Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Practices and Human Caring Science: Toward a Care-Informed Model of Treatment
Journal of Humanistic Psychology April 23, 2021 Andrew Penn, Janis Phelps, William E. Rosa et al. 37 citations
Psychedelic therapies combine a healing environment, psychotherapy, and psychedelic medicine to treat depression and PTSD. This article uses Jean Watson's nursing theory of human caring science to describe essential caring qualities in psychedelic therapy. It maps these qualities onto traits of a psychedelic therapist articulated by Janis Phelps, illustrating them with qualitative data from a psilocybin-assisted therapy study. The resulting nursing-informed philosophical framework helps examine trust between patient and therapist, therapeutic openness, mutual learning, the influence of therapists' spiritual practices, optimizing healing environments, and physical care during sessions. The article aims to identify themes and generate hypotheses for future nursing-informed psychedelic psychotherapy research.