This is part of my Oxford Trauma Conference Reflections, a series on the ideas I’m bringing back into my psychotherapy work in Toronto and how they are shaping the way I think about trauma, relationships, the body and healing.

Professor David Nutt’s session on psychedelics and entactogens was one of the talks at Oxford that challenged me most.

Not because I left believing psychedelics are a magic answer to trauma.

Quite the opposite.

What struck me was just how much serious research now exists, how dramatically that research was interrupted for decades, and how important the therapy around the drug experience may be.

Psilocybin is the psychedelic compound found in certain mushrooms. Modern clinical trials have produced particularly interesting results in depression. A randomised JAMA trial found that a single 25 mg dose of psilocybin, delivered with psychological support, was associated with significant reductions in depressive symptoms compared with an active placebo.

There are also compelling findings in addiction. In a randomised trial of people with alcohol use disorder, psilocybin combined with psychotherapy produced significantly fewer heavy drinking days than psychotherapy combined with active placebo.

PTSD research is newer. A small 2026 pilot involving veterans with severe treatment-resistant PTSD reported large reductions in symptoms following psilocybin-assisted therapy, but it involved only 12 participants and was open-label. That makes it genuinely exciting, but not yet definitive.

MDMA-assisted psychotherapy has also produced substantial PTSD research, although MDMA is an entactogen rather than a classic psychedelic. Regulatory authorities have continued to ask difficult questions about trial methodology, blinding and safety, and it remains an investigational treatment in the United States.

For me, one of the most frustrating parts of this history is how long it took us to get here.

Research into psychedelics was active in the 1950s and 1960s. As these substances became politically and culturally controversial, restrictive drug policy, Schedule I classification, loss of federal funding and stigma made human research extraordinarily difficult. In the United States, modern federal funding for therapeutic psychedelic research did not meaningfully restart until 2021.

The story is therefore more complicated than “governments banned a proven treatment.” The early research itself often would not meet today’s methodological standards.

But political decisions and regulation unquestionably helped create a research drought lasting decades.

Now the science is finally moving again, although the regulatory and funding barriers remain substantial.

The other part of Nutt’s talk that matters enormously to me as a psychotherapist is that the drug cannot be the whole treatment.

Most of the compelling clinical studies do not simply give someone psilocybin and send them home.

They involve preparation, monitored dosing and some form of psychological support or psychotherapy. In the alcohol trial, for example, participants received 12 weeks of psychotherapy around the dosing sessions.

This is where my psychoanalytic and psychodynamic brain becomes particularly interested.

A psychedelic experience may loosen familiar ways of organising experience. Memories, emotions, images, relationships and meanings can emerge in unusual ways.

But an experience does not interpret itself.

What did it mean that this memory appeared?

Why this person?

Why this feeling?

What associations emerged?

What did the person discover about the way they relate to themselves or others?

What was frightening?

What felt relieving?

What needs to be understood, mourned or integrated afterwards?

That process of making meaning is psychotherapy.

I do not currently provide psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and these substances are not treatments somebody should simply experiment with independently because research sounds promising.

But I am fascinated by what this field is showing us about trauma, neuroplasticity and our capacity for psychological change.

Perhaps one of the biggest lessons is not that a drug can “cure” trauma.

It is that even deeply established patterns may be more changeable than we once believed.

And when a window for change opens, relationship, reflection and integration still matter enormously.