This article was submitted by Lucy da Silva, Psychedelic Support Therapist and CEO Silva Wellness, as part of Psychedelic Health’s op-ed program. To submit article ideas, please email news@psychedelichealth.co.uk

I once was addicted to alcohol and drugs, which I was lucky enough to overcome through the 12-step programme. This journey was steeped in peer support and a real sense of community. Over the past five or so years, I have also had my fair share of psychedelic healing experiences, most of them in group settings.

Entering this sphere, I was fortunate to come from a place of internal containment and grounding, since my healing journey had begun long before my first psychedelic experience in a ceremonial setting. As a qualified and experienced psychotherapist, I was well versed in self-care, the analytical lens of Jungian interpretation and, most importantly, trauma knowledge and containment.

What these seeds of experience began to sow for me was an awareness of how clinical excitement can sometimes overshadow the slower work of building adequate systems that protect, hold and integrate – striking the delicate balance between respect for indigenous traditions and the demands of medicine-inspired healing. As a therapist, my work often focuses on the healing that takes place after harm has occurred. But my own experiences in medicine ceremonies (some profound and safe, others not so much) led me to wonder: what would it mean to design safety from the ground up?

The psychedelic field has made extraordinary progress in just a few years. Regulatory frameworks are evolving, clinical trials are expanding, and public interest is growing faster than any of us could have predicted. There’s a palpable sense of momentum—of medicine, culture and consciousness beginning to reconnect. The renaissance is not on its way—it is here! 

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Yet much of this progress still takes place within the same paradigms that shaped twentieth-century psychiatry: models focused on efficacy and access, rather than on the deeper architecture of care. We talk about scaling treatments, but rarely about scaling safety—about designing systems that protect psychological integrity as much as they deliver clinical outcomes.

The conversation about psychedelic medicine often stops at the clinic door. But the next frontier of innovation isn’t pharmacological; it’s relational, community-driven and systemic. It’s about how we build environments that recognise trauma not as an exception, but as the context from which most people seek healing. This is especially relevant when utilising psychedelics for the treatment of substance use disorders.

Co-Design Workshops: Trauma-Informed Care and Community Integration in Psychedelic Therapy

When we had the opportunity to apply for a government-backed R&D grant, it offered the chance to formalise what I had personally seen and encountered in group settings—as well as what I had heard through anecdotal conversations with individuals I met along the way, including clients who needed help processing uncontained trauma after group experiences.

With the grant focusing on individuals suffering from substance use disorders, I was motivated to propose a trauma-informed model in a group setting supported by community integration initiatives. I also wanted to address the elephant in the room: expanding access. With ketamine treatment via IV costing around £10,000 in the UK, affordability remains a serious issue. My goal was to explore how we can scale treatment options safely. We need to ensure that the very systems we design to help people heal do not inadvertently replicate harm.

Rather than studying participants, we’ll be studying systems, and asking what those systems need to look like to prevent harm before it happens.

Our study (scheduled to kick off in November 2025), Co-Design Workshops: Trauma-Informed Care and Community Integration in Psychedelic Therapy, aims to explore how safety can be intentionally designed into emerging psychedelic care models before they become mainstream. It will run as follows:

1. Three stakeholder groups (clinicians, peer facilitators and mental health service designers) will participate in a series of co-design workshops.
2. Using journey mapping and system mapping, the sessions will explore how trauma-informed principles can guide safe, accessible models for group-based ketamine lozenge therapy (KLT).
3. The aim is to co-create conceptual frameworks that integrate ethical design, accessibility and community wisdom from the outset.

What we hope to learn is that safety is relational, shaped by culture and trust just as much as by clinical control. Trauma-informed practice, emotional readiness, education, and attention to set and setting before any medicine is ingested should form vital components of integration.

Promoting integration as preparation—as the precursor to treatment, as a modality in itself—mirrors what the 12-step programme does so well. Peer-led community, robust support and follow-up systems could become the scaffolding that extends care beyond the session, supporting longevity in healing.

This also ties into the concept of reducing hierarchy by amplifying lived expertise and modelling the inclusivity that psychedelic care must embody. It can help individuals lean towards treatment rather than resist it—a common challenge in both community-led and private addiction treatment programmes.

As the long-term aim of this project is to align proposed frameworks with voluntary sector and NHS infrastructure, we envisage that it could inform future service delivery and policy development. Most importantly, we hope to begin a wider discussion about how future frameworks can be wrapped in nurturing ethics and, above all, safety.

If we can integrate trauma-informed principles from the outset, the future of psychedelic therapy could look very different. We might see small, community-based groups supported by skilled facilitators who understand containment as much as chemistry. Integration models could become embedded within peer networks, where shared experience is part of the medicine itself.

Services could evolve through co-design rather than correction, shaped by lived wisdom as much as professional expertise. In this vision, innovation means not just expanding access, but building safety, inclusion and care by design.

