Psychedelics: A Journey Through Grief and Loss

Claire Bidwell Smith: Hi, everyone. Welcome. I’m so honored to be here today with all of you and with our panelists.

My name is Claire Bidwell Smith. I’m a therapist specializing in grief and the author of several books about grief and loss. I’ve been in private practice for over a decade, worked in hospice before that, and have gone through my own losses. I’m honored to be here for this important conversation.

I’d like to introduce our panelists. Dingle Spence is a consultant oncology and palliative care physician. She is also the director of the Hope Institute Hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, and an associate lecturer at the University of the West Indies. She has been working with Neil and Allyson around psychedelics and grief.

Neil Hanon is a psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at the University of British Columbia. He is also a bereaved parent.

Allyson Rockwell is also a bereaved parent. She explored psychedelics to help manage her grief at a retreat in Jamaica.

Welcome, everybody.

I’d love to begin by opening this up, perhaps to Neil first. Over the last couple of years, I’ve had more and more clients come to me feeling curious about trying psychedelics for grief. It’s not something I have tried, so I’ve had a lot of questions and uncertainties about where to direct them, what the experience is like, and what they should expect.

Neil, where can we begin with that?

Neil Hanon: It’s a really important question. Using psilocybin or other psychedelic compounds for grief is a novel treatment model. Mushrooms have been around forever, of course, but they are new to modern psychology and psychiatry.

I am a grieving parent myself. My 17-year-old son died in a car crash. I can legally take mushrooms in Canada because I’ve been granted a Section 56 exemption. One of the only other places in the world where you can legally use mushrooms is Jamaica.

It is incredibly important that, if you’re going to use mushrooms, you have a clinical team around you that understands both grief and psychedelic compounds. They need to understand how to work with psychedelics and integrate them with therapy.

Mushrooms themselves may actually traumatize a grieving parent if that treatment team is not around them. That support is essential.

This isn’t a matter of taking mushrooms and having your grief disappear. It doesn’t work like that at all. You need informed professionals around you.

Allyson, perhaps you can speak to that.

Allyson Rockwell: I can definitely say that’s true.

I lost my son a year and a half ago. He was 17 as well. COVID hit right after he died, and everything was crazy. I was looking for anything that might help.

I found a retreat in Jamaica and spoke with Françoise Bourzat, who was putting it together with Neil, Dingle, and Chris Adrian, who is also speaking today. It was the first time anything like this had been done. It was a retreat specifically for parents who had lost children.

It was powerful and unbelievable, but I could not have imagined going through it without well-trained people who knew how to help me. My husband attended as well. For us and all the other parents, the support we received before, afterward, and continuing to this day was part of the entire experience.

That support is really important because the experience was intense.

When you’re living with that kind of pain, you want to get as far away from it as possible. One of the first things someone said to me was, “Here, take Prozac. Take an antidepressant.”

Psilocybin helped me face the pain and get in touch with it. The pain isn’t going anywhere. Running from it only postpones how it is eventually going to envelop you.

Psilocybin has helped me connect with the pain, know it, and go there. It is not easy. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But in the long run, it helps me live with it.

The Structure of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy

Claire: Thank you. I want to return to some of that, but first I’d like to understand the structure of the experience.

Dingle, perhaps you can speak to this because you’ve helped guide people through it. Are you doing therapy first, followed by the psychedelic treatment and then more therapy? What does the ideal scenario look like?

Dingle Spence: That’s exactly right. I would echo what both Neil and Allyson have said. This is not something you do on your own in a dark room.

We were able to provide a structure. We strongly prefer that parents have received some psychotherapy following their loss, perhaps before they even reach out to us.

Once they contact us, we have a team of trained guides. There is an introductory meeting, followed by a couple more meetings to understand where the parents are and help them understand the retreat process. There are definitely therapeutic encounters beforehand. There may be two, three, or four sessions, depending on what the parents need.

We then brought the parents to Jamaica for a structured five- or six-day retreat.

On the first day, we invited the parents to sit together and tell the stories of their children, which was naturally very emotional. Later that day, they did some pottery and got their hands into the clay. That was Neil’s suggestion. You open people up emotionally, and then it can be helpful to do something creative and physical. The retreat space was next to a beautiful pottery studio.

We gradually led up to the medicine journey, which took place on the third day. We helped the parents set their intentions for the experience by asking, “What are you hoping to achieve?”

Intention is critical when doing mushroom work. I’ve discovered that through my own experiences as well.

The parents journeyed as a group. There were many assistants in the room and trained facilitators supporting them. The following day, we talked about what had happened.

