Psychedelics Are Not Medicine (And Also Totally Are)
Let me say it flat: psychedelics are not medicine.
I know, I know—half of you just clutched your microdosed pearls, and the other half are warming up your rebuttal about clinical trials, neurogenesis, and serotonin receptors. But before the knives come out (or the crystals), stay with me. Because psychedelics are medicine. Sort of. Sometimes. For some people. Under specific conditions. Maybe.
See the problem?
The rush to medicalize psychedelics has given us tidy little frameworks, mostly borrowed from Western biomedicine: a diagnosis, a compound, a dosage, a treatment plan. “Psychedelics treat depression.” “Psilocybin cures PTSD.” Headlines for days. But this framing is deeply inadequate for what’s actually happening in those long, strange, quiet hours of a facilitated session.
A mind expanding with colorful possibilites
I’ve sat with people as they’ve wept through memories they didn’t know were still inside them. I’ve watched bodies shake, laugh, howl, go silent. I’ve held someone’s hand while they remembered their mother’s death with the clarity of a reopened dream. None of that fits neatly into a spreadsheet. None of it follows the logic of “administer compound, see result.” And yet—something changed. Something softened. Something healed. Was it the medicine? Maybe. But not in the way we usually mean that word.
“Medicine” is a story. It tells us what’s wrong, what’s right, who gets to decide, and what we’re supposed to do about it. In the dominant model, it fixes the broken parts. It works like a wrench, a laser, a patch. Clean, predictable, scientific. But psychedelics are anything but clean and predictable. They’re messy. They pull things up from the basement. They dissolve the walls between emotion, memory, sensation, and spirit. And as a facilitator, your job isn’t to manage outcomes—it’s to midwife a process. You’re not the surgeon. You’re not the savior. You’re the calm voice in the storm, the hands that hold the container when it wants to split at the seams.
And yet… try telling the woman who met her long-dead father in the middle of her journey that it wasn’t medicine. Try telling the man who finally felt safe in his own body that nothing curative happened. Try telling the couple who fell back in love that the mushrooms were just a placebo with good PR. To them, that experience was medicine. Not because a molecule repaired a fault, but because something in them was touched—deeply, mysteriously—and they remembered who they were before the fracture.
This is where the language of medicine begins to fall apart. Because we’re not talking about antibiotics. We’re talking about stories. We’re talking about belonging. We’re talking about the slow, beautiful, agonizing work of reconnection. And no double-blind trial is going to quantify that in a way that matters to the human heart.
The danger, of course, is that in forcing psychedelics into the narrow corridor of Western medicine, we forget what they really do. We start chasing clean data and forget the mud. We forget that sometimes the most profound healing doesn’t look like resolution—it looks like rupture. Like grief. Like silence. And for facilitators, that means holding space not for “results,” but for the real: whatever shape it takes.
I don’t know what we should call it instead. Healing, maybe. Ceremony, sometimes. Transformation, when we’re lucky. But the mushroom doesn’t care what we call it. It’s doing its thing either way.
All I know is this: I’ve watched people emerge from these journeys with eyes that see a little more clearly, hearts that feel a little more bravely, and lives that move with a little more integrity. That feels like medicine to me.
Even if it’s not.