Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Practices and Human Caring Science: Toward a Care-Informed Model of Treatment
Journal of Humanistic Psychology – April 23, 2021
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
Psychedelic therapies offer profound hope for intractable conditions. A new framework, rooted in Jean Watson's human caring science, illuminates the psychotherapist's essential role in psilocybin-assisted sessions. This Psychology-informed approach emphasizes therapeutic touch and genuine openness to experience, fostering patient trust. Integrating insights from Psychedelics and Drug Studies, it considers the broader context of chemical synthesis and alkaloids. Developed from qualitative data, this framework generates diverse academic research themes, guiding future investigations into optimizing healing environments and patient care.
Abstract
Psychedelic therapies intentionally combine a caring/healing environment, psychotherapy, and psychedelic medicine as a powerful means of treating intractable conditions of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. This article utilizes the nursing theory of human caring science, as articulated by Jean Watson, to describe the essential and fundamental human caring qualities in psychedelic therapy. By mapping these qualities onto the traits of a psychedelic therapist, articulated by Janis Phelps and illustrating them with qualitative, exemplar data from a psilocybin assisted therapy study, we have created a nursing-informed philosophical theoretical framework with which to begin to examine questions related to trust enhancement between patient and therapist, therapeutic communication of openness to patient experiences, mutual learning between therapist and patient, the influence spiritual or psychedelic practices of the therapist on outcomes, optimizing therapeutic healing environments, and care of the physical body during psychedelic therapy sessions. This article is intended to identify themes and generate hypotheses for future nursing-informed psychedelic psychotherapy research.