A Retrospective Study to Determine the Impact of Psychedelic Therapy for Dimensional Measures of Wellness: A Qualitative Analysis of Response Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background The World Health Organization (WHO) defines wellness as the optimal state of health of individuals and groups. No study to date has identified the impact of psychedelic medicines for optimizing wellness using a dimensional approach. Treatment effects can be measured more broadly using a composite score of participants’ global perceptions of change for pain, function, and mood scores. Given the precedence in previous work for retrospective study of participants’ self-medicating with these substances, the nature of this study design allows for a safe way to develop further evidence in this area of care, with wellness as the broad indication. Methods 65 civilian or military veterans between the ages of 18-99 self-identifying as having used psychedelic medicines for non-recreational therapeutic purposes in the last 3 years were recruited for this study. Participants completed various standardized questionnaires that will be analyzed in a separate study, while this study analyzed the qualitative experiences described in relation to the medicines used and coded them according to themes developed from review of previous literature. Results A total of 93 comments were analyzed. Participant comments were classified into these categories: mysticism and spirituality, functional improvement and self awareness, social connection and cultural impact, impact on medical and mental health conditions, neutral impressions, sensations or difficult experiences. Participants described impacts in these categories related to spiritual, physiological, psychological, and social improvements, as well as difficulties and complex emotions regarding the experience of using psychedelic medicines. Discussion Wellness of individuals or groups is not simply an absence of disease, symptoms, or impairments. Rather, it reflects the outcome of numerous personal characteristics, psychophysiology, and choices, expressed throughout one’s lifespan, unfolding in dynamic interaction with a complicated socio-cultural and physical environment. Participants that used psychedelic medicines described improvement of medical and mental health conditions, social interaction, spirituality, and overall function. In general, quality of life and wellness consequently improved after the use of these medicines based on established multidimensional factors. Conclusion The use of various psychedelic medicines appears to be associated with a broad range of qualitative experiences that could help clarify the mechanism of how they impact wellness in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".