To answer the question in the title, Bruce Tobin seems to think so. Tobin is a clinical psychologist in Victoria and founder of TheraPsil, a non-profit dedicated to helping Canadians access psilocybin psychotherapy to treat end-of-life distress.
Tobin is also the man who threated the first six Canadians who legally accessed psilocybin. Along with his company Therapsil, Tobin has helped twenty-seven Canadians obtain Health Canada exemptions to legally gain access to psilocybin.
These are some of the reasons the founder of Therapsil believes Canada to be a world leader in Psychedelic Therapy.
The Victoria based company has also recently partnered with Dave Phillips to launch a 10 week training program created to prepare health-care practitioners to safely guide patients through a psilocybin. This program ends with each practitioner consuming psilocybin and having their own therapeutic session.
Dave Philips handpicked nineteen Canadian health-care practitioners to participate in the program and Therapsil assisted in obtaining exemptions for all nineteen in order for them to experience a psilocybin trip and better guide their future patients.
Programs like the aforementioned are incredibly important as psilocybin therapy becomes more widespread and available in countries. Health-care practitioners need to experience their own trip that is how they will be able to best serve their patients receiving the therapy.
Trying to explain to someone what a substance is supposed to feel like if you have never tried it yourself can be almost impossible. This can also cause issues with the patient, for example, if a patient is going through a hard time during a trip and they realize the doctor has never tried it and doesn’t know what they’re going through it can be a big issue.
A Psilocybin trip can bring out a wide variety of emotions and anxieties without someone there to guide the experience a trip can easily turn into paranoia also known as a ‘bad trip’.
Hopefully as the research begins to become more definitive governments will allow more therapeutic psilocybin options. Especially since the presumed benefits include, increased creativity, reduced anxiety, and even help with more severe issues like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder also known as PTSD.