Event Details
When: 6 - 8 June, 2024
Where: PHIL, Haarlem, The Netherlands
Speaker Spotlight
Dimitris Repantis, MD is a consultant psychiatrist and co-lead of the Psychedelic Substances Research Group at the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany. He has been actively involved as principal investigator and therapist in trials with psychedelic substances such as psilocybin, MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT. He has worked on cognitive enhancement and the ethics of traumatherapy in previous projects and is working now on the ethical, legal and social aspects of psychedelic therapy. He is coordinating a group of researchers with expertise in psychiatry, philosophy, law, ethics, anthropology, and the social sciences that explores the implications of the return of psychedelics into medicine (http://psychedelsi.org/en/) and is a principal investigator in a project assessing transformative changes caused by psychedelics (https://www.psytrans.com/ ).
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Ethical issues with psychedelic-assisted treatments in psychiatry: a systematic scoping review
The resurge of psychedelic therapies raises a range of ethical questions that urgently need to be addressed before widespread roll-out in society. Bioethics research so far has focused on particular ethical issues, however, a cohesive overview on the ethical challenges of using psychedelics in the context of psychotherapeutic and psychiatric practice is still missing. In this talk I will be presenting preliminary results from a systematic scoping review that aims to fill this gap by examining the research that has emerged on the ethics of psychedelic use in treating mental illness. The objective of this study is to conduct a systematic search, presentation, and descriptive analysis of ethical issues in psychedelic-assisted therapy. We include in our review studies pertaining to human study participants and psychiatric patients (population), which discuss ethical issues (concept) of psychedelic treatments (context) in clinical trials and other clinical applications. Specifically, this study focuses on legal contexts, namely clinical trials and regulated psychotherapeutic or psychiatric practice. The exclusion of unregulated use is intended to increase the focus on the academic groundwork that is directly relevant for informed decisions about the reclassification of these drugs. By focusing on regulated use, this scoping review aims to clarify and assess the ethical implications of psychedelic use for patients, therapists and healthcare providers, policymakers, and society at large. The presentation of the preliminary results for an interdisciplinary audience of experts in psychedelic science will provide initial validation of the results and also a valuable feedback-loop, sparkling further discussion on the topic.