Combining Psychedelic and Mindfulness Interventions: Synergies to Inform Clinical Practice

This 'Perspective' explores the rationale for combining psychedelic and mindfulness interventions; both show to improvements in mental ill-health and wellbeing.

However, each have specific challenges in the context of mental health treatment. This paper focuses on a set of “useful differences”, within the interventions that might address challenges within the other intervention.

Accordingly, the authors propose a set of applied synergies. These indicate specific ways in which these two promising interventions might be combined for greater benefit. Metaphorically, on the journey toward mental health and wellbeing, they propose that psychedelic treatments may serve the role of Compass (initiating, motivating, and steering the course of mindfulness practice), with mindfulness interventions serving the role of Vehicle (integrating, deepening, generalizing, and maintaining the novel perspectives and motivation instigated by psychedelic experience).

The Perspective concludes that psychedelics and mindfulness are clearly aligned in terms of the contextual, methodological, experiential, neurobiological, and clinical outcomes. This allows for a range of combinations between them. Crucially, the key limitations within each intervention appear diametrically opposed. Psychedelics represent an intervention that can reliably instigate substantial therapeutic change but is limited in terms of sustaining that change; mindfulness represents an intervention that presents a range of initial hurdles to engagement but increasing benefits over time.

Further research into the potential of combining psychedelics and mindfulness to enhance important elements of each other is warranted, with implications for clinical practice. For this, they provide outlines for a set of testable hypotheses and future research associated with the synergistic action of psychedelic and mindfulness interventions toward improved clinical outcomes.

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