In this episode, Dr. Roman Palitsky, a clinical psychologist and Director of Research Projects at Emory Spiritual Health, discusses the connections between spirituality, meditation, and mental health. He highlights the lesser-known risks of meditation and psychedelics, practices often celebrated for their benefits but not thoroughly examined for their challenges.
Psychedelics as the Start, and Not the Ending, of the Journey of Healing
After decades of stigmatization, psychedelic medicines have re-emerged onto the world stage as the most promising new mental health treatments in a half-century. Our guest for this podcast, Dr. Rosalind Watts, has played an outsized role in these remarkable developments. Dr. Watts is internationally recognized as a leader in the study and implementation of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. She developed and led the psychedelic-assisted therapy program used in two of the first modern studies of psilocybin for the treatment of depression. More recently, she is the founder of Acer Integration (https://acerintegration.com/), an international, year-long integration community developed for connecting to the self, others, and the natural world. In this podcast we trace Dr. Watts’ journey in the psychedelic world, listening to her describe her initial hope that psychedelics might routinely cure mental illness give way to a growing concern that increasingly unrealistic hopes for these medicines were distorting both their risks and benefits. The podcast concludes with Dr. Watts laying out a vision for integrating psychedelics into more holistic ways of promoting mental health and building healing communities.
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