Two Minds Blog

Any mention of  psychedelic drugs probably conjures up images of Timothy Leary  (Richard Nixon's "most dangerous man in America"), the 1969 Woodstock festival, and the Grateful Dead . There is, however, a tradition of non-recreational use for these medications starting around the turn of the 20th century. As early as 1874, psychologist William James argued for the use of nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) as a mind-expanding drug, which he believed could help people access great truths of religion and philosophy. Drugs like mescaline and peyote had of course been used much earlier in religious ceremonies for exactly that purpose. But legitimate scientific research on psilocybin at Harvard University in the 1960s intersected with the growing New Age movement to create a cultural phenomenon tied to psychedelic drug use, and tainted the reputation of this kind of medication for years to come. In 1963 the Harvard faculty involved in psychedelic research were either fired ...

Although mindfulness is widely recognized in both the professional and popular literature, the state of the science in mindfulness research is still preliminary.  The good news so far is that mindfulness-based interventions work in the treatment of psychological disorders. A 2018 meta-analysis looked at 143 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are the gold standard research approach for testing interventions. The authors included any intervention that had mindfulness as a core component, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn's mindfulness-based stress reduction ( MBSR ) which has been studied since the 1970s, as well as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy ( MBCT ) which is a more recent adaptation of mindfulness techniques to fit within cognitive-behavioral therapy approaches. The treatments in this review generally involved individual or group work with a psychotherapist or coach, and lasted for multiple sessions. The authors excluded treatments that were based on mindfulness or other Eas...