It felt like people had to go home a little too soon. Many would have liked to stay longer, so we’ve been thinking about how to alter that in future retreats.

Aftercare, or what we call integration, is absolutely critical. It continues long afterward. The retreat took place in March, and it is now October. People are still processing it.

It takes a long time because it is like the proverbial onion. You peel off one layer and discover there is more underneath. Then you peel off another and discover something else.

The medicine helps people dig deeply and peel away those layers with the support of psychotherapy.

Why Psychedelics for Grief?

Claire: I have so many questions. Let me begin with a broad one: Why grief? Why can this be helpful for grief?

Allyson: It helped me get in touch with things I had heard or read about but never truly understood. People talk about going into a well or a pit, or connecting with your inner child. Before I started this therapy, I never really understood what those things meant.

Now, when people talk about them, I can feel them deeply. I’m much more connected with what is inside me.

Then comes the processing. I process the experience with my guide, my therapist, and a grief therapist. Everything slowly bubbles up. When these realities emerge, they are enormous and intense.

It is amazing to be able to reach them, but once you get there, what do you do? That’s why you need a support team around you.

Neil: It’s interesting that across the research on psilocybin, whether it is being used for end-of-life distress or even smoking cessation, the most dramatic impact correlates with having a mystical or spiritual experience during the journey.

Around 70 percent of people will have a mystical experience on psilocybin. That doesn’t mean the other 30 percent receive no therapeutic benefit.

One of the most complicated aspects of losing a child is trying to understand how your child could be here one minute and no longer be here the next. How do you continue to have some kind of relationship with your child, even though they are no longer physically present?

Psilocybin mushrooms can teach you how to do that.

Understanding Death and Continuing Relationships

Claire: Is it a combination of helping you inhabit your grief and helping you understand death and your relationship with the person you lost?

Allyson: Absolutely.

In my experience, a reality has come over me that there is a “here” and a “there.” I am here. My son is there. He is also here, but in another place. He isn’t physically here, but he is definitely spiritually here.

This may sound far out, but I’ve come to understand this life as one life that may be part of many. We are physically here for a time, and then we are somewhere else for a time.

The fear of death is no longer there for me. It doesn’t exist in my world anymore.

Claire: That sounds deeply comforting. Dingle, do you want to add to that?

Dingle: I work with many patients in palliative care. Many people who work in this field are familiar with the phenomenon of people approaching the end of life seeing and speaking with relatives who have died before them.

That is often a great comfort. Someone might say, “My mother is standing at the end of the bed.” Most of us cannot see that person, but this happens frequently.

People are often afraid to talk about it because they worry they will be labeled as crazy. In Jamaica’s very Christian culture, seeing spirits is not something people always discuss comfortably, but it happens all the time.

Psilocybin may give relatively well people access to that veil.

Neil, I know you had a spiritual experience in which you felt your son contacted you. I don’t know whether you want to speak about it, but I think the medicine can help dissolve the veil between us and another world.

It gives you a sense of continuity. Your loved one is not literally gone. They have left the form in which you knew them.

Neil: I’d like to point out something about standard psychiatry and psychology.

Cognitive understanding and cognitive behavioral therapy can be very useful in helping with grief. But with psilocybin mushrooms, you may actually experience your loved one. They are there, and you are experiencing them. Or you may feel as though you are receiving information about how the universe works.

You are experiencing it rather than merely understanding it intellectually. That is the difference. You feel and understand in a completely different way from our usual social framework, which treats cognition as though it is all there is.

Once you have a mushroom experience related to grief and the loss of a child, it becomes a completely different level of understanding.

That can be incredibly important for parents who have lost children because they often become dysfunctional. I was dysfunctional. I don’t know how dysfunctional you were, Allyson, but most parents struggle profoundly after the death of a child.

The experience changes the frame.

Anxiety About the Medicine

Claire: I work with many bereaved parents, and I can attest to how much they struggle.

I also see a lot of anxiety. Can this help with anxiety? What happens when someone is anxious about taking the medicine itself?

Allyson: I definitely had anxiety.

I had experienced this loss, the world had become chaotic because of COVID, and then Françoise Bourzat, who was my guide going into Jamaica, was saying we would take mushrooms with a group of strangers.

I said, “What do you mean? We’re going to take mushrooms with strangers? This is crazy. There is no way I’m doing this.”

We talked and talked until I reached a point where I felt comfortable. I wasn’t saying, “This is a great idea.” I was saying, “Okay, I’m ready to try something, but you need to help me become comfortable with it.”

That took a while.

When we got there, we didn’t immediately jump into the experience. We walked together, talked, ate together, and got to know one another. On the second night, we held a medicine circle with a small dose of mushrooms. It opened everybody up a little.

