The mainstreaming of psychedelic medicine, a billion-dollar industry, blends psychiatry with spiritual experience, creating new forms of secular mysticism in an age of disenchantment. Drawing on public discourse analysis, ethnographic research in a psychedelic church, a therapy training program, and science conferences, the article argues that this entanglement reveals contemporary social anxieties and yearnings. It shows how attempts to distinguish drugs, medicine, and sacraments in clinical and non-clinical spaces are not only shifting mental health care paradigms but also generating secular mystical practices.
Collective afflictions among teenage girls in Nepal, often labeled 'mass hysteria,' are reported in local and national newspapers as strange and mysterious events. Treatments range from shamanic rituals to psychosocial interventions, the latter gaining prominence with the rise of global mental health. The discourse around these cases reveals deep societal anxieties about moral community breakdown, the status of shamanic knowledge, and gender norms around emotional expression. Because the cause is ambiguous, symptoms are dramatically displayed, and the afflicted individuals themselves are absent as experiencing subjects, these cases become a blank screen onto which broader collective anxieties of a changing society are projected and debated.