My personal psychiatric guru, Nazi survivor Dorothea Buck, described one of psychiatry’s great failures as its utter lack of dialogue with patients about what they experience.

“By being declared ill in a medicinal sense,” Buck wrote, the diagnosed “are deprived of the human significance of [our] thoughts and feelings.”

Buck was not a psychiatrist but a patient, diagnosed, as I once was, with schizophrenia. I share her wonder at the assumption that what someone depressed, or hearing voices is experiencing—to give two examples--doesn’t in and of itself matter. I hear voices, which can be frightening or enlightening. I’ve had depressive periods that came from nowhere and others that signaled a need for change in my life. According to our diagnostic criteria, any non-consensus experience just counts as a "symptom" and indicates the need for drugs.

Therapeutic Psychedelics

What could bring the value of all consciousness back to psychiatry? I’ve wondered about this question for a long time. I would never have guessed one answer that’s emerged over the past few years: therapeutic psychedelics.

A great discussion of this movement lies in Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind, which explores the use of mind-altering drugs to address problems like trauma, facing death, and depression. Pollan himself tries drugs like psilocybin, finding under its influence a world “jeweled with light.”

Patients and Pollan use substances like psilocybin with trained guides and explore their

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