The Psychedelic Safety Institute (PSI) is committed to making psychedelic use safer and more beneficial for those who choose to engage with these substances. We work to align the psychedelic ecosystem and those stakeholders adjacent to the psychedelic ecosystem through shared understanding, coordination, thoughtful action, and education.
While misconduct and ethical violations are found across all therapeutic environments, psychedelic experiences may present greater risk and susceptibility to these types of violations. Similar to other therapeutic environments, one type of harm people experience in psychedelic spaces stems from misconduct and ethical violations. To address this, PSI has been investigating what infrastructure and systems might help prevent and address such violations.
The Psychedelic Safety Institute (PSI), through its partner entity Now Conscious Inc., was contracted by the Center for Consciousness Medicine Inc., operating as Gather Well Psychedelics (“Gather Well”) in January 2024, and PSI concluded this work on September 27, 2024. This contract between PSI and Gather Well aimed to integrate the ethics reports and the foundational elements of an ethics infrastructure developed by professional bioethicists into an operationalized ethics framework tailored explicitly for Gather Well. The framework was informed by input and reviews from 14 stakeholders, including professional bioethicists. Gather Well has recruited its inaugural ethics committee, with an anticipated launch in Q4 2024.
Gather Well is a non-profit psychedelic training organization that shares a history with practitioners accused of ethical violations. While those practitioners ceased their involvement in Gather Well’s previous iteration, CCM, by October 2021, have no direct influence on the operations or programs of Gather Well, and were not consulted in the development of the ethics framework, it is important to explicitly state this context and invite those interested to read more to review Gather Well’s statement here and Tehseen Noorani and Neşe Devenot’s concerns about Gather Well’s engagement of bioethicists here.
Here are some further resources discussing the practitioners accused of ethical violations for those interested: the New York Magazine’s podcast on the ethical violations here, Inverse’s article on the ethical violations here, and Will Hall’s direct account here.
The current Gather Well leadership expressed a desire to metabolize their experiences being in proximity to these ethical concerns into something that would help prevent and transparently respond to potential future ethical violations and hold themselves accountable to their stated ethical principles. This included establishing sound and transparent ethical practices and effective accountability systems for their organization, practicing guides, trainees, employees, and other stakeholders. Prior to engaging PSI, Gather Well had initiated internal discussions about developing an ethical framework based on the bioethicists' reports. PSI reviewed these reports from professional bioethicists who did an analysis to identify ethical barriers and risks with the Gather Well approach and its organizational policies and plans and recommended a high-level blueprint for an ethics infrastructure overseen by an independent ethics committee.
It’s important to note that one member of Gather Well leadership is related to the accused practitioners. The framework considered and is designed to address this and other types of conflicts of interest that can arise in organizations.
PSI decided to undertake this project with Gather Well because it provided a valuable real-world case study. Working with an organization with an intimate view of ethical challenges helped us understand how ethical frameworks need to operate in practice to be effective and identify key questions, challenges, and opportunities that emerge during implementation.
Now that our contract is concluded, Gather Well is independently responsible for implementing this framework with the oversight of the Ethics Committee they have established. We wish them well in this process.
We want to be clear about several points:
The framework includes robust informed consent procedures, a practitioner and stakeholder code of conduct, an ethics committee and independent oversight body, guidelines on inter-practitioner relationships and conflicts of interest, accountability procedures, and mandatory transparent reporting to the public. It is designed to provide clear expectations and agreements surrounding conduct and behavioral standards which are visible to all stakeholders, transparent systems for receiving and processing any potential future ethical claims in a way that prevents distortion or manipulation, and a governance structure with checks and balances to limit conflicts of interest and increase the quality of reporting and transparency.
The framework we have developed includes:
For more information on how this framework is applied at Gather Well, please refer to their announcement here.
PSI aims to integrate learnings and implementation insights from this case study into broader field-level insights, questions, and gaps. We are engaging with ethics thought leaders, bioethicists, and individuals with extensive experience in ethical mediation within the psychedelic field, along with those who have experienced ethical misconduct and stakeholders raising concerns about emerging training organizations.
Through this structured, iterative process, we aim to:
We believe theoretical frameworks must be informed by and tested through real-world implementation. By using this work as a case study, we hope to contribute meaningful insights that serve the ecosystem where needed most. We look forward to collaborating with ecosystem stakeholders to advance ethical practices across the field.
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