Health care providers learn to guide dying patients through a psychedelic trip
CBC
Psychiatrist Cheryl Willsie spent nearly a week in Hamilton learning how to walk a patient through an experience on psychedelic drugs.
She and two other healthcare professionals learned how to prepare a patient for a therapy session where they take psilocybin – the psychedelic compound in so-called magic mushrooms.
Willsie also learned how to support the patient through the experience and how to help process what came up in a later session.
The five-day training session at Energy Tap, a psychotherapy office on York Boulevard, was offered by TheraPsil, a national organization that advocates for expanded access to psilocybin.
The group learned how to guide patients through an experience on psilocybin with the goal of helping them to better understand their inner world – and ideally, to feel better.
Many of the patients who can legally access this kind of treatment are facing death from a terminal illness, noted Willsie.
"Around end-of-life care, it's been really remarkable to see the benefits people have had with only two or three dosing sessions," she told CBC Hamilton on Monday.
"People have had a lot of relief around their mental and emotional suffering around having a terminal diagnosis."
Willsie, who is from Sarnia, Ont., was drawn to include psychedelics into her practice after seeing promising research into its mental health uses.
"I realized that with medication and with talk therapy alone, most people just weren't getting better," she said.
"That's really driven my excitement about psychedelic-assisted therapy."
Willsie already offers therapy using ketamine, a dissociative drug that can also have psychedelic and anesthetic effects. It can be legally prescribed by a physician.
"I am seeing that [ketamine] allows people deeper access to their subconscious in reprocessing past trauma," she said. "It's sort of deepening and expanding the therapeutic process."
Research is showing psilocybin can have positive outcomes for patients as well.
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