Stephen Ross and Tony Bossis in the NYU treatment room, I was struck
by their excitement, verging on giddiness, at the results they were
observing in their cancer patients—after a single guided psilocybin
session. At first, Ross couldn’t believe what he was seeing: “I thought the
first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it. They
were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on
the planet’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of
smoke.’ People were journeying to early parts of their lives and coming
back with a profound new sense of things, new priorities. People who had
been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug
given once could have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented
finding. We have never had anything like that in the psychiatric field.”
This is when Tony Bossis first told me about his experience sitting with
Patrick Mettes as he journeyed to a place in his mind that, somehow,
lifted the siege of his terror.
“You’re in this room, but you’re in the presence of something large. I
remember how, after two hours of silence, Patrick began to cry softly and
say, twice, ‘Birth and death is a lot of work.’ It’s humbling to sit there. It’s
the most rewarding day of your career.”
As a palliative care specialist, Bossis spends a lot of his time with the
dying. “People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to
address existential distress.” Existential distress is what psychologists call
the complex of depression, anxiety, and fear common in people
confronting a terminal diagnosis. “Xanax isn’t the answer.” If there is an
answer, Bossis believes, it is going to be more spiritual in nature than
pharmacological.
“So how do we not explore this,” he asks, “if it can recalibrate how we
die?”
• • •
IT WAS ON AN APRIL MONDAY in 2010 that Patrick Mettes, a fifty-three-year-
old television news director being treated for a cancer of his bile ducts,
read the article on the front page of the New York Times that would
change his death. His diagnosis had come three years earlier, shortly after
his wife, Lisa Callaghan, noticed that the whites of his eyes had suddenly