Potential Use of Ayahuasca in Grief Therapy

Introduction

Grief after the death of a loved one is a near-universal human experience that can include shock, numbness, difficulty accepting the loss, bitterness, identity disturbance, and problems moving forward. When grief symptoms persist for at least 6 months with significant functional impairment they are described as prolonged grief disorder (PGD). Conventional interventions for uncomplicated bereavement—pharmacotherapy, counselling, peer-support groups and psychotherapies—have shown limited empirical support in systematic reviews, even though peer-support groups are often valued by bereaved people for enabling memory-sharing, reducing isolation, and addressing spiritual issues. Individual responses to loss vary widely depending on factors such as personality, attachment, number and type of losses, social support, health and cultural identity, which motivates exploration of additional therapeutic tools for bereavement care. This study, led by Gonzalez and colleagues, set out to explore the potential effects of ayahuasca on grief. Specifically, the researchers compared people who had used ayahuasca during their grieving process with people who had attended peer-support groups, using standardised measures of grief and experiential avoidance plus an open-ended question to capture participants' subjective accounts of ayahuasca-related experiences. The aim was to generate preliminary data on whether ayahuasca experiences might influence grief severity and related psychological and interpersonal domains, and to identify salient experiential themes that could inform future therapeutic protocols.