Psychedelics, studied from 1943 to 1970 as potential treatments for mental health disorders including addiction, were halted in the early 1970s by the U.S. Controlled Substances Act. As psychedelic-assisted therapy develops, nurses can decide their role in clinical and scholarly research. The article proposes that nurses become familiar with the history, language, and scientific findings of psychedelic research, learn about existing therapy and research resources, examine their own thoughts and judgments about therapeutic psychedelic use, and consider nursing's potential role in these therapies going forward.
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.