Happy to see this out!

Argh can’t find the trial I’m thinking of - will keep looking! Was announced last year, I think Canadian govt funded. Meanwhile assume you know @trpwolff.bsky.social’s writing on the (mainly rhetorical) distinction between ‘psychological support’ and psychotherapy wrt the compass modality

Not the idea of (for example) simply increasing ‘openness’ in a relatively contentless way? But that does seem like a bit of a non-specific amplification-type fantasy - again brings us back to the interaction as what matters. Suggests to me a new regulatory structure for ‘experiential medicines’

I think they’re open to that? Anyway my take is that there’s little financial incentive to study this thru controlled studies; meanwhile the naturalistic studies are so noisy. Saying that, wasn’t there a Canadian study announcing something like a psychological support vs psychotherapy variable?

Hey hey not sure how I missed your comments! Thanks - as always really appreciate them! Hope we might catch up sometime..

I do think there’s a possible eventuality where regulation fails because it’s so siloed it never manages to get at the *interactions* of the parts of the intervention

As talk of offering MDMA therapy in Islamic societies grows, this kind of deeper work feels ethically urgent...

All the big claims make me want to return to Sadie Plant’s Writing on Drugs, to see how that more reflexive project speaks to the quarter century since its publication

I find this all so intriguing and baffling! Clearly there could be loads of mechanisms by which avatar therapy is proving to be helpful. But the agency of the voices themselves seems to be sidelined in all kinds of ways. I kept wondering what they say about being aped by the avatars/researchers

Well they’re notoriously bad settings for psychotic ones! I find the literature on redesigning hospital architecture based on ‘psychotomimetic’ experiences inspiring