Before the actual journey, we had become deeply connected.

I’ve been part of other groups for grieving parents, but the parents from Jamaica are connected in a completely different way. We’re almost magnetically connected. When we get together, it feels as though we have known one another forever. The bonds are very strong.

Neil: Psilocybin could work with individuals outside a group context, but for parents who have lost children, it can be much more therapeutic to journey together.

Anyone who has lost a child is automatically part of a group, but doing a psilocybin journey together introduces another dimension of connection. It can be very healing.

Timing and Readiness

Claire: Is there a particular time frame for bereaved parents, or anyone grieving, to do something like this? Can they do it immediately, or should a certain amount of time have passed? Do they need to have worked through some part of the loss?

Dingle, you mentioned setting intentions. Does that play into this?

Dingle: I’m happy to speak about intention, but I’ll defer to Neil on the first part of the question about timing and whether someone should have therapy beforehand.

Neil: These are still early days, so we are learning.

What seems clear is that if a person is too early in their grief, it may not be a good time to do a psilocybin journey. As you know as a grief therapist, there is an acute grief period. Our group does not believe that is the right time to use psilocybin mushrooms.

The person needs to be beyond that acute phase and stuck in some way. They should have some awareness of where they are stuck. That appears to be the time when a psilocybin journey can be useful.

Setting an Intention

Dingle: Claire, you mentioned setting intentions. I’ve been doing guided journeys of my own over the last year, and I’ve realized how absolutely critical an intention is.

It is not something you invent overnight. You work on it with your therapist or guide and ask, “What do I really want to be able to do or feel? Is it connecting with my child? Is it feeling my grief all the way through?”

The answer will be different for everyone.

The intention is usually stated immediately before the person ingests the mushrooms. We sit in a group, and everyone shares their intention again.

This is where the experience becomes mystical to me. Something we say in the mushroom circle is, “You will get what you need, but it may not be what you thought you wanted.”

Allyson may want to take that up.

I have personally discovered this. I lost my mother nearly a year ago, so I have been grieving too. I got what I needed from my own journey, which became clearer afterward. I came to understand why I had that particular experience instead of the one I had hoped or expected to have.

There is a great deal of trust and faith involved. As you step into that world, you need to trust the medicine because it will give you what you need.

Allyson: Everything Dingle said is exactly right.

The medicine does what it needs to do, but it can only do that if you trust the medicine, trust your guide, and feel safe.

I was fortunate to have amazing guides and be in an unbelievable environment, so I could lean into it. During my journey, I realized, “This is why I have been doing yoga for so many years.” I needed the breathing, the centering, and every tool I had to lean into the experience, engage, trust, and remain present.

I don’t even remember what my intention was, but I know the journey cracked me open. It took me directly into the intense grief of losing my son. I was right there with it.

It was hard. It wasn’t an easy experience, but I had support during and afterward.

What became clear was that this was what I needed to do. I needed to open myself to the grief instead of closing down, running, and pushing it away. The only way I was going to move through it was to remain open to it.

I needed that intense experience to learn that.

Becoming Unstuck

Claire: It sounds as though it doesn’t take away the grief. It allows you to be fully present with it, which is so important because we cannot run away from grief.

I keep hearing all of you use the word “stuck.” That is something I see in many of the people I work with. We can do two years of talk therapy around grief, and there can still be places where someone remains stuck.

Does this allow people to move through or sit inside those stuck places?

Allyson: I was clearly stuck. That was why I was asking, “What can I do?”

I was doing talk therapy. I was taking antidepressants. I was stuck. My husband was stuck too. He started drinking heavily after our son died. Then he stopped, but that didn’t make everything better either.

We reached a place where we had to ask where we could go from there. That stuck moment led us to this treatment.

Neil: I’m not sure whether this is a good way to say it, but I think of psilocybin as a little bomb that goes off. When someone is stuck, the bomb relieves the stuckness.

Because it is a bomb, you need all the support, therapists, and structure around you to help you through it.

In psychedelic therapy, we often say, “The way out is through.” That is also true with grief.

As grieving parents, we get stuck all the time. Sometimes we get a little stuck, and sometimes we get very stuck. The smaller moments may be addressed through talk therapy, but sometimes you need more than that.

In the right context, psilocybin mushrooms can help.

Integration After a Journey

Claire: For a clinician like me, or anyone listening who does not have training in this, what should we think about if a client comes to us after attending a retreat? How can we help them process the experience afterward?

Neil: One of my teachers was Dr. Ralph Metzner. He always said, “There is no point in going somewhere if you don’t bring the information back. And there is no point in bringing the information back if you don’t integrate it into your life.”

