Adolescent Psychedelic Medicine & Exploring PPE
Should You Give Your Children Psychedelic Medicine?
With kids going back to school this September, the psychedelic world is seasonably buzzing with the topic of adolescent care. From the freedom and ease of summer to a student’s more regimented and challenging days of a first quarter in Fall, this transition can aggravate our children’s stress and exacerbate the wounds or struggles they battle or endure. As a parent to six kids myself, ages seven to nineteen, I understand how challenging it can be to manage each child’s personality, their schedules, and their struggles. It can be challenging to figure out what to do and when not to do it, simultaneously nurturing their sense of competency, autonomy, and independence with the reassurance that they are constantly supported and held with love.
The state of adolescent mental health care is atrocious. The impact of mental health, especially post-pandemic, has taken a massive toll on our young people, and uncovered a sick society that has been struggling for decades. The National Alliance of mental health estimates (likely underestimates) that 1 in 5 youth ages 13-18 live with a mental health condition, over 37% of students with a mental health condition age 14+ drop out of school, and 70% of youth in juvenile detention facilities have a mental illness. A 2021 National Poll on Children’s Health on the pandemics impact on teen mental health showed an alarming rise in multiples categories:
Anxiety: 36% (teen girls) vs 19% (teen boys)
Depression: 31% (teen girls) vs 18% (teen boys)
Sleep issues: 24% (teen girls) vs 21% (teen boys)
Withdrawal from family: 14% (teen girls) vs 13% (teen boys)
Aggressive behavior: 9% (teen girls) vs 8% (teen boys)
The IFS, Institute for Family Studies reports that, “As of 2019, 10% of children, including 13% of 12- to 17-year-olds, had ever been diagnosed with ADHD… 62% of all children ages 2-17 with ADHD, e.g.—are taking stimulant medications like Adderall and Ritalin to treat their symptoms.” Alcohol and substance use disorder is estimated to be around 10-15% for adolescence ages 12-17, with many of the substances being medications prescribed routinely for pain (oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet), anxiety (Xanax, valium, Ativan), ADHD (Adderall, Ritalin), and even antidepressants. The statistics are staggering, but the impact is what is truly heart-wrenching.
If we’re discussing medication and treatment-what are we risking by not integrating psychedelic options into this conversation?
When people ask me if they should give their kids psychedelics, I often say, "it depends." I am sure that my answer is controversial and prone to judgment, but I am okay with the scrutiny. This is not a black and white answer, as most things are in life; it dances is the nuances of grey. For thousands of years, plant medicines have played a ritualistic, ceremonial role in small communities, tribes/villages, during Rites of Passage and when exploring conflicts or strife. There was no stigma attached to the medicines or the practices, as it was built into the culture and the community. It was a way of establishing right relationships with both the external environment and our internal worlds.
Before internet memes and sound bites, this is what a healthy, safe container felt like: intimacy within community, support, connection, reverence for awe and mysticism, the power of sacred ceremony, trust and inclusivity, and so much more. Now, we painstakingly espouse "set and setting" or write "how-to's..." on creating a container (I'm guilty of this), but the fact of the matter is, we are desperately trying to bring culture and connection into a society that hardly values this way of living.
The question of whether or not we should be giving kids psychedelics is limited in scope and capacity because what we really should be asking is -
“How do I change the culture in which my child is struggling?”
Gabor Mate, MD, rattled the word of mental wellness with his latest book, widely regarded as his Magnum Opus, The Myth of Normal. There he poses the question - how and where do we begin to address, “trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture?” Lisa Damour, PhD, has been a thought leader and pioneer in helping us – clinicians and parents - to better understand how society impacts our adolescent girls with her first two books, Untangled and Under Pressure, and tackles The Emotional Lives of Teenagers with her third compelling addition to her literary canon. It’s important to educate ourselves with the prevailing wisdom of our societies thought leaders and elders if we are going to tackle institutional and societal forces that are contaminating our lives.
I ask myself, “how can I, as a parent, hold space for my child's discomforts and pain, and teach them to trust themselves? How can I learn to trust myself enough to trust them to navigate their own challenges and difficulties? How can I show my kids what it means to embody both strength and struggle, to truly know and accept myself, and ask for help when I need it?"
As many of us within the modern psychedelic zeitgeist already know, we can begin this shift through our own healing. We can stop looking at our kids struggles as one-offs and start to claim responsibility for our parts. We can see that our children our part of a family system and start to do the work to repair our systems that are exacerbating those wounds or disempowering our young people’s capacity.
DoubleBlind, one of the space’s more respected and robust media hubs published an article about Medicine Woman and Healer, Mikaela de la Myco, and her work with a mother (author of the article, Holly Regan) and her 16-year-old daughter’s joint ceremony. Insightfully, de la Myco says, “The public wants to hear that we’re all dosing our kids…what’s really happening is that they’re getting the downriver benefits of having family members with a psychedelic life.”
It is not the psychedelic that brings the answers and shifts the system. Oftentimes, kids who take psychedelics or engage in a healing journey are sent right back into their broken systems, broken cultures, and families of conflict without touching or even acknowledging the systems impact on creating the dis-ease. We can't continually look at plants that fail to grow, fail to thrive, without looking at the soil, the bedrock, from which we are expecting them to take roots and ascend - so why do we expect it of our kids?
Psychedelic medicine for children is a loaded, nuanced and tender discussion. Before we consider medication or psychedelics - as parents, maybe we should ask ourselves first - have we done everything in our power for the betterment of their lives? This typically starts with a long, hard, and honest look in the mirror.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, famously says, "the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” As parents, it is our responsibility to unburden our children from our shit, our work, our healing. Society and toxic culture has enough it wants to burden our children with, they do not need any additional weight from us.
What are your thoughts? How can we start to create new conversations and treatment options around healing OUR kids?
Are you a parent who is seriously considering psychedelic adolescent care? If you have questions or concerns - please, please reach out. Consider this an invitation to discuss your options in a zero-judgement zone!
With love & light,
Soul Surgeon MD
What is PPE aka Post Psychedelic Embodiment?
PTSD stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Breaking the term down, it means that after a traumatic event, there is a perpetual, disordered state of stress and suffering that impacts humans. This includes symptoms such as emotional dysregulation, sleeplessness, agitation, re-experiencing of trauma, and a persistent state of hypervigilance around normally innocuous stimuli. The description of these words does not properly do justice to the impact and disability it creates in people’s live who are suffering from PTSD. For most, it can feel like a prison sentence, isolating people from the world around them.
In thinking about how traumatic events can have a profound and deeply felt negative experience on our lives, I started to wonder if there was a term that described the opposite effect; a state of profound positivity, clarity, and embodiment after a safe, transformative healing experience. I came up with the term, post-psychedelic embodiment, or PPE.
Psychedelics are known to have a noetic quality, meaning they offer a deeply felt experience within our minds. In a moment, you can experience expansive and overwhelming positive emotions, imagery, and have a truly felt experience (embodiment). These images and feelings can be impactful, real, and integrated into their lives, allowing individuals to reframe their autobiographical history. This idea and term, PPE, is meant to capture the re-experiencing of positive, nurturing symptoms after a psychedelic event. It’s time to usher in new terminology that builds on the hope and promise of these medicines and modalities.
