Psychedelics as a Training Experience for Psychedelic Therapists: Drawing on History to Inform Current Practice

Introduction

Nielson situates the paper within the contemporary revival of psychedelic-assisted therapy research, noting that psilocybin and MDMA are being tested in clinical trials for multiple indications while hundreds of therapists will need training to deliver these treatments. The introduction contrasts three models of professional relation to psychoactive medicines: the pharmacological model in which prescribers typically do not have personal experience with the drug, shamanic models in which extensive personal experience is part of training, and historical scientific practice in which some psychedelic therapists did undergo their own experiences. The author highlights a gap in current training programs: unlike some historical practices and a handful of modern MDMA and ketamine training opportunities, contemporary psilocybin research programmes in the United States do not routinely provide trainees with a legally sanctioned psychedelic experience, which complicates discussion of whether such experiences should form part of therapist training. The paper therefore seeks to inform current debates by revisiting archival materials from the Spring Grove LSD Training Study (1969–1974), one of the last formal US programmes that explicitly provided LSD experiences as training for prospective psychedelic therapists. Nielson frames the work as an archival, exploratory analysis aimed at extracting data and lessons from Spring Grove that might be relevant to designing, evaluating, and ethically situating any future training experiences with serotonergic hallucinogens such as psilocybin.