Timmy Davis - 'Undreamt-of possibilities': the drugs work, but how?

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'Undreamt-of possibilities': a genealogy of 'psychedelic' therapeutics - or - the drugs work, but how?

In this talk I will sketch four major ways in which psychedelics have been used in western psychiatry. Psychedelic therapy, psycholytic therapy, radical psychotherapy, and pseudodelic psychotherapy each posit a distinct methodology and theory of therapeutic efficacy. By situating them in relation to one another, their precursors and contemporaries, and within historical context, I will argue that there is no one size fits all way of using psychedelics in therapy and nor should there be.The history of psychiatry is a history of ideas about the nature of distress and its treatment - and the placebo. The popularity of these various models and their efficacy, is not only determined by, but determines, what is considered to be 'true'. This history is an ongoing negotiation between seekers and providers of treatment, which results in many therapeutic modalities falling by the wayside whilst others gain in popularity and thrive, only to be themselves surpassed by novel or revived therapeutics which capture the popular imagination. The waxing and waning of effect sizes over the lifespan of a treatment is at least in part due to changes in the popular imagination too, with novel treatments often perceived to be the result of scientific progress and touted by 'experts' to be the answer to the suffering of desperate patients - consider for example the drop in cases of possession and exorcism simultaneous to the increasing popularity of mesmerism during the enlightenment, or the rise and fall of effect sizes in trials of SSRI antidepressants since the 1980s.Psychedelic therapeutics are of course not immune to these forces. Arguably the vicissitudes of the personal and popular imagination (for example hope and expectation, hype and stigma - set and setting) may have more power in determining their effects and efficacy than other treatments, leading some researchers to conceive of psychedelics as suggestive technologies, or super-placebos, and to note their power as tools of belief transmission and enculturation.I will argue that the move towards standardisation and manualisation of psychedelic therapeutics is not only ethically problematic but could possibly limit their potential efficacy. Could a focus on the specificity of each seeker of treatment mitigate these issues? Research, regulation, and provision of these treatments should lean into a plurality of containers, each to be determined in dialogue between seeker and provider. What might this look like?

BIOGRAPHY
Timmy Davis is a trainee at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Psilocybin Rescheduling Project manager at the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group. He is a contributing member of Drug Science's Medical Psychedelics Working Group and provides psychological support on the psilocybin for treatment resistant depression trials at Kings College London. Timmy also leads teams of volunteers in welfare and harm reduction spaces such as Boom Festival in Portugal and many music festivals in the UK. He graduated from Birkbeck, University of London with an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and with a BA Hons in Philosophy and Religion from the university of Kent, where he was president of the psychedelic society for three years. Timmy co-authored a chapter entitled The Feminine Enshadowed: the Role of Psychedelics in Deconstructing the Gender Binary in the book Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine (2019) and The Medicinal Use of Psilocybin: Reducing Restrictions on Research and Treatment (2020). He also authored THOU ART NOT THAT - Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Bad Trip (2022) and New, Strange, Odd and Weird Perceptions - A Lacanian Approach to Psychedelic Experience (2020).