Clarifying the ethical landscape of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy

Clarifying the ethical landscape of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
Research Article
Christopher Kochevar
Philosophical Psychology, 27 June 2024
Abstract
This paper attempts to integrate ongoing conversations about the nature and ethics of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAP) in order to clarify some outstanding ethical questions. First, I address a debate about whether informed consent is possible for “transformative” therapies like PAP, and I conclude that reasonable approaches to informed consent should not be considered especially difficult for PAP. Next, I argue that a focus on potential barriers to information about PAP has obscured a more central risk for the therapy – that posed by a PAP patient’s radical susceptibility to environmental influence, or what I call epistemic vulnerability. After expanding on this concept, I conclude that warnings about epistemic vulnerability should be a part of informed consent to PAP in all cases. Finally, I discuss more broadly the complexities of informed consent in PAP, drawing on analogous concerns for regular psychotherapy that may be addressed by a “process view” of consent. I propose that a “nondirective” approach to PAP may be more ethically supportable than other approaches, in part because of the theoretical benefit to patients from managing their own experience, prioritizing the potential for autonomous transformation.