Psychedelic Medicines and Healing Trauma

Hi, my name is Dr. Melody Hayes. I am an anesthesiologist and a leading clinician in the science of psychedelic medicine.

I’m so excited to be here with you today because I want to tell you about how psychedelics are changing hearts and minds and offering health and wellness.

Psychedelics are getting a lot of public attention. Michael Pollan, in his writing, has told the world about how they can change the mind. There are documentaries on Netflix with actors such as Ben Stiller talking about how they tripped on acid and entered new realities. And Mike Tyson, instead of biting ears, took a taste of toad venom and experienced healing and spiritual transformation.

Indeed, these are powerful substances. Let me tell you a little bit more about how they work.

These are quite literally mind-blowing serotonergic agonists. They act on the default mode network.

You can think of the default mode network as a structure in the brain where the ego sits. The default mode network, or the ego, can become fixed and rigid. It can fall into ruminative patterns, telling stories that lead to anxiety and depression.

But psychedelics come in and create neuroplasticity. That means the brain becomes flexible and able to change and transform itself.

During this process, while people are under the influence of psychedelics, they experience love and connection to spirit itself.

The default mode network is silenced for a moment, and people are able to release the pain of the past and release their previous selves.

A new mind is created. This new mind has nerve endings with new dendritic connections. This mind can rewire itself.

Instead of ruminations, people can create new narratives of hope and connection where there was once only anxiety and depression.

There is prolific evidence that these substances are clinically effective.

With psilocybin, there is rapid relief of end-of-life anxiety and depression. Psilocybin is also the best treatment for smoking cessation.

MDMA provides healing from trauma and PTSD for soldiers returning from war or women recovering from sexual assault.

Indeed, there is robust evidence that the health of individuals ends up better than where they started.

However, despite the name of the End Well conference, it’s not only about clinical outcomes regarding how we die. This conference is about how we live together.

Maybe you’re here because you had a loved one who experienced a death, and you felt they needed more support than could be provided by the traditional medical model.

Or maybe you yourself had a perilous experience with depression.

Regardless, we have chosen to be here because we care about healing ourselves, healing our families and healing our culture.

I am here because I know that psychedelic healing and transformation can create a different relationship with human suffering, death and mental illness. It can create a different relationship with one another.

For example, by turning the focus from healthcare to heart care, psychedelic palliative care can reverse the overmedicalization of dying and return it to the sacred space of home and community.

Presently, centuries-old rituals have been replaced by the miracles of modern medicine. There are fewer prayers and more prognostication. The sounds of beeps have replaced the sounds of chants.

But death, which is a part of life equal to all others, cannot only be known in sterile white rooms or padded satin boxes.

While sickness is primarily a medical process, death and dying are social and spiritual phenomena.

Healing our culture requires that we change our minds and change our stories so that we can understand how health is truly created.

Through my work to decriminalize psychedelics in the city of Oakland, in the state of California and eventually across the nation, psychedelics are not merely entering the individual body. Psychedelics are also entering our social body and giving us the ability to change our collective mind.

Because of the legacy of racism, America itself is a traumatized body with a schizophrenic mind. It is split off from its own pain, and right now, it is seeking its path to healing.

White supremacist culture is on its deathbed. It is showing signs of agonal breathing, and we as a nation are ready to release racism as our default mode.

As psychedelics enter our civic body, the U.S. consciousness is becoming neuroplastic. With that change, we can rapidly adapt and heal from the trauma of this reality.

Because the individual body manifests the stresses and fractures of the collective body, it is class inequality, racial oppression and our lost social connections with one another that increase our vulnerability to cancer.

These conditions increase our vulnerability to mental illness and other maladies, whether physical or spiritual.

While illness is a medical process, wellness is fundamentally a social one.

It would be a travesty if we kept focusing on pharmacology while ignoring the social conditions that create trauma.

This is what the children of flower power were turned on to. They were turned on and tuned in to the fact that, yes, we can.

With new minds and new hearts, yes, we can drop out of this reality and create a new one.

At this urgent moment in history, my kaleidoscope vision is that these molecules of love can increase our joy in this life as we heal from the trauma of racism in our nation.

Beyond changing how we die, the magic of these medicines can change how we live together as a nation.

This is why I’ve made it my professional commitment to increase access to the healing power of psychedelic medicine.

I hope it will be a blessing to you, your family and our nation.