understand a subjective phenomenon like the psychedelic experience. There is a constant need to find less subjective terms: from ‘bad trip’ to ‘negative’, ‘adverse’, ‘challenging’ experience. The latter may sound more scientific than hippy, but aren’t they all personal value judgements of subjective experiences? Do they tell us anything objective at all? Another example is the quest to compile THE playlist for psychedelic interventions. Can there be one or even multiple recommended playlists? Is music not a matter of personal taste, memories and associations, of cultural references and education?

    Experiencing objectivity

    Some of the challenges are anchored in psychedelics’ legal status as schedule I drugs and the wish to develop them into treatments for medical conditions. Here too, our web of ontological assumptions and scientific methods keeps getting entangled, sometimes creating dangerous traps. Trying to stay as objective as possible, we wish to minimize the “human element” in order to properly assess the efficacy of substances. We use blinding and placebo-controlled trials, but this very practice sometimes leads to a nocebo effect (worsening of symptoms due to not getting the treatment) and even death, as described in the New York Times’s article. In many cases, practices applied to enhance objectivity are reinterpreted by participants as cold or unempathetic, and thus end up influencing results. For example, in order to minimize bias, the FDA recommends that a trial’s in-session monitor would not be involved in post-session psychotherapy. The assumption is that a therapist may be biased, in the sense that they know what happened during the psychedelic session and may use this information later. For participants, this means there is no continuity between the psychedelic session and the integration part (if there is one). This, in turn, creates trust issues and makes it difficult for participants to let go and to share their experiences. Since the therapy element is so determinate and hard to measure, psychotherapy and psychological support are often minimized in trials (also due to financial reasons), raising ethical concerns and undermining potential benefits. So some of the measures taken to accurately determine the safety and efficacy of psychedelics are in themselves a detriment to the safety and effectiveness of trials.

    Medicalization as a goal has received much critique. Different approaches, as manifested by indigenous cultures or even by counterculture are often regarded as less or not at all valid. But even within mainstream culture, and within medicine and psychiatry, psychedelics raise some thoughts about the very definitions of mental illness, health and well-being. Here are a few: how come psychedelics seem to work for so many different mental disorders? Could it be that the terms “placebo” and “inner healing” refer to the same thing? If placebo works so well, why do we focus on external solutions which would prove better, instead of trying to enhance placebo? Some say that psychedelic research is leading to a full-blown paradigm shift in psychiatry, integrating social and cultural factors into conceptualizations of mental disorders and to transformation as the new basis for psychiatry.

    Wired by culture

    Known since the beginning of the 1960’s, ‘Set and Setting’ is the main mechanism through which subjectivity and culture enter the psychedelic experience. Indeed, many academic papers include an apologetic paragraph acknowledging the importance of these two illusive and immeasurable components, before embarking on a futile battle to neutralize them. 

    Originally referring to a person’s mind-set and environment during a trip, set and setting bring into the psychedelic experience a complex web of one’s personal history, tendencies, mood, culture, environment and education. And all of these together influence participants’ interpretations, the meanings they give to their own experiences. In 1997, Betty Eisner added the Matrix component, one’s broader cultural frame. Then, in American Trip, Ido Hartogsohn expanded it to a Collective Set and Setting of a nation with its particular history and sociocultural context. Our Collective Set and Setting influences not only participants, but researchers and therapists as well. It can include, for example, the infamous hype of the psychedelic renaissance, articles we’ve read, films and documentaries we watched, stories and images from the 1960’s counterculture and echoes from the “War on drugs”. Back in 1959, Anthony F.C. Wallace already attributed the discrepancy seen between reactions to mescaline of Westerners and indigenous people to their cultural beliefs. While white subjects reported ‘going mad’ (e.g. mood swings, losing touch with reality, forsaking social inhibitors, etc.), such phenomena were not felt by the indigenous group, who remained generally stable and positive. Wallace concluded that the differences stemmed from the cultural conceptualization of hallucinations. In Western psychiatry, hallucinations are perceived as signs of mental illness, while in the indigenous culture, they are considered normal and even desirable.

    Several elements in the setting of Griffiths’ lab were deemed problematic by Dr. Richards. It is easy to see how participants’ interpretations and experiences may be affected by a Buddha sculpture. But in fact, a ‘neutral’ setting does not exist. A hospital building carries its own associations, the outside and inside appearance of clinics also matters. According to Art literature, even white walls are not neutral. Music, smells… There is no way out; everything matters, from the size of the room and type of furniture through the number and gender of people present, to perceptions and beliefs of researchers, therapists and participants about psychedelics, people and the world. Moreover, not only do they affect trial results, but also their design, our research questions and our approach to the process. For example, a study aimed at minimizing nausea during consumption of Ayahuasca treats it as an undesired side effect, while another can regard it as an act of cleansing conducive to positive changes in well-being. Simply put, Set and Setting cannot be kept away from the lab.

    Psychedelic research is full of contradictions, paradoxes and absurdities. We strive for total control and meticulous procedures to study substances which make one lose control and reflect on your own processes. We wish to eliminate anything weird or mysterious, but also dream of discovering a “magic pill”. As meanings, chemicals, cultures and personal tendencies collide, interdisciplinary research can supply the necessary means – perhaps not to overcome all contradictions – but at least to understand them better and to live with them as best as we can.

    By Annabelle Abraham

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