Measuring Psychedelic Integration

Integration is a fundamental part of psychedelic therapy, and new scientific research has found a way to measure this process.

Evan Lewis-Healey
5 min readJul 4, 2022
“Fractal Cosmos”, retrieved from Flickr

A recent paper has been published with the first ever validated scales for measuring psychedelic integration. Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the paper represents a step forward in the way that clinicians may apply and measure integration throughout psychedelic therapy.

The Stages of Psychedelic Therapy

Unbeknownst to some, taking psychedelics for healing purposes is much more than simply swallowing back a handful of psilocybin mushrooms and letting the medicine work its magic. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple, nor as easy, as that.

High dose psychedelic therapy, which is the most commonplace in current research trials, generally entails three stages. The first stage is all about preparation. Patients that are going through this protocol will often have a debilitating mental health issue, such as severe depression. They are incredibly vulnerable, and won’t know what to expect throughout the psychedelic session, which may be extremely intense, and has the potential to shatter someone’s worldview in the space of several hours.

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Evan Lewis-Healey

PhD candidate at Cambridge University. Studying the cognitive neuroscience of altered states of consciousness.