Because the psychedelic renaissance will only ever be as safe as the systems that hold it and designing those systems is the real frontier.

As this project begins, we have a rare opportunity to slow down—to listen, collaborate and build the ethical foundations before psychedelic care becomes fully mainstream. Trauma-informed design reminds us that safety is not simply the absence of harm, but the presence of trust, transparency and relationship.

If we can weave those qualities into the structures that support psychedelic work, from the clinic to the community, we stand a chance of creating a field that heals without replicating old wounds.

This study is just the first step, but it marks an invitation to the wider field: to design consciously, collectively and with care at the centre.

Because the question is no longer whether psychedelics can heal, it’s whether we can design the systems that allow that healing to endure.

Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay

A newly published academic review has revisited one of the most sensational — and disputed — theories in psychedelic history: that early Christianity emerged from fertility cults using psychoactive mushrooms.

Released 9 August in the journal Religions, Richard S. Ascough’s paper, John Allegro and the Psychedelic Mysteries Hypothesis, takes a fresh look at the 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by Semitic philologist John M. Allegro.

Allegro claimed that Christian theology, symbols and even the figure of Jesus could be traced back to ancient rituals involving the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria. His argument rested on bold linguistic links between Sumerian and Semitic languages — links that experts swiftly dismissed as unsubstantiated.

Discredited but enduring

Ascough’s review details how Allegro’s thesis was rejected almost immediately in academic circles. Mainstream scholars pointed out that Sumerian is a language isolate, making the connections Allegro proposed linguistically impossible. The fallout was severe — the book damaged Allegro’s reputation and ended his academic career.

Yet, as Ascough points out, the theory refused to disappear. In the decades since, it has surfaced repeatedly in psychedelic counterculture, cited by authors such as Carl Ruck and Terence McKenna. While scholars abandoned the thesis, parts of the public embraced it as part of a broader fascination with the potential spiritual role of entheogens.

Three key takeaways

Ascough distils his reassessment into three main findings:

• Reception – Universally dismissed by academics, the theory nonetheless gained a cult following in popular psychedelic discourse.

• Methodology – Allegro’s linguistic analysis is fundamentally flawed; modern scholarship offers no evidence for the deep language connections he claimed.

• Legacy – The thesis’ real impact lies in how it helped spark public interest in the idea that psychoactive substances may have shaped religious traditions.

In short, Ascough frames Allegro’s work as “a historical curiosity” — important for its cultural footprint but not as a credible piece of entheogenic research.

Why it matters now

The review lands at a time when psychedelics are being investigated for regulated medical use in treating depression, PTSD, and end-of-life anxiety. By separating historical speculation from scientific evidence, Ascough’s work helps keep the conversation grounded.

It also highlights a longer lineage of public fascination with psychedelics — one that stretches from ancient myth to 20th-century counterculture, and now into 21st-century clinics and labs.

For those following the evolution of psychedelic medicine, the review is both a look back at one of the field’s most colourful controversies and a reminder of how far the evidence base has advanced.

Article picture is an illustration made using generative AI tools.

The war in Ukraine brings suffering and trauma, which naturally leads to cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among soldiers and civilians. The Ministry of Health of Ukraine predicts that about 4 million Ukrainian civilians are suffering from PTSD.

According to the WHO, about a quarter of the Ukrainian population may be affected by disorders of mental health. In order to deal with this challenge, Ukraine must ensure access to safe, effective and adequately regulated therapy.

That is also why Ukraine is trying to support the idea that mental health will become an integral part of Ukraine’s “reconstruction.” Czech Republic can in this regard offer a helping hand in the sphere of innovative therapy. That is also one of the reasons why a Ukrainian delegation took part in the international conference Novel Mental Health Treatments and Sustainability of Healthcare Systems: Czechia as a Leader of the EU? which took place in Prague.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy is being increasingly discussed in Ukraine as a way of treating PTSD. Although the use of ketamine as part of mental illness treatment has been legal since 2017, substances such as MDMA and psilocybin are still banned. With a view to global development, which has been inching towards supporting the medical use of psychedelics, Ukrainian institutions are supporting clinical studies for psychedelic-assisted therapy as an innovative way of treating PTSD.

Medical use of psychedelics in PTSD treatment in Ukraine

The potential of psychedelic-assisted therapy in the context of the war in Ukraine was also the focus of one of the conference panels. The panel was attended by Ukrainian MPs Mykhailo Radutskyi, Dmytro Gurin, Rostyslav Tistyk and State Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Inna Yashchuk.

Over the course of the day, Mykhailo Radutskyi, Member of the Verkhovna Rada of the Parliament of Ukraine and Chairman of the Committee on National Health, Health Care and Health Insurance praised the Czech Republic and said that the country is at the forefront of psychedelic research in Europe.

