When psychedelic frameworks collide: clinical trials, shamanic lineages, and the ethics of interpretation

Psychedelic research and practice increasingly unfold at the intersection of clinical trials, therapeutic settings, and long-standing spiritual and shamanic traditions. While this convergence has enabled important advances in safety, efficacy, and legitimacy, it has also generated tensions around how non-ordinary experiences are interpreted, managed, and integrated. This panel explores what happens when interpretive frameworks collide. Drawing on diverse expertise in clinical trials, harm-reduction research and practice, depth-oriented and shamanic therapeutic lineages, panelists will examine how experiences may be framed as therapeutic insight, spiritual emergence, adverse event, or psychotic-like reaction depending on context and ontology. Rather than adjudicating which framework is “correct,” the panel focuses on the ethical and clinical consequences of interpretative lenses. How do different lenses shape participant distress, care pathways, and long-term integration?  Through this discussion, the panel aims to foster dialogue on how the field may develop the capacity to hold multiple ontologies while maintaining safeguards, clarity, and participant wellbeing.