Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Although historical writings, anthropological accounts, and experimental studies document associations between psilocybin use and religion, no prospective experimental study has investigated how the effects of psilocybin are experienced and interpreted by religious clergy. This exploratory study evaluated the overall safety and the acute and enduring effects of psilocybin in clergy. Methods: = 16) at 6 months after screening using self-report measures. The effects of psilocybin were also assessed on session days and 4 and 16 months after the second psilocybin session in the 24 participants who completed both sessions. Results: The primary outcome assessment at 6 months after screening showed that, compared with the delayed control group, participants who had received psilocybin reported significantly greater positive changes in their religious practices, attitudes about their religion, and effectiveness as a religious leader, as well as in their non-religious attitudes, moods, and behavior. Follow-up assessments showed that positive changes in religious and non-religious attitudes and behavior were sustained through 16 months after the second psilocybin session. At that time, participants rated at least one of their psilocybin experiences to be among the top five most spiritually significant (96%), profoundly sacred (92%), psychologically insightful (83%), and psychologically meaningful (79%) of their lives. Furthermore, 42% rated one of their experiences to be the single most profound of their lifetime. At 16-months follow-up, most (79%) strongly endorsed that the experiences had positive effects on their religious practices (e.g., prayer or meditation) and their daily sense of the sacred, and most (71%) reported positive changes in their appreciation of religious traditions other than their own. Although no serious adverse events were reported, 46% rated a psilocybin experience as among the top five most psychologically challenging of their lives. Conclusions: In this population of clergy, psilocybin administration was safe and increased multiple domains of overall psychological well-being including positive changes in religious attitudes and behavior as well as their vocation as a religious leader. The study was limited by a waitlist control design, homogenous sample, and the use of some unvalidated outcome measures. Further research with more rigorous control conditions and diverse samples is needed.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".