Do Psychedelic Trips Open the Door to Messages from God, Spirits, Transcendent Realities, or the Devil? Links with Attitudes About Psychedelics, Opinions About Legalization, and Interest in Personal Use

Making sense of a transformative, mystical psychedelic experience: Will people frame it as spiritual, supernatural, psychological, physical, or a sign of mental illness?

“…In earlier analyses of this same data set, these worldview factors related positively to seeing psychedelics as doorways to supernatural messages (Exline et al, 2022) and sources of spiritual benefits and risks (Exline et al, 2023), and we expected similar patterns here. In earlier analyses (Exline et al, 2023), religious belief salience and identifying as Christian were both related to seeing more spiritual and psychological risks around psychedelics; thus, we also expected these variables to correlate positively with the mental illness lens.…”

“…Although we had completed two other articles from this multiuse data set (Exline et al, 2022, 2023), we continued to follow open science practices by preregistering hypotheses about the lens-related variables before examining them. Preregistrations for existing data sets are becoming more common as researchers create multipurpose data sets, use them in multiple projects, and share their data with others—all while trying to be transparent about their methods and predictions.…”

“…Some experiences include frightening spiritual or supernatural elements such as hellish visions (Huxley, 1956) or encounters with demons or other malevolent entities (Davis et al, 2020; Johnstad, 2021a). Many people seem to be attuned to these risks: Although U.S. adults endorsed psychological and practical risks more than spiritual ones, many also endorsed sources of spiritual risk or struggle around psychedelic use, such as religious community disapproval, divine punishment, demonic attack or influence, moral struggles, religious doubts, and challenging shifts in worldviews (Exline et al, 2023). Widespread concern about the potential risks of psychedelics contributed to policy decisions that have made them largely illegal in the United States in the last half century (Apud, 2016; Pollan, 2018; Strassman, 1991).…”

“…Because these lens variables were new, we also examined some validity-related correlations with attitude-related variables used in earlier articles from this same data set (Exline et al, 2022, 2023). Because we were looking at a positive psychedelic experience with mystical elements, we expected endorsement of spiritual, supernatural, physical, and psychological explanations to correlate positively with propsychedelic attitudes, with the opposite pattern for the mental illness lens.…”

“…We expected the mental illness lens to be used by people who had less psychedelic experience and those whose past experiences were more negative, less positive, and less spiritual or supernatural. Based on the prior analyses from this data set suggesting that older individuals saw fewer psychedelic benefits and more risks (Exline et al, 2023), we expected age to correlate positively with the mental illness lens and negatively with the other four lenses.…”