Spiritual crisis and psychedelics: 5 Questions for anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman

Seale-Feldman discusses her research and spiritual crisis in the U.S.

One day in 2019, Aidan Seale-Feldman went out for a walk. She’d recently moved to Charlottesville for a postdoctoral fellowship in anthropology at the University of Virginia. She’d spent years writing a dissertation on mental health in Nepal in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people, and with that project now complete, she was on the hunt for something new. As she strolled, she asked herself: If there were no constraints and I could study anything, what would it be? Psychedelics came to mind immediately. While people in Nepal had just begun to embrace traditional psychiatry, enthusiasm about psychedelics as potentially viable alternatives to existing psychiatric and pharmaceutical treatments was growing in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere — a contrast she describes as “two sides of the same coin.”

Seale-Feldman is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, and is a visiting scholar at the University of California - Berkeley working on a new project called Ethical Substance: Psychedelic Medicine in Times of Social and Spiritual Crisis. The Microdose spoke with Seale-Feldman about her work and spiritual crisis in the U.S.

Are we in crisis here in the U.S.?

There’s certainly a public discourse around crisis: for example, the American mental health crisis. Whether or not mental health is actually in crisis, where this discourse is coming from, who’s in crisis, and why this became an issue at this particular moment is a different conversation — but the fact is that there is a lot of discussion right now about a mental health crisis here. There haven’t been new psychiatric medications in a longtime, which has led to things like psilocybin being given breakthrough status by the FDA.

There’s a great article by the anthropologist Joseph Masco, called “The Crisis in Crisis.” In it, he writes about the sense of ongoing crisis in our society. There’s constantly a new crisis being reported on, and it’s a part of the contemporary moment we’re living in. There’s the decline of community in America, the crisis of loneliness — there’s the climate crisis. Could the popularization of psychedelics be, in some way, a response to this? Why is that happening now?

How are you doing your research for this new Ethical Substance project?

Our prized methodology is participant observation — spending time with people, which is sometimes called “deep hanging out.” It’s like getting to enter into a different world. I’m working with a psychedelic church, which includes attending their meetings and ceremonies, while also doing interviews with members. I’m also embedding in a clinical trial, which hasn’t quite started up yet, but I’ll be interviewing facilitators, participants, and their family members.

Initially, I was working with a psychedelic therapy training program, too. I attended a ketamine therapy training retreat and some of their online classes. But I ended up applying to the program and going through it myself; there’s a history of anthropologists doing things like this to get more in-depth perspective on what they’re studying. I actually just finished my program, so theoretically I could apply for a license if I wanted to, but I don’t currently have any plans to do that.

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The full title of your project also implies a spiritual crisis. How would you characterize Americans’ orientation towards spirituality, especially as it relates to psychedelics?

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a book called A Secular Age, and in it, he describes how once upon a time, people believed in a religion and there weren’t other options, but now we live in the secular age, which for Taylor is defined by this buffet of options of things to believe in or not believe in.

I see spirituality as playing into that; it’s a way people can have relation to the spiritual without subscribing to a particular dogma of religion. In the interviews I’ve been doing with people in psychedelic churches, that’s very much how they describe their orientation — they’ll say, ‘Yes, I’m very spiritual but I’m not religious.’

There are other types of psychedelic experiences where people report having deeply spiritual experiences, like retreats or even group sessions in studies. What are the differences between those experiences and a psychedelic church?

There are many different types of psychedelic churches - there are more established ones where there’s a clear lineage or tradition, like Santo Daime or União do Vegetal. And then there are these new post-modern churches that are popping up — mushroom churches and multi-sacrament churches — which some researchers are thinking of as a new emergent form of religion in the U.S. I’m particularly interested in them because the people I’ve talked to who belong to them bring a secular worldview but are choosing to get involved in a church. There’s more of an emphasis on having an experience with the divine, people wanting to find community, and people just not wanting to have these types of experiences in a clinical setting. But on the other hand, you still find elements of therapeutic language, so the boundaries can be blurry.

Researchers are currently deeply interested in the role of mystical experiences in people’s healing from mental health issues. What are you observing about the role of these spiritual or mystical experiences in the people you’re following?

I’ve met people who talk about having big experiences and spiritual awakenings. There’s one person I met in the church whose story I keep going back to. They talked about being raised in a “spiritual desert”: their family was atheist. They were struggling with mental health issues and found ketamine therapy as an option; they went to a ketamine clinic and had infusions, which didn’t include any aspect of therapy, like preparation of integration. But during one of these infusions they had a full blown mystical experience and it transformed their life. They said they were trying to live in a more ethical way; they got rid of their possessions. It was a drastic, big change in their life.

I presented this case to a research group I meet with, which includes theologians, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and religious studies scholars. And it was interesting to observe their reaction. People more oriented towards theology were like, ‘Well, this person met God — isn’t this an appropriate response?’ But the people who were more clinically oriented asked if this was something we should be worried about: ‘Are they okay? s this a manic response?’ I found that debate interesting, especially in the light of work on the idea of “spiritual emergencies”: what is the boundary between a spiritual experience or spiritual emergency, and madness or destabilization?

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