CHAPTER SIX

THE TRIP    TREATMENT

Psychedelics in Psychotherapy

One: Dying

AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, psilocybin trips take place in a treatment room
carefully decorated to look more like a cozy den than a hospital suite. The
effect almost works, but not entirely, for the stainless steel and plastic
fittings of modern medicine peek through the domestic scrim here and
there, chilly reminders that the room you are tripping in is still in the
belly of a big city hospital complex.
Against one wall is a comfortable couch long enough for a patient to
stretch out on during a session. An abstract painting—or is it a cubist
landscape?—hangs on the opposite wall, and on the bookshelves large-
format books about art and mythology share space with native craft items
and spiritual knickknacks—a large glazed ceramic mushroom, a Buddha,
a crystal. This could be the apartment of a well-traveled shrink of a
certain age, one with an interest in Eastern religions and the art of what
used to be called primitive cultures. Yet the illusion crumbles as soon as
you lift your gaze to the ceiling, where the tracks that would ordinarily
support the curtains dividing one hospital bed from another traverse the
white acoustic tiles. And then there is the supersized bathroom, ablaze
with fluorescent light and outfitted with the requisite grab bars and
pedals.
It was here in this room that I first heard the story of Patrick Mettes, a
volunteer in NYU’s psilocybin cancer trial who, in the course of a
turbulent six-hour psilocybin journey on the couch where I now sat, had a
life-changing—or perhaps I should say death-changing—experience. I had
come to interview Tony Bossis, the palliative care psychologist who