After 20 years of conventional treatment for depression, Toronto’s Kathleen Flynn decided it was time to look for alternatives, including psychedelic-assisted therapy.

“I was getting some benefit from my medication and therapy, but it wasn’t enough for me to be successful in my life,” says Flynn. “I was basically considered fine as long as I could get up, brush my teeth and go to work.”

Worse, she wasn’t even “fine” all the time. The regimen failed to protect her from periodic “mood dips” that sent her into clinical depression. When Flynn crashed again in late 2023, she felt “desperate enough to try something new” and opted for six sessions of ketamine-assisted therapy. Family helped her pay the nearly prohibitively expensive fee of $1,000 per session, which consisted of hour-long ketamine “trips” followed by therapy.

Ketamine, incidentally, is a “dissociative” anaesthetic with psychoactive effects, as opposed to an actual psychedelic substance, which may help explain why Flynn didn’t have any visions or striking revelations. What it did do was relax her in a way that seemed to make her more “fluid” with difficult emotions during therapy. Nearly a year later, she still thinks it was the right choice for her.

“It’s wild to say, but I was able to go off one medication and reduce another,” she explains. “I’m on the least amount of medication I’ve been on for over 15 years and I’m doing the best I’ve ever been doing.”

Perhaps you have heard of others investigating this field. While psychedelic-assisted therapy is gaining attention, this article is not meant to advocate for any specific treatment. Instead, it aims to explore the growing field, answer common questions, and examine the scientific, historical, and cultural contexts surrounding these therapies.

Dawning of an old era

Since people are more willing to tell success stories than failures, we may be hearing more of the good news stories than bad about psychedelic therapies from our friends and in the media. The reason this has captured peoples’ imaginations, though, is partly because a lot of folks are feeling stuck and, like Flynn, “desperate enough to try something new.”

To be accurate, however, very little of this is new. Indigenous cultures in the Americas, the first scientists on these continents, have studied the healing properties of plant medicines for millennia. Psychedelics are newer in western medicine, but psychedelic-assisted therapy (PaT) was developed in the 1950s in rural Saskatchewan, which is also the birthplace of the actual term “psychedelic,” a fun bit of Canadiana discovered by Erika Dyck, Canada Research Chair, History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan.

The word was first used by British-trained psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond in a letter to his pal Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. Huxley sometimes gets credit for the term, but it was Osmond who first combined two ancient Greek words that translate as “mind” and “revealing.”

At the time, Osmond was at a hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, experimenting with treating patients with alcohol use disorder with a single large dose of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in combination with therapy. He’d been invited there in 1951 by provincial premier Tommy Douglas. “Osmond came over from England in this moment of ideological enthusiasm as part of (provincial) health reforms, including mental health,” notes University of Saskatchewan’s Dyck.

Douglas’ role as the “father of universal healthcare” in Canada is widely celebrated. Less well-known is the role he played in kick-starting psychedelic-assisted therapy, pioneered by Osmond and his colleague, Dr. Abram Hoffer. Since the results were promising, their work developing PaT inspired many similar research projects in what came to be known as the “Psychedelic Era.”

The era was destined to be brief. As psychedelic substances gained popularity outside of research circles and people began using drugs like LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and mescaline for recreational, spiritual and/or self-healing purposes, psychedelics provoked societal anxiety and thus began their descent from panacea to pariah.

Psychedelics are neither of these things, of course, but it’s a class of drugs that invites extremes. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the camp that fought to vilify and criminalize psychedelics succeeded in both the United States and Canada, which put the nail in the coffin of nearly all institutional psychedelic research.

Although this research is making a comeback in what some call the “Psychedelic Renaissance,” most of the drugs used in PaT remain illegal, including LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), the latter a stimulant that can cause hallucinations but isn’t technically a psychedelic. Only ketamine is legal because it’s used as an anaesthetic.

The legal prohibition on psychedelics presents special problems for researchers, who have multiple extra hoops to jump through to gain access to these medicines and ethics permissions for clinical trials.

“Psychedelics are still stigmatized from the war on drugs,” says Dr. Monnica Williams, Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Disparities at the University of Ottawa and author of Healing the Wounds of Racial Trauma. “And, because they’re illegal, people assume that must mean they’re really dangerous and addictive. And they’re not.”