Front Burner - Do drugs belong in therapy?

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

On Drugs looks through the lenses of history, pop culture and personal experience to understand how drugs have shaped our world. Because even if it’s just caffeine or ibuprofen, there’s a good chance you’re on drugs right now.More episodes of On Drugs are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/Q5X33U

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM. Tickets at rom.ca. This is a CBC Podcast.

Hey everyone, Jamie here. We have a special bonus episode for you today from the new season of the CBC Podcast on drugs. This season challenges the typical narratives about addiction, exploring what substances reveal not only about our bodies, but also our understanding of consciousness, our motivations, and our very sense of self. With the rise of psychedelic therapy, questions arise about the ethics, effectiveness, and experiences that it brings. In this episode you'll

take a visit to a psychedelic therapy clinic to explore how substances are reshaping mental health treatments. Now here's the episode of On Drugs. You've got this, we're right here. You see yes, yes. You see it all. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I see your legs. Yeah, I see your legs shaking. Yeah. Is that coming from your glute? What's happening now in your pelvis? Yeah. There it is.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, what's here now? That's gone. That's a scene from the upcoming season of the CBC podcast Other People's Problems. In that series, host Dr. Hilary McBride takes listeners into actual therapy sessions, where real people unpack their real-life issues. There are a couple of things that make the new season different.

For starters, all of the episodes this season involve psychedelic therapy. The clients have taken one of a number of psychoactive drugs that are meant to facilitate talk therapy. Another thing that sets this season apart is that Hillary is sharing her own psychedelic therapy sessions as a client. You heard a little bit of that off the top. In a few minutes, I'll be in conversation with Hilary about her experience with psychedelics

and why she's embraced them as part of her practice. And full disclosure, I'm also the senior producer of other people's problems. But to start, I want to take a quick walk through the recent history of psychedelics and mental wellness. The first thing you should know is that while psychedelics are only now reaching the mainstream of therapeutic practice, people have been using them this way for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples in every corner of the world incorporated mind-altering substances into their spiritual practices to promote emotional healing, to overcome trauma, and to gain reflective insight into mental health.

It's important to have that up front and to remember that science sometimes takes thousands of years to validate practices that people figured out a long time ago. But in the middle of the 20th century, Western scientists were starting to investigate the potential of some of those ancient treatments. A chemist named Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1938. Five years later, he discovered the hallucinogenic properties of the drug when he accidentally dosed himself and went for a really trippy bike ride. Of course, that led to an explosion of interest in psychedelic drugs for recreational use. LSD wound up being the chemical pulse of 1960s counterculture.

The people that I know that have taken acid, we can look out at the other people that haven't and they can tell us we're crazy and we can say, well you haven't seen anything yet. Because there are things that are more beautiful. But almost from the start there was serious consideration of the potential for LSD in psychiatry. In fact, the very word psychedelic was coined by a British psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond. He'd already been studying LSD and mescaline at Guy's Hospital in London, where he observed the striking effects of mescaline, the hallucinogen that's derived from the peyote cactus. Then he took a job at the Weyburn Psychiatric Hospital in Saskatchewan. That's

where he began collaborating on LSD experiments with a doctor named Albert Hoffer. He tried the stuff on himself as well as patients, most notably some who were struggling with severe alcoholism. They reported remarkable results among the study subjects, and word about their success spread fast and their approach was even endorsed by the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. The movie star Cary Grant reported success with LSD treatment. But they were going beyond just treating problem drinking. They theorized that the psychedelic experience allowed patients to observe their problems from a new perspective. They would give LSD as an adjunct to

psychotherapy. And through the late 50s and early 60s they attempted to treat schizophrenia, psychosis, and even autism with the drug. Now there's a lot of controversy about how those experiments were conducted. There are troubling questions about patient consent for starters, and to the extent that they tracked results the sample sizes were small and lacking control groups. But despite all that, there was a general belief that psychedelics had a lot of potential in conjunction with psychotherapy. But then all that experimentation came to a grinding halt. In 1965, LSD was banned in the US because of fears about how it was being used recreationally. And that was the beginning of a wider backlash against 60s drug culture.

