In this episode, Kyle speaks with Imperial College London research assistant and past guest, Dr. Malin Vedøy Uthaug, who just earned her doctorate and published her dissertation on Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT research.
Uthaug discusses how she started working in this field, why Prague is a good place for research, what past research has led to today, how certain factors could predict whether someone would have a more challenging or more mystical experience, how these experiences can treat people with PTSD differently, what dissociation actually means, the differences between vaporized 5-MeO-DMT and intramuscular 5-MeO-DMT injections and how injections typically lead towards better trauma resolution over the "too much too soon" effects of vaporization. They also talk about reactivation (re-experiencing parts of the 5-MeO-DMT experience at a later time) and why it might happen, how it is different from LSD flashbacks, and how expectations, the experience, and the facilitator all come into play.
They discuss her research and dissertation, which consisted of 2 studies on ayahuasca and 3 on 5-MeO-DMT, focusing on if participants saw improvement in convergent thinking and mental health variables (depression, anxiety and stress), and how her placebo-controlled study revealed that those who received the placebo still saw a marked improvement. This leads to a conclusion that often, context may play a larger role than the medicine- feeling safe and being heard in a ceremonial, community-based setting may be the biggest factor towards healing.
Notable Quotes “Once you make the unconscious conscious, then you can learn from it, and [it’s not] so much about resisting anymore. Carl Jung says, ‘what you resist persists,’ and what I think is happening, especially with PTSD, is that you’re kind of just holding this ball underwater and it’s not allowed to float to the surface.”
“You need to feel safe, you need to experience being heard and seen. Psychedelics do help us remember things that we have repressed, but obviously, [they] also make us very vulnerable and things might come up. And having somebody witness that and validate those feelings that are expressed and shown can be incredibly healing for people.”
“What we can learn is to learn to sit with difficult emotions and to not push them aside. ...I learned that there is comfort in the discomfort. I learned that you can basically figure out so many things about yourself if you just sit with yourself for a moment and you stay in that uncomfortable silence.”
Links The Exploration of Naturalistically used Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT: by Malin Vedøy Uthaug (dissertation)
Imperial College London- Centre for Psychedelic Research
Her past Psychedelics Today appearance, 3/21/2018
Save a Toad, Exploit a Chemist t-shirt
About Dr. Malin Vedøy Uthaug
Malin Vedøy Uthaug has a background in psychologywho just earned her doctorate and published her dissertation on Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT research at the department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology (FPN) at Maastricht University. Her doctoral research, supervised by Dr. Jan Ramaekers and Dr. Jordi Riba, centres around the investigation of the effects of Ayahuasca ingested in a naturalistic setting on affect and cognition, in addition to pioneer work on the effects of 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) in humans. Outside of her thesis work, Malin is also conducting research on mescaline and holotropic breathwork, is interested in trauma resolution and non-ordinary state psychotherapy (NOSP), and finally, she is also one of the co-founders of the Norwegian Association for Psychedelic Studies.
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