Switzerland played an early and notable role in the 21st-century revival of psychedelic science, which has generated growing global interest in using psychedelics for research and therapy. In 2023, the Swiss Interest Group for Psychedelic-assisted Therapy was formed to establish a clear, widely accepted framework for such work. The group produced a first draft of treatment recommendations (S1 guidelines) that will be regularly updated to reflect new research and therapeutic findings.
Standard diagnostic categories like the ICD and DSM were created as a practical compromise between competing schools in psychiatry, focusing on symptom patterns to improve reliability, communication, and reimbursement. However, this focus misses the complex bodily, personal, interpersonal, and cultural processes underlying human suffering. The article argues that beneath efforts to address this gap lies a fundamental complementarity in human existence: the organismic–biological dimension, based on Jakob von Uexküll's biosemiotics of pre-linguistic meaning-attribution, and the symbolic–cultural dimension, from Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, involving socially shared symbol systems. Understanding psychopathology and therapy through both complementary perspectives can enrich clinical practice.