Research

I’m currently focusing on the clinical application of psychedelics. Psychedelic therapy seems to hold a lot of promise for treating a diverse range of mental health problems. But we still don’t fully know how psychedelics help people mentally recover. Nor do we fully understand the risks that using psychedelics for clinical means might carry.

There’re three questions I’m particularly interested in. Does the subjective experience caused by psychedelics (i.e., the psychedelic “trip”) play a role in reducing people’s symptoms or is it entirely therapeutically epiphenomenal? If psychedelics improve people’s mental well-being by changing what they believe, does it make psychedelic therapy epistemically suspect? And if psychedelics’ therapeutic effects are not due to belief revision, what might they be due instead?

Relatedly, I have a few works in progress: 

Transformative Visions (email me for a draft)
About the role of spontaneous imagination in psychedelic therapy.

Debunking Psychedelic Beliefs (email me for a draft)
About the irrationality of psychedelic beliefs.

What Psychedelic Experience Teaches 
About the role of emotions in psychedelic therapy. 

I’ve written a couple of things about psychedelics and imagination for The Junkyard blog. See here for an immersive mental simulation model of psychedelic visions and here for some general thoughts on the role of imagination in psychedelic therapy.