Psychedelic and traumatic experiences as pivotal mental states and transformative experiences

Samuli Kangaslampi's lecture "Psychedelic and traumatic experiences as pivotal mental states and transformative experiences" from the Psykedeelit 2023 conference held in Turku, Finland on November 23-24, 2023.
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"Both psychedelic and traumatic experiences involve acutely enhanced associative learning and the potential for psychological transformation. Retrospectively, people often evaluate them as highly important, meaningful, or central to their lives, and they can lead to profound changes in beliefs, worldviews, and well-being. Traumatic experiences involve extreme stress, but psychedelic experiences are also, in several ways, states of stress. Despite these similarities, traumatic experiences are typically surprising, unwelcome, and devastating events, while psychedelic experiences are actively sought by many people and studied as tools for psychiatric treatment.
In this talk, I compare what we know about the acute states and long-term consequences of traumatic and psychedelic experiences. How exactly are these experiences similar and different? Are psychedelic experiences 'anti-traumatic'? Or can psychedelic experiences sometimes be traumatic, or traumatic experiences psychedelic?
Employing the idea of 'pivotal mental states' (Brouwer & Carhart-Harris, 2021), I explore whether it would be useful to consider both psychedelic and traumatic experiences as examples of a larger set of states or experiences exceptionally capable of promoting rapid psychological change and re-orientation, for better or worse. Implications for psychedelic-assisted treatment of (trauma-related) disorders and for facilitating transformative experiences with beneficial outcomes are discussed."
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