5 Questions for psychedelic professor Christine Ziemer

Ziemer discusseswhy she chose to offer a psychedelics course and what she hopes her undergraduate students learn from it.

Colleges all across the country and the world are beginning to offer classes on psychedelics designed for undergraduates. Universities like Stanford, The Ohio State University, UC Berkeley, Northern Illinois, and Maastricht University in the Netherlands already teach psychedelics courses, some since well before psychedelic research re-entered the zeitgeist. 

Such course offerings are popping up in unexpected places and not just in liberal coastal cities like Berkeley.  Christine Ziemer is an associate professor of psychology at Missouri Western University in St. Joseph, a small city along the Missouri River. Last spring, for the first time, Ziemer taught an undergraduate honors seminar called “Psychedelic Science: Exploring the New Frontier of Psychedelics as Medicine for the Mind.”

Ziemer is not a psychedelics researcher. In fact, she mostly focuses on the psychology of children. But like many psychologists, she’s interested in psychedelic science and what it might tell us more generally about the human mind. The Microdose spoke with Ziemer about why she chose to offer this course and what she hopes her undergraduate students learn from it.

Can you tell us a bit about Missouri Western University, and how your course has been received by the university community?

Missouri Western is a pretty small university — it’s around 4,000 students. We’re located in northwest Missouri in a city of about 80,000. The closest big city is Kansas City, which is an hour away. We’re right in the middle of the country. It’s a pretty affordable place to live, and it’s a very red state. It was interesting proposing this class because I wasn’t sure how it would go, but everyone I talked to as I was putting out feelers in 2019 seemed excited and supportive. I think that was the right time; there were big news sources covering psychedelic research then, and most faculty had heard of psychedelic research. 

When I first taught the course, it was an honors colloquium. Usually, those are capped at 15 students, but we kept having students wanting to get into the course and we didn't want to turn anyone away. There ended up being 23 students in the class; it was the largest honors colloquium we’ve had. Only two or three were psychology majors; we had business majors, criminal justice majors, students in pre-med or nursing tracks. 

Why did you want to teach undergraduates about psychedelics?

Psychedelics are becoming a movement. But there's very little about it being taught; every time I get a new psychology textbook from a publishing representative, I look to see if there's anything about psychedelics. I’ve found a few that have just a little blurb, but I just felt like they were really missing the boat. And as psychedelics move into the mainstream, there's going to be more need for this type of education at the college level, or even at the high school level, and the community level. One thing I’m really passionate about is harm reduction, and I think education is harm reduction. What age are kids starting to encounter drugs? That's when they should know about them. If we're teaching an abstinence-only curriculum for drugs, that puts people at higher risk. It's going to be a hard sell right now, especially in Missouri, to go into the high schools and start teaching real drug education — my children still come home from school with “drugs are bad” stickers — but I think the tides are changing.

It will be important for students to understand these drugs, and how to use them safely. How do you support somebody who wants to try them, recognizing that they are still illegal? As we're moving towards a path of medicalization or legalization, there needs to be education about how to use these really powerful substances safely. At first I had imposter syndrome about teaching the course, but I shifted my mindset to the idea that I was just facilitating space for conversation. My role is to bring in reading materials and people who could talk about these topics, and to expose students to new and different ideas. I aim to give a basic overview of psychedelics so students understand the roles of set, setting, preparation, integration — all the beneficial parts of the experience but also talking about the real risks involved and what kind of precautions people can take and contraindications for substances.

There has never been a more exciting – or bewildering – time in the world of psychedelics. Don’t miss a beat.

What did you observe about students’ reactions to the course during the semester?

I assumed that my students would come in knowing that psychedelics were being used in research. But on the first day of class, as I was trying to gauge what students knew about psychedelics, I was surprised by how much of their knowledge was still based around a culture of fear and abstinence-only approaches. What they’d heard about psychedelic drugs was that they’re dangerous, they’re addictive, they’ll cause long-term harm — psychedelics were just grouped in with all other illegal drugs. Very few had even heard about the possibility of using them for mental health. That was different from what I was expecting going into the class.

I really had to start at square one, like which drugs even qualify as psychedelics.

One of the things that I try to do with the class is to help students be more comfortable talking about psychedelics. One of their assignments is to have a conversation about psychedelics with somebody; they ask their conversation partner what they know about psychedelics, what they've heard, what they've experienced. Students talked to their grandparents, their parents, their siblings, their high school friends. Sometimes the person they talked to was really against psychedelics, but became more open to the possibility of research after their conversation. Or sometimes they went into the conversation thinking that the person they were interviewing knew nothing about psychedelics but found out they actually knew quite a bit about it. Giving students an opportunity to practice talking about something that's still considered taboo in a lot of places is a form of education and harm reduction.

It was also a lot of fun seeing the change in people's perspective over the course of the semester. As they read the assigned articles and hear from experts, most people in the class came away with a really different view on psychedelics compared with when they started. Many became more open to the idea of research, using psychedelics for medical purposes, or even legalizing them for recreational use. The conversations that we had became more in-depth as we got further along and they started to understand how these substances work and the potential that they had. It was a really rewarding experience.

You clearly have an interest in teaching psychedelics — are you also interested in studying it?

It's hard in a small university to pivot to psychedelics work. There's still a lot of red tape. Child development has been my main research focus; my previous work has been about how infants integrate perception and action. I never would’ve dreamed that I would teach a class on psychedelics. But there are parallels between psychedelics and the way that babies’ minds work; children's minds are really open, and they make really chaotic connections, so they can find creative solutions. Just spending time with young children, you can see how the ways they think and act are different from the ways adults do, so having a background in child development can help give a deeper understanding of what the psychedelic mind state is like. 

I haven’t published anything yet, but I have been shifting my research more towards meditation. My students and I have implemented a pilot study, with kids at a foster home. These are kids who have trauma and some rough history, and they go through a six week meditation training to see how it affects anxiety and depression. We're trying different lengths and styles of meditation.

Several universities have psychedelics courses now, and more may join as psychedelics become more popular. Have you been in touch with other instructors who have taught or want to teach a psychedelics course?

I’m trying to form connections with other people teaching psychedelics. I might be wrong, because there isn’t a strong network yet, but there aren’t many of us right now. Right now we're all in our individual places, doing it mostly on our own. 

I was connected with Dr. Thomas Roberts at Northern Illinois; he's taught a psychedelics course for decades. He's retired now, but he was a great mentor when I started doing this. He gave me ideas for discussion questions and topics, and sent me some of his syllabi and references. He even came and talked to the class. It was so great to have somebody established in the field supporting and guiding me. I'd love to build on that and connect with more people who are teaching or wanting to start teaching these types of courses, so what I'd like to manifest is by the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, we have a group of twenty or so people who are teaching or interested in teaching undergraduate psychedelics courses. Maybe we could get together for a luncheon or a panel and compare syllabi and notes. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.