This essay is the final piece in a three-part series exploring how therapy both reflects and resists our cultural moment.

In Part One, “Are We All Becoming Avoidantly Attached?”, I looked at our collective retreat from emotional discomfort.

In Part Two, “The Validation Trap,” I examined how therapy itself can collude with that avoidance, offering comfort over challenge.

Here, in Part Three, “The Return of the Sacred,” I turn to the renewed fascination with psychedelic therapy, asking whether this hunger for transcendence represents a true return to depth, or simply the next evolution of comfort in disguise.

The Longing for Depth in a Shallow Age

Psychedelics have re-entered the mainstream. From Netflix documentaries to biotech start-ups, psilocybin, ketamine and MDMA are being heralded as the future of mental-health care. Europe has joined the movement: the European Medicines Agency is drafting new guidance for psychedelic medicines, the European Commission has funded PsyPal, a €6.5 million, nine-nation trial exploring psilocybin therapy for end-of-life distress, and Czechia has already approved medical psilocybin.

Beneath the data and clinical promise, though, lies something more human. Psychedelics have become a vessel for a longing that our modern world is failing to satisfy, a desire to pierce the veil of the ordinary, to recover psychological health and meaning in a world that has learned to pathologize and technologize human experience.

From Awakening to Avoidance

In my earlier essays I wrote about how comfort threatens to become an organising principle of our time. We try to optimize life rather than live it, smoothing away friction wherever we can, in our relationships (or lack thereof), our politics, even in therapy itself. Psychedelics appear to move in the opposite direction. They offer us the opportunity to move toward what we most avoid: intensity, dissolution, and the raw material of ourselves outside of our defenses.

But the contrast is not as clean as it looks. For all their promise, psychedelics can easily become another form of comfort and avoidance, albeit much more glamorous. They can offer belonging, self-optimisation, even status, while convincing us we are evolving. The experience feels radical, but the underlying wish is familiar: to feel better as soon as possible without having to bear too much struggle. 

Psychologist Sam Vaknin argues that psychedelics perhaps reveal a darker mirror. What we call mystical, transcendent or even therapy may not be healing at all, but a transient form of mental disintegration, a controlled psychosis dressed in sacred language. The brain, flooded with neurochemical chaos, generates grand narratives to stabilise itself, mistaking collapse for illumination. What feels like profundity may, in some cases, be psychic shock: an ecstasy that dazzles but rarely transforms.

And yet, there is something recognisably human in this search for awe. Psychedelic therapy returns mystery and intensity to the work of healing, reminding us that transformation has always depended on something other than technique. Where comfort-first therapy seeks to stabilize, psychedelic work, at its best, seeks to destabilize in the service of meaning.

A Spiritual Technology

Even if some psychedelic states are closer to collapse than revelation, others do seem to open a window, brief but real, into meaning and insight.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research has shown that even a single guided psilocybin session can bring sustained relief from depression and anxiety in people facing terminal illness (Griffiths et al., 2016). Comparable results have been found for treatment-resistant depression (Carhart-Harris et al., 2021).

But what stands out is not only the data, it’s the language participants use. They speak of awe, unity, ego-dissolution, forgiveness, love. The vocabulary belongs less to pharmacology than to theology. Philosopher Jules Evans has called psychedelics a form of “secular spirituality,” a re-enchantment project in a world that has lost its gods.

The small underground circles I have witnessed often unfold like rituals: shy arrivals, shared ordeal, morning gratitude. There is something unmistakably initiatory about it, a communal descent and return. It carries the sense of a rite our culture once knew how to hold, before religion and science split the human in two.

Between Apollo and Dionysus

Nietzsche wrote that every civilisation is a negotiation between two forces: the Apollonian drive for order and reason, and the Dionysian drive toward ecstasy and chaos. The new clinical psychedelic renaissance sits precisely between them.

The underground ceremonies lean Dionysian: collective, emotional, often unregulated. The medical approach represents the Apollonian correction: safety, ethics, research, control. Both have their place, yet moving the mushroom from forest to lab might also reveal a psychological defence, the wish to control what could potentially be the very thing that transforms us.

In psychotherapy, the same defence appears when a patient intellectualises feeling or when a therapist uses a manual to conduct the sessions. Collectively, medicalising psychedelics risks repeating that pattern: we control transcendence, and in doing so we avoid undergoing it. Perhaps true integration requires both energies, the containment that science provides alongside the ordeal of catharsis and initiation, both held in creative tension.

Pseudo Connection and the New Cults of Belonging

Psychedelics may be the clearest expression of our hunger for transcendence, but the same impulse threads through much of contemporary life: in wellness culture, tech rationalism, influencer spirituality, and even in some current political activism movements.

