Vince Polito

There are currently roughly 100 new scientific papers published on psychedelics and other altered states of consciousness each week. There is broad agreement that these kinds of interventions can have considerable positive impacts on a broad range of mental and physical health conditions. And so a lot of these papers are focused on exploring these clinical outcomes – for example we see many graphs showing that levels of depression and anxiety drop after psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. However, across this booming scientific literature, there is surprisingly little information about what actually happens to participants’ state of consciousness during these interventions.

Jake Payne

In this presentation, Jake Payne will outline the preliminary findings from his PhD.

First, he will discuss a narrative review that utilized Robinson’s (2020) framework to generate hypotheses regarding possible ways that psychedelic use may positively interact with emerging adult development. Here, we reviewed potential pathways psychedelics may facilitate emerging adults’ positive orthogenetic, veridical-epistemic, eudaimonic, relational, and ethical developmental trajectories through changes in personality trait openness, beliefs systems, self-insight and social concern.