The case for interdisciplinarians: 5 Questions for psychologist Emily Bloesch

Bloesch discusses the value of interdisciplinary psychedelics research.

Emily Bloesch and Christopher Davoli met in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. The two students were both studying perception, but Davoli had a side interest in psychedelics and the psychological mysteries they posed. The substances alter our perception but we don’t know why — can we really understand the perceptual system without understanding psychedelics? Davoli’s enthusiasm was infectious. The two researchers married and now co-lead a psychology lab at Central Michigan University.

For the past two years, Bloesch has participated in an interdisciplinary psychedelics research group, along with Davoli, psychology researcher Gabrielle Harter, and University of North Carolina women and gender studies professor Sarah Bloesch. The workgroup holds weekly calls to discuss psychedelic questions combining spiritual and psychological perspectives. The Microdose spoke with Bloesch about the value of interdisciplinary work.

How did this group form?

At the start of the pandemic, in spring 2020, our university shut down. We went completely remote but we still had a really active lab. One of our students, Gabrielle Harter, reached out to us because she was interested in consciousness and psychedelics; she was concerned that with the shutdown, she didn't have anyone to discuss research with. We suggested that she find a piece of media related to psychedelics or consciousness, and that we could meet once a week to discuss it. 

Over time, Gabby became increasingly interested in how psychedelics and spirituality lined up. She found resources, we would read them, and then she would ask us questions. We're psychologists — we didn’t know the answers! We have no training in spirituality or religion. But it turns out that my sister has her Ph.D. in theology, and she teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So we invited my sister to come and join us for one or two meetings so she could answer some questions for us. She did — and then she just kept coming, because we had even more questions. And now it's been two years of research.

Has this cross-discipline collaboration changed your perspective on psychedelics?

As psychologists, we’re trained to understand the individual perspective and to understand things on an individual-oriented level. But that gives us such an incomplete picture, and Sarah has helped us to see that. When we ask questions like why is psychedelic therapy more helpful for some people than other people, we tend to think of that as an individual question. But Sarah has helped us to see that we might also need to factor in what systems that person lives in — do they have the support they need? 

Another concrete example is understanding mystical experiences. Our group was talking about some of Rick Strassman’s work and how he had been curious if DMT would occasion mystical experiences. The conclusion ultimately was no, not really, for very very few people – and Sarah asked, what kind of experiences do people have on DMT? When we started to tell her, her response was: whether that’s a mystical experience or not depends on the framework you’re using. There are people who would say those absolutely sound like mystical experiences! But if you’re coming from a strictly Christian framework, they’re not going to look particularly mystical. 

A modern Christian framework assumes that encounters with God or the divine are going to be positive and affirming but if you look at ancient mystics in around 1200 or 1300, some of the most prominent and enduring mystics had experiences with the divine that were straight up terrifying. But these days, if someone had a trip like that, you might not immediately think it was a mystical experience — you might just feel like you had a bad trip.

What are some challenges to doing interdisciplinary work?

It’s taken us a long time to get to the point where we can understand each other's academic language enough to talk without having to explain the jargon! But also, logistically, it’s a big commitment to ask people to regularly take time out of their schedules to read and discuss things that might have nothing to do with the type of work you typically do. This isn’t the type of work that gets you “credit” in your department or university. 

I’ve also learned that the structure for what gets recognized as scholarly work in humanities is very different from the types of work that are recognized in psychology. In psych, we have multi-author journal articles; we all get credit for that work. But in the humanities, academic publications are typically single-author, and often, it’s a book. When our group presented at the Psychedemia conference, Sarah said she did not know if she would get credit for that from her department because it was a presentation with three other people. Trying to figure out how to keep the collaboration going, and how we can do work that can be beneficial to all our careers, will be an interesting challenge moving forward. 

Is there something the group read or watched that you found particularly captivating?

The Midnight Gospel, which is a show on Netflix. It takes real podcast interviews that Duncan Trussell conducted with a variety of guests and sets them to animation. It was actually the first thing we did as a group, and then about a year later we reviewed them and got just as much out of them as we did the first time. The interviews are with a wide range of guests and cover diverse topics such as drug policy, death and death acceptance, social attachments, Buddhism and reincarnation, and meditation, to name a few.  

All the episodes feel inherently psychedelic, both visually and conceptually; one of the reasons psychedelics can be healing is because they allow people to view their questions and problems from a new perspective and to make connections that are otherwise elusive. The simultaneous stories in each episode, along with their content, certainly encourage that same process. In other words, this show found a way to allow all our fields to converge fairly seamlessly! 

What’s next for this group?

The goal for our working group is to shift from talking and learning from one another towards an outward focus. How can we combine all our areas of expertise in unique ways, and to write articles or look for grants that might support this so we can take our work to a larger audience? We can see how meaningful it has been for us and how it informs our scholarship and research within our own fields, so our hope is to convince people that regularly talking to scholars in domains vastly different from your own can be incredibly enriching and rewarding. 

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