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# A Medicalization-Only Model Limits the Psychedelic Experience
- URL: https://www.psymposia.com/a-medicalization-only-model-limits-the-psychedelic-experience/
- Published: 2026-11-02T05:00:04.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-02T05:02:14.000Z
- Description: Journalist Rich Haridy discusses his concerns with boxing psychedelics into a medicalized container.
- Author: Psymposia
- Tags: Videos, #youtube, #youtube-transcript

[![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wHo-i8gTpcU/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&ref=psymposia.com)

Journalist Rich Haridy discusses his concerns with boxing psychedelics into a medicalized container.

## Transcript

*This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.*

[\[00:00\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=0s&ref=psymposia.com) Psychedelics have been deeply boxed in to a container that seems like the acceptable way that they can be talked about. I think to me the biggest shift has been in just this conversation about medicalization and the way that psychedelics have been deeply boxed in to a container that seems like the acceptable way that they can be talked about. So it's yes, I see so many more people talking about psychedelics now. I see my mother-in-law bringing it up in conversation with me, which is crazy cuz she was is conservative, but it's very much in this person took it because they were sick and it was a medicine and it was for healing.

[\[00:59\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=59s&ref=psymposia.com) And so there's this been push to kind of make psychedelics acceptable by treating them as a medicine. And I feel like that whole narrative over the last 5 to 10 years has been kind of very reactionary because of the taboo space that psychedelics have been in for so long. I kind of I understand why so many people in the psychedelic community have kind of nurtured that messaging to try to pull people like my mother-in-law into the conversation. However, I think now in the mid 2020s, we've got ourselves into I think a really tight spot where I worry that we can't get out of this medical container now. And I worry that we the conversation is now just becoming a bit boring to me, I guess, as someone who kind of follows it as a journalist.

[\[01:49\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=109s&ref=psymposia.com) It's the research and the conversations now are all regulatory. They're all very narrow. It's all about how to put this into a medical system and just make a new medicine. And that's fine. Like I'm sure that I think that psychedelics can be useful as a medicine to lots of people. and I think that that is a good avenue to pursue. But I think that if it boxes off all uses of psychedelics and all ways that we can think about psychedelics from ways of community connection and social cohesion and well-being and all of these other things that psychedelics can do, we've kind of just brushed all that aside and went and gone, here is a new medicine for anxiety.

[\[02:39\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=159s&ref=psymposia.com) Here is a new medicine for depression. And yeah, I think that that that's been kind of the most interesting thing to watch because I know that maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, a lot of us in the community were cheering on these early stages of research because we ourselves were excited that things were a little bit legitimate and there was a genuine excitement. It's kind of after being told for so many years that these things were dangerous and they'll kill you and there's no other uses to finally kind of feel like, oh no, we can show you that they're not. It was an exciting moment 10 or 15 years ago, but I think we're living now in the wake of that, which is massive pharmaceutical companies controlling the clinical trials and taking the substances and there being very little other conversation.

[\[03:33\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=213s&ref=psymposia.com) And that's what's probably, yeah, the tension point that I'm seeing kind of nowadays is how limited the conversation is now about psychedelics. It opened up and so many more people are talking about it, but it's narrowed into a way that they're talking about it that is probably I think the biggest thing that we need to kind of break up a bit. Totally. I'm so glad you mentioned that. We talk about that a lot and at the end of the psychedelic syndicate, the report we wrote, that's one of our major takeaways that there's just been such an impoverishment of the imagination that is going to like limit the types of psychedelic experiences that people can have without people realizing that they're boxing themselves in because they just think this is what psychedelic therapy is. This is what psychedelics do. And they don't realize that that was just a kind of a limited construction.

[\[04:21\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=261s&ref=psymposia.com) Yeah. There's also kind of like an overpromise to it in a lot of ways. Like I think one of I was reading some reviews of your book, RIP, Rich, and one of the themes that the writer of this review took away from the book and I appreciated seeing was can and should the weirdness and unpredictability of psychedelics be separated from their potentially healing properties? And I think that's it. It's hard to sell unpredictability and weirdness. And I feel like that's what we're running into is like the whole industry that's bringing this to the mainstream needs to be able to sell a promise that that something's going to change, that they're going to be able to reliably get an end result from psychedelic experiences that is predictable. And I've always sort of questioned that if that's always a possibility with these drugs.

[\[05:08\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=308s&ref=psymposia.com) Like they are weird and they are fairly unpredictable a lot of times. And I think we lose something in pretending that that's not true. Well, that's why I kind of I see this that's why I feel like the point that we're in is really strange because when you see kind of the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world buying 5 MAO DMT and pushing that forward as a depression medicine. It's kind of crazy to me because you're taking the wildest psychedelic you can and going, "We can put this in a clinic and give it to your grandma via a doctor's prescription when she has depression." And I don't understand how that's even a possible future reality.

[\[05:55\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=355s&ref=psymposia.com) Like I cannot see a world in 5 10 years time where millions of people are having 5 MO right like treatments in clinics like that that's just an in like it doesn't even make sense to me. Do you know what I mean? like the repercussions of that like ontologically in terms of what it does to just it's I can't so I just I'm fascinated watching this from a journalistic perspective going like seeing kind of the business take hold of it and trying to ram it into a direction but I just don't know how you scale up something that just is is essentially just a bit too strange and weird to contain and too unpredictable as well.