“We have a large population suffering from mental health problems, but we will most likely never have enough experts. In Ukraine, we have an information campaign on how to treat soldiers who have returned from the front, and we are proposing a law which would ensure mental health,” Radutskyi stated.

“About 3.5 million people in Ukraine, and not only soldiers and veterans, currently have mental health problems because of the war, over a million war veterans will need psychotherapeutic help, and currently about half of the veterans suffer from PTSD,” said Dmytro Gurin, Ukrainian MP and member of the Committee on National Health, Health Care and Health Insurance.

“Mental health must become an issue and must play a part in the reconstruction of Ukraine. Winning the war is one thing, but we must also win the war on mental health. One way to win this war is through psychedelic-assisted therapy, and our Parliament and the Ministry of Health will support clinical trials.

“I hope that we will soon approve a study researching the potential for treating PTSD through psychedelic-assisted therapy. Our task is to create fitting conditions for future clinical trials.”

State Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Inna Yashchuk said: “The Ministry of Internal Affairs is setting up mental health centers all over Ukraine, and I estimate that when we win, 80 % of the people will come to their doctors in need of psychological and psychiatric help. So mental health is not a problem today, but it will be a problem for the future.”

Czech Republic wants to help Ukraine with mental health issues

The event also featured a speech by the Governmental Envoy for the Reconstruction of Ukraine, Tomáš Kopečný, who said: “Ukraine’s reconstruction is not only about physical reconstruction, but also about the mental health of Ukrainian civilians and war veterans, it is about increasing capacities on site, so that the support reach is as effective as possible.”

Other experts also believe that one of the outcomes of the panel discussion should consist in the establishment of a structural relationship between the Czech Republic and Ukraine in the field of mental health, which would include scientific cooperation, exchange of know-how and joint research projects.

Scientific supervision of the ongoing exchange between Czechia and Ukraine in the field of mental health is primarily provided by Professor Jiří Horáček of the Faculty of Medicine at Charles University and director of the Centre for Advanced Studies of Brain and Consciousness at the National Institute of Mental Health, who has prepared an innovative clinical study of using ketamine for the treatment of PTSD in Ukrainian veterans.

In Czech Republic, the topic is also addressed by the Psychedelic Research Foundation (PSYRES). Its director, Jana Bednářová, has said that: “Research about psychedelics is crucial for the future of Ukraine and the Czech Republic. While such research will put Czech Republic on the cutting edge of the field in Europe, without breakthrough solutions for Ukraine, it can take an entire generation to regenerate mental health – in comparison, the physical recovery of the country can be a matter of mere years. Our mission is to enlist visionaries, philanthropists, organizations and the general public to support our research projects and activities and help us make treatment available to everyone who may need it.”

The issue has been resonating in Brussels, Czechia among EU leaders in mental health

The Czech Republic was the first country to put mental health back on the EU’s agenda. The Czech trial in Brussels also leads to the topic of psychedelic-assisted therapy in the treatment of PTSD in Ukraine. The topic was first addressed last year by PsychedelicsEUROPE, a platform focussing on the European regulation of psychedelics. The platform has long been working towards the approval of a new regulatory framework for the medical use of psychedelics on the European single market.

“Mental health is becoming a central issue for the EU. We are a little behind the US, the UK and Australia, but the necessary debate about the regulation of psychedelic substances is coming to Europe. In the same way that psychedelic-assisted therapy can help Ukraine, Ukraine can help the EU in this field by providing data from new research which may help with drafting good legislation. This is one of the reasons why mental health ought to be an implicit part of Ukraine’s reconstruction,” said Viktor Chvátal, founder of PsychedelicsEUROPE.

The event was organised by:

PSYRES
The mission of PSYRES, the Psychedelic Research Endowment Fund, is to provide funding to scientific projects and facilities that focus on innovative treatment procedures in the field of mental illnesses. Our task is to support research and study of the potential of psychedelics and their therapeutic use in psychiatry, neurology and addictology. Our activities help with the preparation and implementation of clinical studies and analyses and with the education of the public. We collaborate with doctors, therapists and researchers who deal in depth with altered states of human consciousness.

INSTITUTE FOR RATIONAL ADDICTION POLICIES
Institute for Rational Addiction Policies is a multidisciplinary association of independent and prominent experts who address the issue of addiction from all angles – public and individual health, legislation and other legal implications, including security challenges, and economics including market modeling, tax, economic impacts on public budgets, the field of education and prevention, and finally also the fields of social and sociological and political science.

PSYCHEDELICS EUROPE
PsychedelicsEUROPE (PE) is an innovative public affairs mental health platform based in Brussels that brings together leading research centres, NGOs, investors, philanthropists and private companies. Based on the latest scientific evidence, PE advocate in the EU for a regulatory environment that promotes modern therapies, cutting-edge research, and innovative industry.