Although psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy usually seen as a recent breakthrough in the field of psychiatry, the ironic fact is that mind-altering, chemicals have utilized to enhance mental health for thousands of years. While the ceremonial use of plants such as ayahuasca in South America, peyote in North America, and iboga in Africa may appear to be a long way from the psychiatrist’s couch, researchers are increasingly turning to indigenous cultures to understand how to use these powerful medicines. However, this endeavor to reconcile contemporary science with traditional medical practices has inevitably resulted in some cultural friction, which researchers from numerous fields are currently attempting to resolve.
Anthropologists who examine the ceremonial usage of hallucinogenic substances frequently write about shamans’ deft handling of their patients while they enter “controlled altered states of consciousness.” Traditional healers can lead participants’ visions and hallucinations in specific desirable directions by manipulating symbols, music, and other aesthetic components in rituals. Indigenous healers at the Takiwasi Center in Peru, an excellent treatment and research institution where traditional Amazonian medicine blended with Western psychotherapy, regularly use such approaches.
“Most Western researchers who travel to the Amazon and attend an ayahuasca ceremony would probably regard the ritual itself as lacking in scientific value, and would not count it as a relevant variable,” the project’s scientific director, Dr. Matteo Politi, told IFLScience. However, many of us in the field of ethnopharmacology believe that ritual is not only necessary but absolutely essential to the treatment’s success.”
According to recent research of Westerners who participated in a similar mental health retreat led by indigenous ayahuasca healers, the activities of these shamans were the single most crucial element in their improved wellbeing. While orthodox psychiatrists may not completely understand shamanic rituals, it is commonly acknowledged that psychedelic experiences are the result of more than simply medicine.
Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor turned LSD evangelist, popularized the concept of “set and setting,” which states that the effects of psychedelics are largely determined by the user’s mindset as well as the environment in which they are taken, rather than the properties of the substances themselves, in the 1960s.
Research released in 2018 added some meat to these bones, concluding that psychedelics make people more responsive to environmental cues, most likely due to their propensity to promote neuroplasticity. As a result, setting and setting have been included in subsequent psychedelic experiments. This usually accomplished adjusting the therapeutic atmosphere with dim lighting and carefully chosen music playlists.
This final point is particularly significant, as research has shown that music enhances the ability of psychedelics to increase activity in the areas of the brain that process emotion. According to Politi, “the awareness of the relevance of set and setting constitutes a bridge between traditional healing and modern medicine.” “However, we must learn from the societies that have been utilizing these herbs for millennia if we are to develop this idea in modern circumstances.”
