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Integrative Psychiatry

Psilocybin assisted therapy for existential distress in cancer patients By Dr. Jeff Guss, MD – Part 2

By September 11, 2020December 3rd, 2020No Comments

For indigenous people, psychedelics is a way of opening doors to a spiritual or imaginal plane. It is used to access vital information to help tribal cohesion and survival instead of being seen as treatments for disorders or problems. It has been recorded as part of a number of life cycle transitions from birth, maturation, up to death.

During dosing sessions therapists as much as possible do not encourage to think about cancer but instead encourage to practice radical acceptance of all the emmergers during the session.

The first theme that emerges a patient experiences with Psilocybin assisted therapy is relational embeddedness which talks about the profound transformations in their personal relationships reporting a great sense of emotional depth far more when their living their ordinary day to day life which links to a more deeper narrative.

In this topic transpersonal psychology is about helping individuals explore their spiritual side and work with the pairing of any shattered piece of their soul. A deeper research and study of this is needed in order to better understand the difference between the soul and psyche.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

For indigenous people psychedelics are a way of opening doors to the spiritual or imaginal planes. They were not really seen as treatments for disorders or treatments for problems. Instead, they were used to access vital information to help tribal cohesion, and to help tribal survival, and engender pro social values for people. They were used to facilitate healing and predict the future or define the future, to protect the community from danger, enhance learning, solve social problems, and facilitate the dying process. In fact, psychedelics have been recorded as part of a number of life cycle transitions in a variety of indigenous cultures such as birth, death, which maturation boyhood to manhood, rituals, marriage, and childbirth.

What is existential distress? In this context, it is the pain that results from questioning the very foundations of life. Whether my life or this life has any meaning, purpose, or value. existential distress is characterized by fear, anger, terror, sadness at the prospect of not existing, a loss of purpose in life and, a loss of meaning in life.

The goal of the therapist is to support the medicines effect and the participants immersion in their inner experience. We did not do very much talking with the participants during their journey, unless they really insisted on it. And even then, we try to just talk for a little while, and then have them returned to their inner-directed work with the earphones and an eye shade We do not give them any encouragement to think about cancer, we encourage them to practice a radical acceptance of all that emerges during the session. When you’re with them, they endure and learn and have a profound experience as a result of going to that edge and you certainly see this in psychoanalytic work.

The first theme that emerged was relational embeddedness. And I think it’s really should have been called embeddedness in relationship or embeddedness into relationality. People talked about profound transformations in their personal relationships, often emotionally laden with grief and hope. People reported a great sense of emotional depth. They just felt more, a lot more, far more than they did an ordinary day to day life. They had intense feelings of bliss, joy, and love, as well as despair, and fear and sadness and grief. They had disparate emotions that change quickly, sometimes having opposing emotions at the same time and these were always linked to meaningful narrative. People felt that they were shown or they were given wisdom, they receive transpersonal insights into the nature of the universe, or existence, and these are often things that if they were said in in regular words, they would seem trite or cliched, but as a felt experience about the unity of all things are the essential core of love as the most important force in the universe. And there reported lasting changes to their sense of identity, greater confidence, ability to overcome barriers, changing problematic behaviors, and a sense of being reborn.

Transpersonal psychology is about helping individuals explore their spiritual side and work with repairing any shattered pieces of their soul. So, if you ask a traditional psychoanalyst the difference between a soul and a psyche, they won’t really have a very coherent answer for you, but a transpersonal psychologist will. A transpersonal psychologist is a specialist in understanding spiritual work, spiritual growth, spiritual illness and malady, spiritual emergence, and integrating this as part of the human being.

Sara Reed, MS, LMFT

Sara Reed is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and CEO of Mind’s iHealth Solutions, a digital health company that provides evidence based and culturally responsible mental health services for underserved groups. As a mental health futurist and clinical researcher, Sara examines the ways culture informs the way we diagnose and treat mental illness. Sara’s prior research work includes participation as a study therapist in psychedelic therapy research at Yale University and the University of Connecticut’s Health Center. Sara was the first Black therapist to provide MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in a clinical trial and continues to engage in ongoing advocacy work around health equity in psychedelic medicine.

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Jeffrey Guss, MD is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher with specializations in psychoanalytic therapy and the treatment of substance use disorders. He was Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Psychedelic Therapy Training for the NYU School of Medicine’s study on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of cancer-related existential distress, which was published in Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016. He currently is a study therapist in the NYU study on Psychedelic-Assisted therapy in the treatment of Alcoholism, a collaborator with Yale University’s study on psychedelic-assisted therapy for Major Depressive Disorder and a study therapist with the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) study on treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy. 

Dr. Guss is interested in the integration of psychedelic therapies with contemporary psychoanalytic theory and has published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He has published (with Elizabeth Nielson, PhD) a paper on “the influence of therapists’ first had experience with psychedelics on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy research and therapist training” in The Journal of Psychedelic Studies, August, 2018. He is an Instructor and Mentor with the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Supervisor in NYU’s Fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry. 

Dr. Guss maintains a private practice in New York City.

Will Van Derveer, MD

Will Van Derveer, MD is Co-Founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute and Integrative Psychiatry Centers. Dr. Van Derveer was co-investigator on a phase 2 MAPS study of Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, and co-authored the publication of this study in 2018. He has also provided Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in two MAPS training studies. An active provider of KAP at his clinic in Boulder, CO, he has been teaching others KAP therapy for several years. Dr. Van Derveer contributed a chapter on mescaline in the 2021 "Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens" (edited by Charles Grob and Jim Grigsby). He is co-host of the Higher Practice Podcast.

Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant under-recognized root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass.


Scott has been a student of consciousness since his honors thesis on that topic at the University of Arizona in the 1970s under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Weil. Following medical school, Scott studied Jungian therapy and acupuncture while working as a primary care physician in a rural area for four years. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy became a facet of his practice before this medicine was scheduled in 1985. He then completed a psychiatry residency at Columbia program in New York. Scott studied cross-cultural psychiatry and completed a child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of New Mexico.

In 2010 he founded Wholeness Center in Fort Collins. This innovative clinic provides cross-disciplinary evaluation and care for all mental health concerns. Scott serves as a site Principal Investigator and therapist for the Phase III trial of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD sponsored by (MAPS). He has also published numerous articles about his research on (CBD) in mental health. Currently, Scott works extensively with psychedelic-assisted-psychotherapy. He lectures all over the world to professional groups interested in a deeper look at mental health issues, safer tools, and a paradigm-shifting perspective about transformative care.

Will Van Derveer, MD is co-founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI), along with friend and colleague Keith Kurlander, MA. He co-created IPI as an expression of what he stands for. First, that anyone can heal, and second that we medical providers must embrace our own healing journeys in order to fully command our potency as healers.

Dr. Van Derveer spent the last 20 years innovating and testing a comprehensive approach to addressing psychiatric challenges which transcends the conventional model he learned in medical school at Vanderbilt University and residency at University of Colorado, while deeply engaging his own healing path.

He founded the Integrative Psychiatric Healing Center in in 2001 in Boulder, CO, where he currently practices. Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass. In addition to his clinical work and teaching, he was co-investigator in 2016 a Phase II randomized clinical trial, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He continues to support this protocol, now in a Phase III clinical trial under break-through designation by FDA.

Dr. Van Derveer is a diplomate of the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine (ABoIHM) since 2013, and he was board certified in the first wave of diplomates of the new American Board of Integrative Medicine (ABIM) in 2016.