Neşe Devenot, PhD

@neselsd.bsky.social

1551 Followers 521 Following

Rhymes w/ paper mâché 🍉 Psychedelic humanities: literature, ethics, harm reduction 🍄 Senior Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University 🌐 University Writing Program 📝 Indigenous/Kurdish 🟥☀🟩 ND (they/them) chemicalpoetics.substack.com

A YouTube thumbnail includes a photo of Hamilton Morris in the foreground with FDA & DEA in the background.

PT interview with two Phase 3 therapists:

“I’ve seen this happen on retreats, where [psychedelic] therapists who had previously been more non-transpersonal actually open up to this more intuitive gift, or intuitive ability they have.

“And then they start going through a big identity crisis around like, ‘Well, what if I go back and tell my [therapist] colleagues back home that I’m, you know...hearing ancestral voices, or, you know, picking up things [telepathically].

”And so, I think there's a lot of support needed for therapists who are going through the, the transformation to become psychedelic therapists.”

Psychedelics Today host, discussing "bodywork":

, how do you pass that on? I feel like it, it is really tricky, and this is something that we've actually run into a little bit in, in our breathwork training.... We've been trying to figure out, like, some of the bodywork — how do you teach that?

“Our teacher Lenny's always like, you know, there's certain techniques [...]

A cover of the recent book by Wade Richardson, titled "The Psychedelic Mindmeld: Telepathically Exploring Shared Consciousness," which includes a foreword by Martin Ball.

It's disappointing — but not surprising — that journalists with close ties to MAPS have resorted to such a transparently partisan political attack. This piece is an opportunistic attempt to politicize whistleblowers with a narrative that appeals to the Trump administration. While Jacobs and Nuwer attack Psymposia and me personally, they have failed to refute our core claims, which remain important and unrebutted. To be clear, their attacks are flatly incorrect and underscore their desperation to distract from the real story: that MAPS’s handling of its clinical trials was a disaster, and that Lykos is in financial disarray.

To obscure this fact, the article offered a caricature of my research and of Psymposia's broader work in the field. I describe my actual motivations in a recent AJOB commentary: Lykos has never acknowledged how the on-camera physical and sexual abuse from its Phase 2 clinical trial was enabled by the therapy's reliance on Grofian “focused bodywork.” The Phase 2 participant had tried to alert the FDA to this connection for years, and it was only after those initial attempts were unsuccessful that we felt obligated to communicate this to the advisory committee, before this dangerous practice could be scaled.

If MAPS had listened to this participant’s concerns when the abuse took place, they could have made their therapy safer years ago. I am not opposed to the psychedelic industry, but to the normalization of pseudoscientific practices when vulnerable groups are at stake.

Quote from The Guardian reads:

"Neşe Devenot, a bioethics researcher affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and the psychedelic harm reduction non-profit Psymposia, organized opposition to Lykos’s treatment. Their research, which has not yet been published, found “the therapy component was based on pseudoscience very similar to Facilitated Communication,” a discredited technique ostensibly intended to help disabled people communicate, that actually gives their “facilitator” power to speak for them.

"Kennedy boosted claims that Devenot’s opposition stemmed from hatred toward veterans, and blasted the FDA’s decision, suggesting it illustrated collusion with the pharmaceutical industry."

A cover image of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies with a rainbow-colored, swirling graphic in the background.