David Naylor guesses that he's facilitated over a thousand psychedelic therapy sessions in the last two and half years as the CEO of the Within Center. The Within Center in Austin uses ketamine to treat addiction, depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. Naylor's patients almost always confront loss in the sessions, he said, and this can include fears about dying. But psychedelic therapy changes the way they feel about death.
"People will say, 'A loved one visited me,'" Naylor said. "Or, 'I saw myself dying and I felt the oneness, the connection of everything, that nothing can die.' They understand that your consciousness doesn't just wipe out and go black."
Naylor has seen his share of death and, as a young man, contemplated ending his own life. He struggled with addiction, entering rehab for the first time at the age of 17. He got sober in his 20s and eventually became the owner of four rehabilitation clinics which treated addiction in the conventional fashion, using abstinence, antidepressants, and talk therapy. He remembers how clients, many of whom became friends, got treatment, relapsed, got treatment again, and then died of suicide or overdose.
"It was a revolving door," Naylor said. "I saw over 50 deaths of people I knew in seven or eight years, including my sponsor, who died on my birthday; he actually was the CEO of a treatment center. It just completely fried my soul. Nobody was getting better. And that's when I had my Jerry Maguire moment. I had a breakdown, an epiphany. I went out and tried ketamine therapy. And then I went to Peru as well, and sat with other medicines, with the shamans. And I came into this consciousness of oneness, of regulating my nervous system - healing that I never imagined possible."
In opening the Within Center, Naylor is part of the biggest change in psychiatry since the late 1980s, when antidepressants like Prozac became available. Research is beginning to show that psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, and other substances are, for some, much more effective than antidepressants in treating anxiety and depression. Since 2011, at least four studies have concluded that psychedelic therapy reduces end-of-life fears for people with terminal diagnoses. In the largest of these studies, conducted in 2016, researchers at Johns Hopkins found that 80% of cancer patients who took one strong dose of psilocybin showed significant reductions in anxiety and depression.
Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins professor at the forefront of psychedelic research in the United States, led the study. Five years later, he was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer. David Marchese of New York Times Magazine interviewed Griffiths in 2023, after doctors told him he had only months to live. Griffiths told Marchese his life had never been better, describing improved relationships with his partner, children, and grandchildren. Marchese asked if he had made use of psychedelics since his diagnosis. Griffiths, who practiced Vipassana meditation but rarely took drugs, said he had and that he'd asked for insight into his disease.
"First, I asked myself, 'Is there something I am not dealing with?'" Griffiths said. "The answer came back: 'No, the joy you're experiencing is great. This is how it should be.' Then I asked a question directly of the cancer ...: 'What are you doing here? What can you tell me about what's going on?' I got nothing back. Then I wanted to humanize it, and I said: 'I really respect you. I talk about you as a blessing. I have had this astonishing sense of well-being and gratitude, despite everything that's happening, and so I want to thank you. This process, is it going to kill me?' The answer was, 'Yes, you will die, but everything is absolutely perfect; there's meaning and purpose to this that goes beyond your understanding, but how you're managing that is exactly how you should manage it.'" Griffiths died six months later.
In addition to examining how psychedelic therapy eases end-of-life fears, researchers are looking into whether the psychedelic experience is similar to what people have reported after dying and being resuscitated. In a study published six weeks ago, researchers asked 31 people who have had both experiences to describe what they felt. Among other findings, 27 of the subjects reported a sense of peacefulness and well-being in both the near-death and psychedelic experiences.
This isn't surprising to Naylor, who explained that psychedelics transform, or obliterate, the way people experience time, the concept which defines death. "It can show you the eternal oneness, that we're all connected. Because there is no future. There is no past. Those are just stories."