This guy led the charge. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. President Richard Milhouse Nixon declared a war on drugs in 1971. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive. I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of supply as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad wherever they are in the world." The decision to mobilize the resources of the federal government against illicit drugs

had far-reaching consequences for criminal justice. But it also put a serious chill on research into clinical uses for psychedelics. But the idea never died out completely. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies was founded in 1986 to support academic research in the field. And in the last decade especially, research has exploded. A lot of that work has focused on therapy for trauma and for the use of MDMA in particular. But now the potential for psychedelics is being explored with depression and anxiety

as well, and it's reaching the mainstream. The medical insurance giant Blue Cross just announced that it will now cover psychedelic assisted therapy in Alberta. And maybe it's just because I have a show called On Drugs and my search history has made me a sitting duck for this kind of thing, but I really noticed when this stuff started to pop up on social media. Numinous is definitely a leader in the psychedelic industry. Not only are we building our expertise, but I believe that we're building the industry

as well. Based on my social media feeds, the algorithms are convinced that I either need some psychedelic therapy or I need to be trained to practice psychedelic therapy. Truthfully, I don't think I'm ready for either, but I've enlisted some help. So my name is Hilary McBride. I'm a registered psychologist and also host of other people's problems. So this season of other people's problems, we're introducing another therapeutic element into the mix, which is the use of psychedelic psychotherapy. And so we're including listeners in on these sessions that I'm doing with

patients of mine, including some of my own personal therapeutic work as well, where there's this added element of kind of a non-ordinary state of consciousness. And so the hope is that in letting people hear a little bit about what this sounds like, that we're not only creating some demystification around this process, kind of taking it out of the underground and from behind the scenes into a place where people can learn more and understand more, but as this is a kind of emerging field in Western psychotherapy and kind of more allopathic approaches to treatment, I think we need to have more conversations about the way we're involving psychedelics into therapy.

And I think for people who have listened to past seasons of other people's problems, they will have had the experience of you working through sessions in more probably familiar modes of talk therapy. Right, yeah. And to great success. What was it that made you decide that you wanted to go even further and explore psychedelics in that context? One of the things that I noticed as a trauma specialist and someone who's really interested

in cutting edge trauma treatments is that there was a whole body of literature emerging about how psychedelic therapy could be a really innovative approach to supporting people with their trauma treatment. The idea is that this is not necessarily a panacea, that you take this miracle magic bullet pill and then all of your symptoms disappear without you having to do any of the grueling work of facing the traumas associated with those symptoms. But what we're seeing is that this is actually moving treatment

forward. It's useful in certain contexts for a whole range of presenting concerns, but it was really paying attention to the research literature that made me think, wow, if this is useful for people and this could be legal and in certain situations could be safe for them when we do it carefully and we screen appropriately and there's medical support, why wouldn't I do something that could help people more? And then of course I had my own personal experience and that really changed everything for me.

Right, and we're gonna get to that, but I wonder, and I know you've already expressed that this is really an emerging field and I know there's a expressed that this is really an emerging field and I know there's a growing evidence base around it, but there still seems to be not necessarily conclusive evidence about what it is to the extent that it is effective, what it is that makes it effective. Are you starting to get a sense? Because a part of me wonder when I started to think about this, started to wonder, well,

what's going on? Is it the drugs chemical interaction with the brain? Is it the drugs chemical interaction with the brain in conjunction with talk therapy? What's your sense of what makes it work to the extent that it does? It's a pretty well accepted phenomena in the, again, in the theoretical world, in the clinical world, in the academic world to say that emotional processes, including emotional dysregulation or overregulation, predicts mental health concerns. So we know that emotion has a lot to do with how people receive a diagnosis, what creates their distress, and also what creates their wellbeing. And so it's not surprising that the research literature is saying that when people have a chance to actually

deeply feel their unfelt feelings, particularly about salient events in their life, like things that were really difficult to go through, that there is something about having a sense of completion around the event or the experience that allows the autonomic nervous system and then subsequently their narrative around the events to resolve. And it allows people to have a sense, particularly again about traumatic events or unprocessed emotion, have a sense of, oh wow, this is over now. This was living in me in an unfinished way. Here's all my unfinished business I haven't been able to look at. Through the use of the psychedelic, I can actually face those memories and those experiences. I can feel them all the way through and I can

then on the other side of it begin to envision a life without these things haunting me in the same way. So that might be one way of explaining what's going on, although I have some other theories as well. Pete That's fascinating. And I'm actually a senior producer on this season of Other People's Problems. And that's given me the privilege of listening to early versions of several of the episodes. And I have a bunch of takeaways from what I've heard there. First of all, that there is some really raw stuff in there. And I think I've, I feel like I've been privy to maybe some of those breakthroughs that you're talking about and some of that catharsis.