A recent Harper’s article, The Goon Squad, described an online world devoted to “gooning”, a trance-like state induced through compulsive masturbation. The language used by its adherents is quasi-mystical: surrender, ego-death, communion. The form is spiritual, yet the function is deeply depressingly embodied, hundreds of men “gooning” in isolated “goon caves”. It is the perfect christallization of a mass ritual event without tradition, creating ecstasy without real community, and offering spirituality without any real service or chance of growth.

We are no doubt witnessing the sacred return in many frightening and distorted forms, and the psychedelic renaissance could prove to be another of them, a therapeutic and self-improvement gospel promising transcendence and healing, but in the end, be yet another hedonistic way of managing discomfort through avoidance and “awakening”.

Hedonism Disguised as Healing

Much of the new spiritual landscape, psychedelics included, carries an undertone of hedonism. Beneath the language of healing lies the grammar of self-optimisation, more insight, more bliss, more connection. Even transcendence becomes another form of consumption.

In psilocybin therapy circles one sometimes senses the subtle hierarchy of who has “gone deeper,” who did the extra dose, who saw the most compelling visions. It is the same self we claim to dissolve, now dressed in sacred clothes. The rhetoric is surrender but the subtext is accumulation leaning towards narcissism. I’ve even heard conversations where people competitively compared shamens and gurus, as if to say “my shamen is more authentic than yours.”

True transformation asks for something harder in the form of humility, restraint, sometimes even self-sacrifice. These are the qualities that once grounded religious life but sit uneasily in a culture that equates pleasure and image with progress. However without them, transcendence becomes therapy chic, another fleeting high mistaken for healing.

When Awe Turns Dangerous

The 2024 Amy Griffin case was a reminder of how fragile this territory can be. Griffin, a wealthy woman who underwent psychedelic “therapy” with an untrained guide, later alleged the emergence of repressed memories of sexual abuse which caused her serious psychological harm. Her story is contested, but it highlighted the hazards of suggestion, power, and uncontained emotion. Psychedelics can open the psyche but what they reveal is not always the truth, meaningful, or even therapeutically helpful.

The recent meme about ordinary people getting “one shotted” by ayahuasca speaks exactly to this risk, merging the term “one shotted” from gamer language with the new territory of psychedelic intensity being opened up to the masses. The viral tweet read:

Ayahuasca is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately dangerous drugs with the potential to gigafry your brain but taken by literal turbonormies who unironically want to ‘like heal racial trauma’ and basically end up getting one shotted by it.

In a culture already struggling to find a shared sense of reality outside of curated echo chambers, where personal lived experience and performative emotion trump evidence and reason, that risk is magnified. Which is why proper training, supervision, and ethical containment are not bureaucratic details; they are the moral foundation of any work with merging psychotherapy and psychedelics.

The Revolution and its Risk

Across Europe, enthusiasm for psychedelic therapy is growing. Advocacy groups such as PsychedeliCare campaign for regulated access. The hope is real, but so is the risk of commodification.

Faced with a mental-health crisis it cannot contain, psychiatry may yet turn psychedelics into another quick fix: microdoses for burnout and depression management, psilocybin for productivity. If therapy has become an industry of comfort, psychedelic therapy could amplify this trend, commodifying and flattening the sacred that it once sought to enable.

When free ketamine is being offered to laid-off tech workers, then you may have a clue that this isn’t just about healing depression but perhaps sedating a toxic society and culture. Another example is in 2016, a Peruvian centre hosted the aptly titled “Entrepreneurs’ Awakening,” where tech start-up founders could take psychedelics to forward their personal and professional development, no doubt hopefully maximizing shareholder value in the process.

This is why institutions such as the MIND Foundation Berlin matter, because they hold the line: rigour, ethics, integration, alongside a deep understanding and commitment to what human beings need to heal. The challenge ahead is to preserve what makes these experiences transformative: relationship, reflection, and moral seriousness, before the sacred is flattened into just data and optimisation.

The Deeper Thread

The psychedelic renaissance does not necessarily announce a new Age of Depth replacing an Age of Comfort. We have yet to see where this psychedelic renaissance takes us, whether to something new and genuinely therapeutically useful for people, or towards more accumulation, individualism, consumerism, and narcissism in the culture.

In November I myself will begin a training in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, as I do believe this is an exciting frontier in the search for human wellness and health in these troubled times. My hope, however, is to acknowledge the tensions and contradictions present and to meet that tension with care: to bridge the scientific and the soulful with the chemical and the relational. If comfort and control have defined one side of our culture, what comes next may require both Apollonian discipline and Dionysian courage, and a renewed faith in the mind’s capacity for meaning.

Sophie Frost is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and coach. She works with teens, adults, and couples in Berlin and online through The Primrose Practice