[\[06:40\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=400s&ref=psymposia.com) I think that was one of the things I've spoken to a lot of researchers and clinicians and MDMA is is is predictable in a way. I can see MDMA kind of fitting medically a bit more, but when you start talking about drugs like psilocybin and LSD and DMT, I'm like they're not nearly as predictable and we don't even kind of have good connectivity on how they get therapeutic effects. So them scaled up to massive societal kind of treatment things. I just I don't know how it works. I don't know how. So I don't know where we're going with this. Well, you're not the only one that works, right? Like the scientists don't know how it works. They there's a lot of studies that are, you know, functionally unblinded and they're publishing these things like it's the truth.

[\[07:35\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=455s&ref=psymposia.com) You know, there was a study that came out on 5me about how it's the most it's like a depression cure that is higher than the theoretical possibly most therapeutic thing for depression. And like it's kind of ridiculous and people don't have I mean scientists don't have like sort of the data in the first place at this point. They're just kind of saying it. I think it's part of the deal with the pharmaceutical industry and the medicalization situation. And yeah, it is too weird. It's inherently unpredictable, right? Like you can't predict what's going to happen with these things and you know solving depression. How many people do you know personally that are like more anxious from having done psychedelics?

[\[08:21\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=501s&ref=psymposia.com) You know what I mean? Like this is what's also like I think the trials have got very narrow. That was one of the things that I've kind of really noticed over the last five or 10 years is that the trials are very much pushing to a regulatory endpoint. So they're extraordinarily narrow now. They're basically kind of like I have a depression scale and I just need to show that after this drug you drop a certain amount of points on that scale. That's all I need to show. And so that's all they're looking at. and they're boxing that in and sending that data across and that and it might be true that you give me a depression scale and I'll give you a rating and then I'll take LSD and 24 hours later you ask me again and I might be five six points higher and so therefore you can go here's an anti-depressant but you missing so much of what is going on in that person and the changes that are occurring by just so narrowly focusing

[\[09:24\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=564s&ref=psymposia.com) On those scales. And that's what's I think kind of the biggest concern that I see in the way that kind of pharmarmacology and research is going is that it's missing so much by just narrowly looking at scales and trying to push something over the line because yeah, I'm sure you could yeah easily do a 5 MO study and show it changing people's lives if you're looking at kind of a Madras depression scale or something. It's like yeah the I mean it's actually it's really like the it I mean it's funny talking about functional unblinding you know that one because I didn't know a lot about that depression scale in particular until I'd actually you know not being a psychologist you know until I looked it up and realized that this is a scale this is if you could pick a scale where functional unblinding would skew your results you could not have picked a better scale for that because it's the clinician's interpretation.

[\[10:23\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=623s&ref=psymposia.com) So it's functionally unblinded. Then of course they're going to go yeah they seem way less depressed right which is a extremely short version of what happens in that you know a lot of what happens in that scale. So it is like just methodologically it's the stupidest thing. I can see that I'm not even a scientist. I'm a philosopher but I can see how that doesn't hang together properly already. But yeah, like we're just saying, it's super narrow and we already know like this is what frustrates me so much is that there's this thing where we just keep on making the same mistakes. We like clinical trials have not changed a lot. We know what clinical trials for pharmaceuticals are like, you know, and for anti-depressants are like they pick someone who's only depressed and who the \[expletive\] is only depressed, right? Like that is uncommon. Like yeah, I'm depressed but I'm not anxious.

[\[11:11\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=671s&ref=psymposia.com) That's unusual. That is actually unusual. So you pick this very narrow cohort of people. You run them through the process. It looks like it works. It gets out into the real world. And then, you know, amazingly enough, it doesn't work the same way when you give it to people who aren't just depressed. And we've already seen that with existing anti-depressants. And we know we're going to see this again with psychedelics. So, it's just so frustrating to me that it's the same mistakes and you know, but this is what you have to do to get a thing over the line into the market. My personal take, Rich, you know, in terms of 5me, I'll believe that go hits the market when I \[expletive\] see it. Like, you know, it's just mind-blowing to me. You know, we're going to talk about this.

[\[11:57\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=717s&ref=psymposia.com) It's like no one talks about reactivations, right? like from 5 MO like and if I could pick one thing that is going to give the FDA the absolute horrors it's going to be something that's functionally a flashback right but yeah I a lot of these things I mean cynically I think a lot of these things they're just a vehicle for attracting investment you don't need to you don't need any of these products to ever hit the market to make money off them you just need someone else to be holding the bag when the whole thing fails so you know that's still cynically My thing I don't think that you know depending on how you do the regulatory approach for these things like we have in Australia and I've written about it is this idea that someone's going to make people are going to make billions of dollars selling psilocybin to Australia for therapy.

[\[12:46\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=766s&ref=psymposia.com) No, you're not because only psychiatrists can prescribe it. There's only 4,000 psychiatrists in Australia and only a tiny proportion of them are ever going to prescribe this these medicines. So there just isn't that there isn't there is no economy of scale here in terms of just manufacturing these drugs. So the whole often for me like for here at least in Australia the whole you know people trying to spin up this narrative and there's one company in particular like Optimize Health loves to do you know a press release like you know we're we we're selling psilocybin to Australia for therapy. Yeah. Like there's more psilocybin growing in Melbourne in autumn in people's garden beds. Like it's just from mushrooms. It's the scale is just not there is just no scale there.

[\[13:32\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo-i8gTpcU&t=812s&ref=psymposia.com) Oh, we sold 100 doses this year. What are you talking about? That's not something to base a billion dollar company, you know. So the whole scale is just wrong. The whole narrative is just this thing where people are hyping up this thing, but the actual market may never eventuate. It might turn out to be something like Spravado, but equally likely it might not. Yeah, that was a report that I saw recently was like at least in the US there's all these like strip mall ketamine clinics and things like that and they're all kind of prepping to latch on to psilocybin or 5me whichever one kind of makes it through the FDA first or whatever.