I wanted to also flag, like it sounds like you're going very deep. And the other thing I noticed is that your approach is not necessarily like any talk therapy that I was familiar with. Yeah, so there's a bunch of different ways of approaching psychedelic psychotherapy and some of them feel familiar to other kinds of talk therapy and others of them maybe not so much. Again, it's helpful for the average listener to learn, like, when we do talk therapy or when we do any kind of therapy, there is a whole spectrum of things that we employ, including

thinking-based strategies and emotion-based strategies and relationship-based strategies. And one of the things that I'm doing in this particular season is making use of a particular skill set that privileges attachment-oriented interventions and somatic-oriented interventions. So that's just a way, a fancy way of saying clinically that I am making good use of the relationship that I have with people in front of me and we're also paying really close attention to what the body is doing. And the reason that we do that is because when we get into the psychedelic space, what we see that psychedelics are really useful at doing

is disrupting something called the default mode network, which is this coordinated set of neural structures that when they're working together, create kind of a normal way of thinking about the world, our normal way of thinking about the world. And of course of a normal way of thinking about the world, our normal way of thinking about the world. And of course, our normal way of thinking about the world comes from early experiences that are shaped by connection and emotion and our experience of being in the world and facing life and what's happened to us.

So through the use of the psychedelics, we kind of disrupt the default mode network. We get into, it's almost like the relational and body-based memory bank of what it's been like to be us in the world. And my job is to bring to the surface all of those things that have been playing out in the background of people's conscious awareness, bringing them right to the foreground

so that we can work with them. Right here. Right here. Right here. Yeah, right here. I'm right with you. I'm with you. I'm right here. Here's my hand if you need it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, do you want to tell me what's happening for you? Oh.

I don't think I'm supposed to be here. Hmm. Just notice where you are. You have the sense you're not supposed to be here, notice. Go inside. The monkeys are rewiring the brain. In the psychedelic space, they're flexible enough that we can massage out some of the old stock kinks and we can work in some new ways of feeling about themselves and, you know, feeling about other people in connection. But often the way we do that is to be with the gnarliest,

most painful, most unconscious fears and memories and emotions that we've had that again, are kind of operating in the basement of our mind all the time that we just don't stop enough to, we're long enough to give time for, don't really know how to get access to. I think it's the somatic modality that I was hearing that was so striking to me, where I think from my own experience of therapy and the pop culture version of talk therapy

is typically entails the client unpacking a narrative and experiences. Whereas in these episodes what I'm hearing is sometimes it's almost, it feels as though there's something unnameable, that it's just visceral and it's coming through maybe in the sound of whimpers or a cry or something and that was quite striking to me. Yeah, it's quite arresting, isn't it, to hear people's raw emotion without this neatly tied bow of a narrative on top of it. And I think that the caricature of therapy as narrative based has been really useful as a trope in movies and media as a way of getting characters to disclose things about

themselves and kind of get new insights and move the plot along. But the reality is that a lot of therapy isn't thinking based. A lot of therapy isn't even about tying a perfect bow on top of something. It's about getting access to these places inside of us that live so alone with so much pain and don't really have words. Maybe because words are too, almost in a way sophisticated for the primal pain that we carry around in our bodies. All it takes is someone talking about their grief at a funeral for you to know

that they can't even say the speech anymore, that all they have in that moment is tears. Or for someone to talk about the most beautiful moment of their life, we can't even get the words out. We choke up, right? It's almost like words come after the feeling place inside of us. But that's not really how our society likes to operate, right? We like to have, again, an organized series of cognitions on top of things and give ourselves the illusion of control and make sense

of things as a way of trying to move through them. But all of us have places inside of ourselves that don't quite have words, but have a lot of feeling. And sometimes it's those places and the memories associated with them that drive a lot of our action, that drive a lot of the ways that we try to make sense of things. But we can't quite get to them when we use the sense making approaches of therapy. And so psychedelics are for this reason extremely useful at descending underneath our organized narratives into like what's what's really inside of me when I don't try to cover it up with like a nice interpretation. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies

that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM. Tickets at rom.ca. The Council for Interior Design qualification administers the NCIDQ exam. This rigorous examination assesses the competency of interior designers to practice in a manner that protects the health, safety, and welfare of a building's occupants. CIDQ's more than 17,000 active NCIDQ certified interior designers protect the public through the design of safe, code compliant, and accessible spaces. Learn more at cidq.org slash design. One of the really striking things that people are going to take away from this season is

the fact that listeners are going to hear you on the other side of a therapy session. Yes. Okay, send that energy from that hand inside right to the center of this. You get every drop. Feel us here with you. Feel us here with you. I love you. You don't want to go. From that hand inside right to the your body when you feel how much you don't want to go. I've heard some of those. There's a session where you're dealing with a pregnancy loss and it's very moving and incredibly intimate.

I wonder why did you decide that you needed to share that? Hmm. I think we have a construction, a social construction of the archetype of the therapist, which actually dehumanizes the therapist and makes us into like an object. And in doing so, we actually do ourselves a disservice socially because we don't see how we are all alike then. I think sometimes people come to therapy and they want their therapist to be a person who has all the answers, who doesn't struggle, who doesn't live a life with their own jealousy and anger and grief and longings and passion and confusion. And then in doing so, we can create this kind of expectation that if we just know enough that we arrive at healing and then we're good,

right? We don't struggle anymore. And so for me to invite people into my own processing, I think is a disruption around, again, this archetype, this socially constructed archetype of the therapist healer in which there's nothing happening in our lives that we struggle with. And what I'm wanting for people to know is that I am capable of holding space for people in their most difficult moments, not because everything in my life is resolved and I've never felt any pain and I've like ascended above all sorts of suffering, but rather that I am choosing to face my own. And in doing so, I want to disrupt this binary and really invite us into seeing how we can all be people who are both struggling and

helping others heal. Now, I don't want listeners to come away with the idea that anecdote is evidence, but you have had the experience of using psychedelics as a client and as a therapist. What difference do you think they made for you, if any, in this session? I think, and maybe I'll just kind of speak plainly as the patient for a moment, I think that some of the things that I faced in the pregnancy loss and then the resulting medical intervention that I received after that felt so scary to look at and feel that I kind of put them away. It's almost like I locked them in this box and put them on a shelf for a future time when I maybe would have to face them

or would feel brave enough to face them. And in doing so, what I realized is that it was keeping me from actually being in my life. It was like I was spending so much energy trying to keep these things in this box that I wasn't actually available for the experiences that were coming or were present or feeling even connected to my body. It was like I was pushing away some of my fear. And as a result, I kind of numb certain parts of myself out. And so in this session, I was able to find the courage

to face some of those things, right? It's almost like together the support of the people who were with me in the session therapeutically and the help of the psychedelics helped me pull that box off the shelf and actually open it up and not just open it up and look at it and put it back on the shelf but open it up and completely sort through everything that was in it. And what that's meant for me is that I don't

feel like I have to push these things to the side because they're so big and scary for me to not look at them anymore. I have actually looked at them and I can think about them and I don't feel any fear or dysregulation in my body. I have actually looked at them and I can think about them and I don't feel any fear or dysregulation in my body. I mean, that's one of the hallmarks of us completing trauma processing is that when we think about something, maybe we can feel sad about it or a little worried about it, but it doesn't hijack us in the same way. So for me, the kind of avoidance and the, you know, all of the trauma symptoms, really the avoidance, the fear, the intrusions, the nightmares, the flashbacks, like those things aren't existing around this topic anymore. And that's not to say that for people who do psychedelic

work, we know one session, right, all of your symptoms go away. But for me, the experience was in feeling like I could complete the processing of these events. And now, now I in a way have access to more of my life back. I had a chance to listen to the episode that features a client named Rachel, who's dealing with some really, really deep issues connected to a controlling religious community that she was raised in. And it's very striking again. I feel like I'm just like flayed open. Just like I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Yeah. Something about you saying you felt flayed,

like split open. I just felt so protective of you. I felt like this whole softening of my body and then I could feel this coarse sadness in my solar plexus. And then when you put your hand on me and then we're saying you felt protective of me being flayed,

