Psychedelic Integration as Systemic Spiritual Bypassing
Written for the MA in Psychedelics & Consciousness Studies at the University of Ottawa.
The Modern Mental Health Crisis
The mental health crisis we are experiencing in the modernized Western world is primarily a socio-economic and political epidemic rather than simply a biological problem sweeping our societies (Davies, 2021). The individualization of mental health diverts responsibility and attention away from the extractive and oppressive systems of neoliberal capitalism and their propensity toward profiteering through exploitative industrial complexes.
Loneliness, overwork, burnout, inequality, insecurity, social fragmentation, and isolation are examples of forms of distress that are becoming increasingly widespread and prevalent (Davies, 2021). But instead of addressing the structural societal causes, Western culture reframes these psychological challenges into individual “disorders.” People respond differently to their environments and internal struggles, so our society has built frameworks to categorize these ailments into diagnoses that can be labelled onto them with the intention of treating them, often with medication.
The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is perhaps the most widely used and best known of these frameworks. The first edition published in 1952 was created by a committee of 28 members of the American Psychiatric Association and contained 106 disorders explained using psychodynamic theories. The DSM-III published in 1980 marked a turning point, abandoning psychoanalytical theories and adopting a symptom-based model, framing the disorders as having biological causality that could be treated medically (First, 2012). Upon publication of the DSM-5 in 2013, the number of disorders ballooned to around 370 diagnostic categories including subtypes and specifiers, and the task force voting them into existence remained a mere 28 members – 68% of those members had close ties and potential conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry (Cosgrove et al., 2009).
As of 2022, it is estimated that over 23.1% of the adult population in the United States is currently living with a mental illness (National Institute of Mental Health, 2022). Surprisingly, there is no biomarker for any diagnosis in the DSM, despite the often-heard phrase “chemical imbalance” as the cause – due to the lack of biological evidence, diagnosis remains entirely symptom-cluster based.
Yet the rate of psychotropic medication usage in the U.S. alone has risen significantly over the decades (Paulose-Ram et al., 2004; Sanborn et al., 2023; Stafford et al., 2001). With the rise of standard medicalization of mental illness has come both a rise in realizations that they simply aren’t working (Davies, 2021), and an increased interest in alternative treatments to these disorders – notably that of psychedelic therapy.
The Psychedelic Therapy Response
While traditional models of psychiatry have framed distress and mental health disorders as individual biochemical imbalances requiring medical intervention, psychedelic therapy as a treatment might ostensibly provide a break from that perspective, given the ancient origins, indigenous practices, and Western countercultural recent past that so heavily emphasized “oneness” in spiritual, social, collective relationship to nature and consciousness.
Alas, we find it follows the same arc that happens to many countercultural practices under neoliberalism: beginning as a movement that includes a radical critique of mainstream society, met with heavy suppression and fear, then gaining enough momentum to be absorbed and standardized via “proper channels” like medicine, eventually being regulated, the narrative shaped, and sold back to the public as a commodity under the terms of the system (Aday et al., 2023; Barber & Aaronson, 2022; Sanchez Petrement, 2023).
This is not to say that psychedelic therapy is definitively ineffective in treating these maladies. By many accounts following the latest mainstream narrative of psychedelic research, the effectiveness of psychedelics for “treatment resistant” mental illness has been touted as showing remarkable promise (Mitchell et al., 2021; Rosenblat et al., 2024). Unfortunately, these promises are presently unfounded, lack sufficient evidence, and must be met with extreme caution and remain unfulfilled until larger, more representative, rigorous, and longitudinal research is completed (Butler et al., 2022).
Some highly anticipated studies claiming this promise have been shown to suffer from poor blinding and strong expectancy effects, ethical concerns, and safety-reporting oversights, all muddling data integrity. Perhaps one of the most notable contemporary examples is that of the Phase 3 trial for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD being denied approval in 2024 by the FDA (Singh, 2025).