As a therapist, you are already helping people integrate life events.

The questions are: What happened during the journey? How can you bring what you learned into your life now? How can you incorporate it into your everyday experience, your relationships, your work, the way you relate to the Earth, and the way you relate to everyone around you?

You bring it into the here and now so that none of it is wasted.

That is the real answer. The experience needs to be solidly integrated into the person’s life because they may have received a great deal of valuable information.

Repeat Experiences

Claire: Before we open the conversation to audience questions, is this something someone would do repeatedly? Do you attend multiple retreats? Can one retreat be enough to help someone become unstuck?

Where is the future of this going? Should everybody be doing it?

Allyson: It depends on who you are and where you are.

Some of the people at our retreat felt pretty good afterward. It hasn’t even been a year, so perhaps they will need to return and perhaps they won’t. It is different for everyone.

It is not something you do back-to-back because processing, integration, and bringing the lessons into your life are so important.

When you become stuck again, perhaps it is something you return to. You go as far as you can with what you have learned, and if you need it again, the medicine stays with you. It tells you when it is time to go back.

Only you can know that for yourself.

Neil: That was beautifully put.

The only thing I would add is that I do not think it is good to use mushrooms more frequently than once every three months. You need time to integrate the experience.

But I completely agree with Allyson. There is no schedule beyond what your life and integration tell you.

Dingle: I agree.

Training for Clinicians

Claire: I could keep asking questions for another hour, but we have many great questions from the audience.

The first is: How do we get training to support people who want to use these medicines to process grief? How can therapists, counselors, and other professionals receive appropriate training?

Neil: Training programs are appearing all over the place.

You need to do your due diligence and research them carefully. I don’t want to promote products or programs that I’m involved in, but reputable training does exist.

The California Institute of Integral Studies has a training program, for example. There are legitimate programs available. Make sure you understand the training, its approach, and its qualifications.

Dingle: I’m in Jamaica and am being trained by a group that comes there.

It is clear to me that many training opportunities are available. You need to research them and perhaps speak with people who have completed them.

There has been a mushrooming of these opportunities. For people who are already trained in psychology, it may be easier to step into a program than it would be for someone without any relevant background.

Clinical Trials and End-of-Life Distress

Claire: Another question says: Clinical trials have been conducted around processing terminal illness. Why haven’t these findings translated into clinical practice? Instead of waiting for a death to occur, why not confront it as fully as possible beforehand? What do you think the timeline will be?

Neil: I’m in Canada, where we have a wonderful health minister granting Section 56 exemptions. These allow people to legally possess and use psilocybin mushrooms for end-of-life distress.

I work legally with people experiencing end-of-life distress and help them obtain Section 56 exemptions. That work is happening outside research trials.

The Canadian government wants more research trials and is encouraging people to conduct them. Outside Canada, I’m not sure how easy it is to pursue this work.

Dingle, I’m not sure where Jamaica is with this.

Dingle: There is increasing interest in Jamaica because mushrooms are not illegal there.

Many groups are looking toward us. I work with a particular company, and we are exploring the construction of palliative care trials with patients approaching the end of life.

We know that this can work, but we need more data. If it is going to become fully legal in the United States, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere, regulatory authorities will want evidence.

We are in a period of building that evidence. We hope to begin a trial with palliative care patients in Jamaica in the near future.

Group Versus Individual Experiences

Claire: Another popular question keeps coming up: Are these experiences best conducted in groups, or can they be just as powerful individually?

I know you touched on this earlier, but people clearly want to hear more.

Allyson: The group helped me understand things that I might have believed intellectually but did not fully know to be true.

At the retreat, two of the fathers brought up how the experience of losing a child can be different for a mother than for a father. I could say that, and everyone might respond, “Of course it is different for the mother.”

But it didn’t truly make sense to me until I heard it from the fathers rather than the mothers. I began to understand why my husband and I were processing our son’s death so differently.

That made a huge difference to me. By myself, that might never have become a truth I could fully understand.

Neil: For parental grief, it is very important that this be done in a group.

For end-of-life distress, it may be an individual experience. How psilocybin should be used depends on what it is being used for.

In our ancestral history, grief was a community event. It no longer functions that way in much of our culture, but it needs to.

For grieving parents, the starting community may be other parents who have also lost children. That is the beginning of getting it right.

Dingle: As Allyson said, that group of parents remains completely bonded nine months after the journey. They continue to support one another.

That deep kind of connection likely would not have developed in the same way if they had not gone through the journey as a group.