it was just like all these tears just started to come. Good, okay, let's keep staying with this then. Can you tell me a little bit about that session and maybe how the drugs made a difference there? I believe it was ketamine. Yeah, yeah. So what's interesting about the work with Rachel

is that she's well-practiced in psychedelic medicine and her and I have done lots of clinical work together. And so you get to hear the benefit of, of lots and lots of work and lots and lots of trust and relationship built over time, which allows us to negotiate going to some new spaces. I've kind of set up so far in our conversation, Jeff, the idea that psychedelics help us go to the painful places and help us go back to things. But what's interesting about the episode or the session with Rachel is that you're getting to hear us go to a new place together. And the idea of the new place for Rachel is being able to work on receiving care, receiving nurturing, receiving love. I mean, I think of how many of us in our day-to-day lives

in our society don't know how to actually take in care, take in the love that we want. And that's because sometimes relationships have been places we've been wounded. And so we build up these barriers to not let in the good things that other people are offering us. So the session with Rachel is about us using the psychedelics as a way to soften some of her defensive structures

and to create an invitation for her to deeply embed new core memories about being able to receive love and receive care. And it's really, really special because unlike some of the other episodes where there's a lot of like grueling emotional intensities you acknowledged, this session has a kind of gentleness and sweetness and slowness to it, which I think actually might be quite disarming for some people to listen to. I'm absolutely certain of it, having listened to it myself. Now I need to put on my skeptical journalist hat as well, because there's a part of this where I listen to an episode and I think, well, if there's one thing that we know about

psychedelic drugs is that they can make you hear things and make you feel things and make you see things that aren't there. And I wonder how you navigate that truth when you're investigating personal histories that may or may not be true or maybe, I can imagine there being a risk that they're actually made foggier by the presence of a psychedelic or a hallucinogen. Okay, I love this question.

I think it's so important that we talk about upfront because I'm not sure that that's always been handled well in the psychedelic community. And I think we've actually done a disservice to people by not knowing how to negotiate the complexity of hallucination and memory and truth. And so I'm really glad that we're talking about it. I want to back up by talking about first, like the word psychedelic is a compound word. It means mind manifesting or soul revealing, psych, psyche, and delios. So when we think about psychedelics, the way that I

conceptualize them as informed by the neuroscientific literature is that psychedelics actually show us what's inside of ourselves. For anyone who's taken, you know, a psychedelic drug recreationally, and they've looked up at the trees and they've seen thousands of eyes looking back at them, what we know from the research is that human brains are primed to see certain patterns. Doesn't mean that the tree has eyes in it. It means that brains like to see eyes. So when we're thinking about what's happening

in terms of the hallucination, the way to conceptualize this is twofold. First, we can conceptualize the hallucination as something that is being shown about a person's inner world and mind. Right? So if they're hallucinating me to be a scary person, even though I'm sitting across from them and I'm lovingly gazing at them and holding the boundary that they've asked me to keep, which is to sit six feet away from them or something like that, what

that might be telling me is that there's some fear that lives in that person's system about people having been scary for them. So that's one way to look at it. The hallucination is informed by something in a person's unconscious. The second way to look at it, which I think allows for a little bit more flexibility is to say whether the hallucination is informed by memory or reality in the past or present, the experience of it is real. The fear inside of a person is real.

The joy, the aliveness, the awe, the wonder, that's really happening for them in their body in the present moment, no matter what the storyline or the imagery is. And what I know about human development is that when our experiences are accompanied, when they are felt, when somebody joins us in our emotional experience, not only does it feel more real, but it allows us to process it and integrate it and make sense of it. So if somebody's handing me a story and I'm not sure if it's a hallucination or if it's a memory or you know how it's connected to past or the real or the not real, what I know is that their emotional experience of it is real

and that each person deserves to be accompanied in their emotion. And it may be that without knowing it, the person's giving me a very sophisticated adult storyline, but who I'm meeting inside of them is a neural network, a cluster of neural activation that's connected to a childhood memory where they felt scared and alone. And I have a chance, because of the way that I interact with them, to embed in that neural network the presence of a loving, attuned, caring, and supportive, nurturing adult. So again, I'm not so concerned at times about if the, you know, the hallucination air quote is, you know, real or not real. What I know for sure is that a person's experience is real and deserves to be accompanied. And that can be the very thing that changes our mental health.