Deeper still than the glaring problems with empirical methodology and disastrously unethical sexual abuse issues, the moving train of corporate investment is driving much of this inadequate research (Barber et al., 2025; Buchman & Rosenbaum, 2024). It is important to recall historical precedents of corporate meddling in research to further status and monetary gain such as those of the tobacco industry and explore them as possible analogues or precursors to what we see now given the current state of research of psychedelics (Francey & Chapman, 2000).
The Integration Excuse
Partly in order to make up for the gap in empirical evidence that psychedelic substances alone are as effective as promised in treating mental disorders, Psychedelic Assisted (Psycho)therapy (PAP or PAT) has been touted as a necessary component of psychedelic treatment which involves a preparation phase (including set and setting), a liminal phase (the psychedelic trip or journey), and an integration phase (Muthukumaraswamy et al., 2025).
Integration has been a loaded term in the industry, with no consensus definition or standardized techniques, and often disparate or unclear goals. Many clinicians and participants treat integration as a safeguard or guarantee of benefit, but the loose definition and ongoing process characterizing it poses inherent risks and ethical hazards, especially without the supporting empirical evidence for that assumption, much like the substances themselves (Bathje et al., 2022; Pilecki et al., 2021).
In an attempt to erode some ambiguity regarding integration concepts, Bathje et al. (2022) critically analyzed a comprehensive set of different definitions and practices to provide a synthesized definition and model. In their research, they note: “we must acknowledge that treating integration as a separate phase of psychedelic experiences probably imposes Western dualistic thinking” (p. 3). They go on to discuss Cartesian dualism, Marx’s theory of alienation, existential distress associated with climate change and inequality, and lack of freedom, collectivism, and egalitarianism as potential reasons why there is a renewed interest in psychedelics, and why integration is more necessary for Westerners than Indigenous people.
Much like psychiatry, the DSM, and the medical-industrial complex, integration as we view it through these frameworks and “synthesized models” is a Western invention, created by and for the systems that apparently caused the need for it in the first place. This self-fulfilling prophecy loop is a symptom of the notion of “capitalist realism” – that there is no alternative form of social organization so we must live and operate within the system and that capitalism simply is reality (Sanchez Petrement, 2023).
As is the way of capitalism, this has led to commodification of the concept of integration. An estimated 91.2% of the cost of PAT sessions ($7,543 per patient) goes to specialized therapists’ compensation (Marseille et al., 2020). Naturally, investors and heads of pharmaceutical companies have started implementing cost-cutting techniques by replacing the human element with digital integration apps run on profit-oriented algorithms under the guise of broadening access. This standardized formulaic solution reduces integration to a solvable technical problem that further disconnects the individual from the ceremonial, therapeutic, communal aspects of these experiences that have been successful in Indigenous communities throughout history (Sanabria & Tófoli, 2025; Yoo & Sakopoulos, 2025).
It also has the paradoxical effect of decreasing access to these treatments and risks bias in rates of effectiveness, since the data provided by research in this field on which these formulas and algorithms are built is gathered on an incredibly non-diverse set of participants who are predominantly white, highly educated Westerners (Haft et al., 2025; Hovmand et al., 2023).
The Non-Western Perspectives
In contrast to the way Western culture treats mental health and integration as personal, non-communal concepts requiring one to look into the individual self for healing and change, most societies outside the West have long traditions of approaching what we call mental illness with holistic healing methods that incorporate spiritual, physical, and social balance with communal support (Burns & Tomita, 2015; Cruz et al., 2022; Ned et al., 2022).
This is also true for the use of psychedelics in these non-Western cultures. In societies where the psychedelic substance and ritual are embedded in a communal, spiritual lifestyle with a deep emphasis on nature and cosmological connection, integration usually isn’t singled out as a distinct “phase,” rather as a natural part of the broader cultural practice. But when Westerners participate in these indigenous rituals – usually through psychedelic tourism – the necessity of the specific integration phase often becomes apparent to preserve the lasting benefits of the experience, lest these often life-changing aspects and purpose of the rituals get quickly lost in the day-to-day grind of the return to modern life in the system (Cowley-Court et al., 2023; Dupuis, 2021; Jiménez-Garrido et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2022).
