As touched upon in the intro, the primary driver behind integrating AI into psychedelic care is the issue of scale. Currently, our model of psychedelic-assisted therapy is not only in its infancy, but also requires a great deal of time with highly trained professionals, in highly specialised environments. This of course makes it extremely expensive and therefore inaccessible for the vast majority of people. As it often is, technology can be a societal leveller here, democratising psychedelic support for all. Supporters of this AI-driven solution could provide guided preparation content, therapeutic support throughout, and integration services following the experience – for anyone, at a fraction of the price. I’ll quickly state here that when I say a fraction of the price, I mean for an individual.
This article is not the place to dive into AI’s increasing impact on the planet as a whole, as a result of the massive computing power and, therefore, electricity it requires to function, but bear in mind it is real and comes with a cost, regardless of the perceived day-to-day benefits we perceive.
Beyond the simple fact of accessibility, we can look at how AI might, in fact, provide better support than an individual. In theory (disregarding the politics of the people producing the LLM itself), AI should be better placed to provide unbiased, data-driven support. It could even integrate with the user’s smart tech, biometric data from wearables, for example, real-time indicators of stress like heart rate, which would negate the need for external analysis of body language, an area which is ripe for misinterpretation. AI has internet access, and is itself a gigantic database, and therefore possesses pretty much the sum of all human knowledge. The potential benefits of this cannot be ignored. I think particularly powerful here will be the AI’s ability to skirt around the woo-woo and unsubstantiated claims of psychedelic therapy sought out in contexts other than the strictly clinical – ayahuasca retreats, for example, are rife with this.
Jerome Sarris, in a 2024 study published in The New York Academy of Sciences, states:
Artificial intelligence (AI) and psychedelic medicines are among the most high-profile evolving disruptive innovations within mental healthcare in recent years. Although AI and psychedelics may not have historically shared any common ground, there exists the potential for these subjects to combine in generating innovative mental health treatment approaches.
Not only can AI be used in the study of the psychedelic substances themselves, but it can also actively be involved in drug discovery, as with vaccine creation during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the future, it could vet potential patients and eventually even be involved in administering uniquely targeted psychedelics for individuals themselves. The most immediately tangible application of the technology is in post-session integration.
Companies as well known as Headspace have already released an AI support/journaling platform called Ebb. It is described as your “compassionate AI companion”. You could quite simply modify platforms such as this to be solely trained on and hyper-focused on the trip sitter role, which is, in a lot of ways, pretty analogous to more generic support bots. This increased ability for users who wouldn’t otherwise easily have access to the means to analyse, explain, and integrate their experiences coherently is, if correctly managed, potentially invaluable.
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