A new behavior change program using psilocybin.
Psychotherapy – January 01, 1965
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
With 67% of offenders returning to prison within five years, traditional rehabilitation struggles. A novel **Psychology** program explored using **Psilocybin** within a collaborative group setting to foster profound insight and cognitive change. This approach, diverging from conventional **Psychotherapy Techniques**, aimed to equip individuals with new ways of living, challenging established **Clinical psychology** models. Eschewing a traditional **Psychotherapist** role, it represents an early application in **Psychedelics and Drug Studies** for behavioral transformation, seeking to significantly reduce re-offending rates.
Abstract
This paper describes the procedure and results of a new kind of behavior change or rehabilitation program The methods used here may have applications to a wide range of settings in the field of rehabilitation or behavior change. The program aims to produce such changes in prisoners' ways of thinking and living as will enable them to stay out of prison once they are: released. It is well known that our contemporary prison systems do not perform this function (usually called reforming the criminal). Fifty to seventy percent of offenders paroled or released return within a 5-year period, with a nationwide average of 67% (Mattick, 1960) . Many attempts have been made to develop programs which would better serve the purpose of reform or rehabilitation. Our program may be summarized as follows: (1) It is a collaborative group program; we avoid as much as possible the traditional doctor-patient, researcher-subject, or professional-client roles. (2) The program is relatively short and emphasizes the crucial importance of certain far-reaching experiences (produced by consciousness-altering drugs). (3) The program has a built in evaluation procedure. Records of changes serve as feedback for the group members and to communicate the activities of the group to other research workers. The program does not require expensive professional personnel. It does require persons (usually non-professionals possessing a certain egalitarian wisdom) who are experienced in the procedures we have developed. Although the particular combination of methods used in this program is new, some of the methods have been used successfully by others within institutional settings. Sturup (1957) has developed a group total treatment program for criminals, involving insight experience, self-help in changing patterns of and the concept of the chain-reaction by which groups are encouraged to further their own learning and progress. The Highfields project, which uses guided group interaction to provide insight and assumes that increased responsibility makes for change, is also similar in many respects (McCorkle et al., 1958). Feedback and self-evaluation) by the group has been discussed by Jenkins (1948). Most writers on group have agreed that the learning and change takes place through observation and understanding of here-and-now experience and behavior. The group behavior which serves as the focus around which the learning takes place may be role-playing (Levit and Jennings, 1960) or psychodrama (Moreno, 1959); or it may be some set of stimuli brought in from the outside, such as a problem or a case-history (Slater, 1961). In our case, the group experience around which the therapeutic process is constructed is the shared insight experienced by psilocybin. [2] Although psilocybin per se has only rarely been used in therapy (e.g. Duche and Laut, 1961) other drugs from the same group such as LSD-25 have of course been widely used as adjuncts