Tehseen Noorani studies the co-evolving epistemics, therapeutics & economics of extreme experiences. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist based in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, where he co-leads the project, Community Strategising about Psychedelic Therapy in Aotearoa. Tehseen also convenes the Reimagining Psychedelic Trials working group.
Colloquium Presentation: 13 December 2024 (Mood Disorder centre G17, Sir Henry Wellcome building)
On Psychedelic Liberalism and Mad Trust: Towards Varieties of Willing in Extreme States
Abstract
The vexed ‘psychotomimetic model’ of psychedelics claims to offer insights into both psychedelic experiences and madness by placing these sets of experiences into conversation. A standard opposition to the model claims that psychedelic experiences are voluntary or ‘willed’, while madness is an affliction to be endured. This opposition is central to the project to sanitise and medicalize psychedelic therapy. I bring ethnographic data from a decade-long study of emerging psychedelic therapeutics into conversation with mad studies and phenomenological psychiatry to destabilize the opposition between willed psychedelic experiences and unwilled madness. I consider the central role accorded to trust and curiosity in modes of engaging with extreme experiences, whether pathologized or otherwise. We arrive at a paradoxical formulation of psychedelic therapy as willful surrender, which troubles assumptions of the autogenic, liberal subject, and brings psychedelic therapy into uncomfortable proximity with the very boundary violations it is seeking to legislate away.