Murray Hill Center Wants To Help You Process Your Psychedelic Trip

MURRAY HILL, NY — A therapy center for helping people process their experimentations with psychedelic drugs just opened up in Murray Hill.

The Center for Optimal Living — the group behind the project — actually started its program back in September 2015, running "psychedelic integration groups" at the New School. But now the center has moved into a new set of offices at 41st Street and Lexington Avenue, where it hopes to create a kind of "community center" for people who have used psychedelics.

"We have a beautiful large room that we can bring all the psychedelic activities into," Andrew Tatarsky, founder and director of the Center for Optimal Living, tells Patch. With the new home, Tatarsky hopes, "we can develop a sense of community."

To clarify: The program does not offer "psychedelic-assisted therapy"— the administration by a health-care professional of psychedelic drugs for the purpose of treatment.

"We do not recommend it, and we do not condone it," Tatarsky says, "because it is not currently legal, and it is not FDA-approved as a treatment. We really believe that although the research and the traditional wisdom is strongly suggestive, without [the drugs] being improved and regulated, and given in a safe and secure way," there is no guarantee that people won't have a harmful experience.

Rather than a place for people to take drugs, the Center is for people who have had an experience with psychedelics on their own, or are thinking about using them.

"Part of our mission — the reason we decided to start this program — is because of the growing body of research data and press coverage that is suggestive of a growing rise in experimentation. And that growing interest and experimentation cries out for a program where people can come to get honest, research-based education and information about the potential risks."

A data analysis based on the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated 17 percent of Americans ages 21 to 64 have used a psychedelic at some point in their lives.

As the website for the Center's Psychedelic Program states: "While the use of psychedelic substances remains tightly controlled in the United States, the reality is that many individuals continue to make use of these substances in a variety of settings and contexts; many of them less than optimal. Despite the potential benefits psychedelics have to offer, there are real risks associated with their unsupervised use."

The integration groups are run by the director of the Center's Psychedelic Program, Katherine MacLean, who, as a part of a research team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine studied the uses of psilocybin (the mind-altering chemical in "magic mushrooms") in improving quality of life. Participants can pay $30 to secure a spot in a the group, or $15 if they're students.

In addition to psychedelic integration groups, which help people process their past experiences with psychedelic drugs in a safe, supportive environment, the Center will also host a monthly series of experiential workshops on different practices that both support the integration work and are alternative forms of psychotherapy.

The next workshop — on psychotropic breath work — will take place on Feb. 1. Following that, there will be sessions on "sound meditation," yoga and mindfulness meditation, and shamanic training from a number of different traditions. The center in intentional about recognizing that psychedelics have been used ritually and as treatment for thousands of years by Mayan healers in Central America and Mexico, among other groups.

At some point in the near future the center also plans to offer a psychedelic integration certificate program for therapists who want to become trained in leading groups of their own. The center is in the planning stages, as well, for a training for all medical and mental health professionals — a sort of Psychedelics 101.

The monthly groups are open to drop-ins, but so far, Tatarsky says, they've been sold out nearly every time.

"It's really been striking how strong the interest and the need is in the community," he says.

Why such a need?

"Psychedelics can facilitate a deep openness to exploration that can[...]lead to spiritual or transcendent experiences which really can give rise to a very different sense of relationship to life, to the planet and to spirituality," Tatarsky says. "In some cases this can be very positive, but in some cases it can be extremely difficult, particularly if people kind of open up and make contact with repressed conflicts or dissociated trauma."

Tatarsky says that they've had a number of people attend groups after discovering traumatic experiences — such as early sexual abuse, early experiences of neglect and abandonment or physical violence — that "had been completely dissociated" before a psychedelic experience brought them to the surface.

The groups aim to help integrate the insights or discoveries made while on psychedelics into one's life.

Taking psychedelics can sometimes, Tatarsky says, "be the beginning of a very important journey of resolving the trauma." But other times, it is not recommended.

"Part of our work," Tatarsky says, "is that when people come to us with an interest in psychedelics, we help them think through whether that is the right choice for them. In some cases it becomes clear that another form of therapy would be more beneficial. But in harm-reduction fashion, while we may not condone substance use, we need to really meet it with acceptance, compassion and support.

"We recognize that people are engaging in these substances, and therefore we feel that it is ethical to provide support around their use."

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