And anyways, your statements ignore that there's plenty of hippies on Instagram peddling their mushrooms and Ayahuasca in intense spiritual experiences for only 1500$ a pop. Does the Catholic church control them too?
Somehow you turned someone's subjective spiritual exploration into them limiting themselves...
Dostoevsky made observations like this, too.
"It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you"
"Men need to bow down to something; whether another man or an idea.”
I think Ernest Becker explored similar ideas in The Denial of Death, though through a different context.
The customer is not always right. Just because the customer wants something or believes something doesn’t make it true.
This really isn’t about being a lawful authority trying to buzz-kill society as much as it is about having principles as a doctor.
If I had someone coming into my IT department saying they heard that dipping their laptop in maple syrup would speed up their processor, and to please proceed to dip their computer in maple syrup, my noncompliance doesn’t make me a gatekeeper like the medieval catholic priests.
What I broadly mean is that modern society has done a relatively poor job at helping to produce integrated humans that have the capacity, tools, and know-how to navigate their inner journey. I know this sounds woo to a lot of people here. That the new wave of psychedelic interest is reified as purely medical treatment is a continuation of this trend. That is what I'm trying to articulate.
I have a deep suspicion that you can't simply sterilise the transformation at the heart of these experiences.
When people tell me about their psychedelic trips, I am like, so? I’ve been doing it my whole life without drugs!
However, my tendency to go on these trips are highly affected by environmental variables. So the only thing I would add is, it’s a mix between the spiritual and the material And we cannot negate either.
So all these therapist and psychiatrist trying to cure me are taking the wrong tact. What I learned is I needed to understand it, and understanding it alone is the cure.
Not to mention, the language you use is really cruel.
In this way, your psychiatrist friend is simply the next iteration of a priest, and the portrayal of her patients as greedy fools only furthers this divide and pushes ever more people towards the other side of the law. I'll see you in _my_ cow field with a woven basket!
_edit_: think of it this way. An internal urge drives people to your friend in search of a meaningful experience. Your friend consults her good book and returns to them with information: no, you cannot have your meaningful experience.