Suffering is not a commodity

Investors in psychedelic-assisted therapy want a return

When psychedelics as a mental health therapeutic started capturing headlines shortly after Michael Pollan’s breakthrough 2015 article, the first question that came to mind: how are companies going to monetize it? 

Pollan didn’t start the psychedelics-as-therapy wave, though his New Yorker piece on psilocybin-assisted therapy for hospice care certainly helped it swell. Millions were already being invested in potential therapeutic interventions. That sum has swelled to billions. 

And investors are going to want a return.

This has always been obvious. The well-funded Compass Pathways immediately went on a patenting spree, trying to muscle its way into a psilocybin monopoly. Simmering below the “mental health moonshot” hyperbole is an expectable capitalist crusade: corner new territory and capture its value.

Last Friday, I published an article looking at a 2021 paper exploring right-wing psychedelia. Turns out the authors just published a new paper on psychedelics in a neoliberal paradigm.

I read it right away.

The dangerous monomyth

Neoliberalism represents the reemergence of privatized and deregulated free market capitalism in 20th-century economics. While the economic theory is mostly tethered to the right, the left has embraced many of its principles. (As their previous paper posits, American Democrats are closer to center-right than left, in large part due to economic principles.) 

In their paper, James Davies, Brian Pace, and Nese Devenot caution that the current psychedelics-as-therapy wave is taking on the same dimensions as previous mental health models—along with all the for-profit and exclusionary trappings.

Despite claims for novelty, the psychedelics industry is engaging in the same profit-oriented approach that contributed to poor clinical outcomes with SSRIs and other earlier pharmaceuticals, which threatens to undermine their purported clinical benefits.

This “neoliberal mental health paradigm” puts the onus on the individual rather than societal circumstances, which in large part represents the basic divide between left-right thought. On the right, as represented by faux iconoclasts like Jordan Peterson, the individual is held to be solely responsible for their own success or failings—an extreme reading of the Campbellian monomyth, which positions the “hero” at the center of the story.

The left has pushed back on this individualistic monomyth for generations. To take but one example: critical race theory was developed in the nineteen-seventies as a way to explore systemic injustices that favor persons from one racial group over another. Chronic bias in institutions unfairly tilts the socioeconomic playing field, and leads, in part, to mental distress in underrepresented groups.

Honestly, pretty basic stuff given America’s racist history, but the individualist right has pushed back against anything even hinting that their hero paradigm, and the false notion that “everyone has an equal chance,” might be flawed.

This is the environment psychedelics-as-medicine enters. No wonder, then, that it would immediately be governed by the exploitative not-so-invisible hand of venture capitalists despite it being marketed as a wondrous curative of all society’s ills.