There's another dimension to this as well. And it's the root of another concern of mine is that some of these drugs, maybe most notably ketamine, can put a person in a very vulnerable position where depending on the dosage, and I know it's used differently in different modalities, but depending on the dosage can be at least temporarily really disabling and put someone in a vulnerable position. How much do you worry, especially with this field exploding the way it is now, about the

vulnerability that clients might be putting themselves in? I think I worry about it in a way that's relative to how little training we're doing for therapists to actually work skillfully with people. And perhaps I think I worry about it more because as a lot of above ground ketamine work can be inaccessible for people, like doing in the clinic that I'm a part of might be cost prohibitive to some, that people are doing underground work with people who aren't necessarily licensed, who don't know how to do clinical work, particularly with folks who have a history of abuse, don't know how to hold boundaries, haven't done

their own supervision around the work. And so I think I'm worried as I am excited about how this field is exploding because I think we just need to train therapists better. And I think we need to make the work more accessible. And what that's going to mean is that people have more access to quality care in settings where there is good supervision, really good support, and really good wraparound medical care. And until we can make this accessible, I think people are going to be driven to do more underground work, which doesn't necessarily allow them to work with clinicians who have,

who know how to support them, or maybe for people who have medical risks who are trying to do ketamine underground and don't know, yeah, don't know the risks to watch for. And therapists are not working with medical professionals to really do thorough medical assessments. I think I'm concerned about how the systemic factors drive people into precarious situations. I think I'm concerned about how the systemic factors drive people into precarious situations. But what I know is that when clinicians are trained and they're working in settings that are medically supported and when people have really good assessments

and are thoroughly, like there's been a thorough investigation into if this is appropriate for them or not, I think in all of those conditions, this can be one of the safest approaches to psychedelic works that we have. I guess my worry was partly rooted in the fact that when I started doing research for this season of On Drugs and was investigating, I had that experience that everybody has when they start to search things in Google and Google starts to push things to you. And the next thing you know, I'm getting ads for offering me training in psychedelic assisted

therapy and I got the sense that in just six weeks, I could be hanging up my shingle as a psychedelic therapist. And it feels as though there's a bit of a wild west aspect to it right now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's this interesting tension of people like wanting to get training so they know how to do this effectively. But then the hubris of assuming that in six weeks

we've investigated all of our counter-transferential projections onto clients or that we know how to work skillfully when there's complex PTSD in the room or personality disorders or health risks. And so I think I appreciate that there is this boom of trainings and definitely I've been a part of that. I train clinicians, but what I'm hoping that we can do as we're training clinicians is that we can also engender in them a sense of responsibility to slow down and to really be thoughtful about getting good supervision, working with partners, right? So that there's multiple people in the room, that we're taking lots of time to do our own work so that we're not asking people to go places that we haven't gone or that we're not equipped to go with them. And I think that that just means that in this way, there's this tension of like wanting

to speed up and needing to slow down. And it's, yeah, it's sometimes hard for us to slow down when it feels really exciting to be a lot of this. For someone out there who might be considering this type of therapy, what essential questions should they be asking themselves before they darken the door of a psychedelic therapist? Right. Yeah. Well, my suggestion would be make sure that there's no medical or psychological contraindications

and usually having medical providers or therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists who are skilled at assessment can help with that. And then making sure you have a really good relationship with somebody who's actually got a lot of skill and training and supervision in this area so that you're going into this with a relational container that helps you feel held no matter what you face. Well, this has been wonderful, Hilary. I'm so grateful that we got a chance to talk about this because I think it's going

to be really enlightening for our listeners. Mm, thank you so much for the invitation, Jess. I've loved being on the podcast with you today, and yeah, eager to share this season with the world. That's my conversation with Dr. Hilary McBride. The new season of her podcast, Other People's Problems, will be available in May. In the meantime, you should check out past seasons wherever you get your podcasts. And that's all for this season of On Drugs, but I hope you'll dive into the previous seasons of this show as well.

We've now got more than 30 episodes covering everything from opioids to ozempic. On Drugs is produced by Hadil Abdel Nabi and me. Sound design by Graham McDonald. Our coordinating producer is Roshni Nair. Our executive producers are Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez. Tanya Springer is senior manager of growth and Arif Narani is director of CBC Podcasts. Thanks for listening. That was an episode of On Drugs. All episodes from the brand new season are available now. Just search for On Drugs wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.