Claire: Group work is so powerful for grief. I could imagine it being useful for people who have lost spouses, partners, or parents too. Coming together with others helps people understand the wider experience and feel less alone.

Psychedelics and Anticipatory Grief

There is another question I had on my own list. Dingle, is there a use for psychedelics among people who are already grieving while caring for someone with a terminal diagnosis?

Dingle: That’s a very interesting question. We are just beginning to discover all the ways psilocybin could be useful.

I do think it could be helpful. Wouldn’t it be interesting to have the caregiver and the ill person journey together?

As Allyson said earlier, we often try to push pain away. Our society tends to do that with death and dying. We look away.

Mushroom medicine helps us be present with it. It is painful, but as Neil said, the only way out is through.

We can ask, “What does this really mean? Can we open ourselves to death and dying and remain present with it?”

I believe mushroom medicine could help with that dynamic. It could also help in bereavement more broadly, beyond bereaved parents.

I also see applications for what I call “all comers,” people seeking personal growth who may have been in talk therapy for a while and feel stuck. There may be applications for otherwise well people too.

Depictions in Popular Culture

Claire: There is a question about the television show Nine Perfect Strangers. I don’t know whether all of you have seen it.

Nicole Kidman plays a retreat leader. Nine people come to the retreat for different reasons. One is a grieving family that has lost a child. It is an intense show with many dark moments, and I’m not sure it provides great public relations for this kind of treatment.

Psychedelic therapy is clearly spilling into popular culture, and people are curious. How can we create more positive and helpful depictions?

Neil: I don’t own a television, so I don’t know much about popular television. But from what I’ve read in reviews of that show, I don’t think it is good to have people journeying together when they are dealing with very different and powerful issues.

This is still early, but I think grieving parents should journey with grieving parents. People grieving spouses should be with others grieving spouses.

It follows some of the older principles around group work for post-traumatic stress disorder. You would not place survivors of sexual violence in the same treatment group as soldiers with combat trauma. You create groups around the shared experience.

I think that principle also applies to work with psilocybin mushrooms.

The television show needed many different kinds of characters, but that part is misleading.

Claire: I agree. There was a lot in the show that was misleading.

Processing Trauma and Grief

Here is another question: How would the panelists describe processing trauma or grief? What are we really talking about? Is it more than sitting with emotions?

Allyson: Absolutely.

Speaking from where I am right now, it is like the onion Dingle described. You begin by dealing with the immediate loss of your child. But once you delve into it, you realize that if you haven’t tended to earlier traumas inside yourself, you may never be able to fully address what is on the table.

All of us came to this because we lost our children. But now we are going deeper and dealing with things that happened during childhood and whatever other traumas are inside us.

You cannot deal with one without eventually dealing with all of them.

Claire: That’s an important point. Grief asks us to look at our entire lives. It asks us to examine who we are, who we have been, our relationships, and the world around us.

You may go into the experience because of grief and loss but end up confronting a much broader picture.

Is This Only for Complicated Grief?

Someone asks whether this is only for complicated grief or people who have difficulty accessing their grief. Could it also help someone who is already very present with their grief?

Dingle: I lost my mother on October 31 of last year. She was 94. People said, “She was old,” but we were very, very close.

I was able to have my first mushroom journey six weeks after she died, and I have continued to have guided journeys. It is probably the most helpful thing I have done.

I don’t think you need to be distraught, experiencing complicated grief, or deeply stuck. Grief is grief. Mushroom medicine can make a significant difference in helping someone process it.

Our society, and even the way medicine is practiced, teaches us to push things away and suppress them. We need to do the opposite. We need to face grief directly. That is where healing can emerge.

Allyson: You made me think of something else. It is incredibly important to have a guide who understands the psychedelic space.

During my journey, Dingle was with me. Everyone else completed their journey and left the space, but I wasn’t finished. I needed to stay there, and Dingle stayed with me all night.

She did that because she knew where I was. She understood that space and what I needed.

If you are not personally familiar with the psychedelic space, I cannot imagine helping someone through it. You need to understand it yourself.

What Experience Should a Guide Have?

Claire: That touches on a great final question. Does a guide also need personal familiarity with grief to do this kind of work?

Neil: One of the principles in psychedelic therapy is that it can be difficult for a person on a journey to go beyond where their guide has gone. That isn’t always true, but you want a guide with a great deal of experience.

They need psychedelic experience, life experience, and wisdom. That is what the work requires.

Claire: That makes sense.

I’m so grateful to all of you for sharing your experiences and wisdom today, and for bringing this conversation further into the world.

I think this work could have a profound impact on how we understand grief and move through it in our culture.

Thank you all so much.