What is psychedelic therapy really like? 5 Questions with the director of Psychedelic Lived Experiences Pedram Dara
Dara discusses why researchers need to listen more to the stories of clinical trial participants.
At the end of 2018, Pedram Dara participated in a clinical trial for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD in Canada. The treatment had a profound impact on him, yet once the trial was over, there wasn’t a way for him to share how he was continuing to process. He had no one to talk about the aspects of his experience that were specific to him that he felt researchers might learn from. For example, clinicians often play music during psychedelic dosing sessions, and they often pick songs without lyrics so that people won’t get distracted by the words. But Dara’s playlist included a song in Farsi—which he understands. Rather than being a hindrance, the song was a pivotal moment in his session, and a moment he credits with being the catalyst to positive effects.
Since then, Dara has wanted people’s lived experiences to be more central in psychedelic conferences, research, and discussions. Some may have messier experiences not easily classified as good or bad. People can have psychedelic trips that are disappointing yet neutral, scary yet beneficial, or positive yet short-lasting, as Dara found while interviewing past clinical trial participants for an upcoming event he is organizing: The Psychedelic Lived Experiences Summit. The Microdose asked Dara about the summit, and what’s missed when lived experiences are ignored.
How did your focus on individuals’ lived experiences with psychedelics begin?
I was a participant, a research subject. After attending a few conferences, I quickly realized how invisible voices like mine were when it came to how the experts were designing and delivering these treatments. I participated in an MDMA-assisted therapy trial in late 2018 and I finished that by mid 2019. The experience was profound, but when it ended, there was no aftercare, and I was left on my own. There was no infrastructure for me to provide feedback in any way, and I couldn’t make a difference in broader scientific or policy narratives.
When I started speaking more publicly about my own experiences with other patients, caregivers, practitioners, I saw that there were clearly frustrations from others who also felt like their voices were not being treated properly. They were treated like anecdotes or testimonials, but not like evidence. If this lived experience input is not built into the feedback, the system stays blind to what helps or harms.
When you went to conferences, you most likely saw researchers presenting trial findings using various depression or trauma measurements. Why didn’t you feel like those results reflected lived experience?
It’s not the full experience if you’re only looking at the clinical scales. Let’s say somebody’s life is like an onion—it’s just one layer. You’re looking at that one layer, which makes sense to experts, but not to the individual. Nobody tracks their depression based on a clinical score. Nobody wakes up and says, “Today I’m five points better on my BECK depression score.”
I have recordings of all my sessions. But then, I also recorded videos every day after my dosing session for 45 minutes for how I was making sense of all of it. Nobody watched them. They only saw what happened in the dosing, not how I personally reflected on it to my wife, my kids, to people around me. I watch those myself, and I’m like, “Wow there’s so much more here.” It’s essentially uncaptured and unmeasured data, and we’re just missing out on it.
There are a lot of psychedelic experiences portrayed in the media, and they can tend to be very good or very bad. How are lived experiences that you’ve encountered different from that?
My story doesn’t fit those extremes. There’s a group called the middle majority, and the extremes are in the minority. It’s rare that someone has just one MDMA session and is cured of their PTSD. There are people who describe their experiences as, “This saved my life, but it nearly killed me.” Nuanced, right? I’ve been doing interviews with people where within one minute what they say is contradictory.
People have contradictions within their own experience, but also with others. What do you make of lived experiences that directly contradict each other?
I think we need to treat contradictions as data. It’s still data, it’s not a threat to legitimacy. Let’s not skip the data that doesn’t make sense. Psychedelics are not like regular medicine, they amplify subjective experiences, so even more divergent experiences aren’t really noise, they are signals. Some people call the experiences healing, others may say harm or confusion, but all of these realities must still inform practice. In quality research, the way they look for truth is that it emerges from patterns across differences. We have to respect the contradictions.
It’s human transformation, for better or worse. Someone I’m interviewing who described their psilocybin experience within a clinical trial in Canada has been in hell for the last three years. That’s transformation, right? In a very negative way. This person no longer feels their old self. They’re fully transformed, but for worse, not for better. What happens to that data?
What prompted you to create the Lived Experiences Summit?
I’ve been in this field six years, and I organized the very first panel at ICPR (Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research) with trial participants in 2022. I organized the first panel with MDMA therapy trial participants at the past Psychedelic Science conference. Then, I thought it was finally time to have a dedicated event. I wanted to make it global. I wanted to keep it grassroots, patient-led. I wanted to bridge clinical science with lived experience, nuance, and wisdom. Clinicians are doing their own thing, researchers doing their own thing. We need bridges.
I invited 27 people with lived experience, on top of 27 professional researchers and therapists together to really share these raw stories and expert insights with treatments—all legal treatments above ground, across the world, with MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, DMT, and Ibogaine for various health indicators. We have no funding. It’s 100% independent.
I decided to do [the summit] back on the day of the MDMA FDA advisory meeting. I spoke, and when I walked out I realized how much these voices were missing and how much we were stuck between a hype and fear narrative. It wasn’t representing the real world complexity of healing. I wanted to replace the feeling of expert versus subject. I wanted the insights to feel mutual, and to treat these experiences as evidence that needs to be captured, measured, and understood properly.
It’s not about worshipping psychedelics or being against it, it’s about listening to the people who risked the most to bring the field forward to where we are now.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