Indigenous groups allowing Westerners to participate in their rituals must contend with a dilemma: to cater specifically to these tourists for economic survival in the age of globalization at the cost of potential dilution of their own culture. The so-called and aptly named “psychedelic renaissance” is made possible by neocolonial extractivism, another hallmark of Western neoliberal capitalism that has eerily similar parallels to the European Renaissance also driven through colonialism. Dealing with this dichotomy of participating in these rituals and returning to Western capitalist society can be difficult to resolve and integrate, so one response is to claim “reciprocity” by paying the indigenous groups money and simply acknowledging their cultural practices (Dupuis, 2021; Williams et al., 2022).
But sometimes, reintegration into the Western world after deep psychedelic experiences or rituals can have the effect of individuals entering spiritual bypass, characterized by Picciotto et al. (2018) as “a defensive psychological posture cultivated by a tendency to privilege spiritual beliefs or experiences over and against psychological needs creating a means of avoiding or bypassing difficult emotions or experiences” (p. 1).
A Societal Spiritual Bypass
Western culture tends to secularize science and biochemical mechanisms from materialist, naturalist, and as discussed earlier, Cartesian dualist perspectives. But spirituality is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human life and worldview (Lynn & Schell, 2024). In the current sociopolitical climate of the United States, spirituality has been coopted and weaponized as a tool to push forward neoliberal and right-wing (and particularly Christian) nationalist agendas, abandoning the religious freedom and cultural pluralist ideals long defining the “religious right” until recently (Li & Froese, 2023; Saiya, 2025; Smidt, 2024).
The literature rarely uses the term “spiritual bypassing” outside the frame of the individual, which as we’ve explored, is the modus operandi of Western thought and systems. But the societal neoliberal capitalist feedback loop is incentivized to seize the ubiquity of spirituality as a mechanism to perpetuate its insatiable purpose. It has even been convincingly proposed that neoliberalism itself has become its own religion (Guest, 2022; Mavelli, 2019).
Given the deep social substrate of humanity, assumptions can be made of disparate human societies operating similarly to how individuals behave (Offer, 2019; Pizarro et al., 2022). It can then naturally be argued that the concept of spiritual bypass can be applied to a society made up of, and beyond, the individual. Therefore, it would also be plausible to say that given the propensity for neoliberal capitalist self-serving ideals to perpetuate economic growth at all costs, such a society would readily employ these avoidant mechanisms to evade facing difficult truths as a defense against its own psychological, or more aptly, sociological “harm” against the perpetuation of the system.
Reassessing the Roots of Distress
The mental health crisis in the Western world is a byproduct of the sociopolitical and economic systems that have a self-preserving mandate to remain in power. These structures employ colonialism, extraction, and profiteering to further their goals. Their inherent limitlessness and insatiability force their methods to exploit every aspect of individual and societal existence possible. The medicalization of mental illness, and even the unsupported notion of biochemical causes thereof, is a uniquely Western example of the phenomenon that is rooted in this systemically extractive social machine.
These exploitations are not limited to cultural phenomena currently or formerly associated with counter-cultural or anti-Western ideals, as is apparent by the commercialization of psychedelics and the creation of standardized, cost-effective ways to commodify and profit from even the peripheral narrative around these substances as in the concept of integration.
Neoliberalism can be argued to have gone so far as employing evasive tools like spiritual bypassing (verging on spiritual abuse) to distract from the underlying issues caused by the system itself. It creates self-serving concepts such as integration, which as discussed in the psychedelic discourse can be seen as a Western idea created out of the apparent necessity of responding to the discordant struggle of returning to the distressing lifestyle in which it operates. Returning, that is, from experiences that have the ability – and even propensity – to allow individuals to think and act in a way less conducive to existing in these oppressive systems they live in.
Psychedelic integration as defined by Western epistemology is a characteristic of systemic spiritual bypassing by the dominant, exploitative, extractive system of capitalist neoliberalism that must be challenged by reframing the ailments that PAT claims to treat as caused by these systems themselves, rather than individual “disorders.”
We must as Western society rethink how we view mental health, psychedelics, and community in service of our own prosperity and cognitive liberty, to refocus the blame on where it truly lies – in the systems that create and perpetuate our distress for their own gain.
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