Leveraging meditation research for the study of psychedelic-related adverse effects

Abstract

Psychedelics have shown early evidence for a range of benefits and low harm profiles in extant research. However, adverse effects (AEs) research in psychedelics has been limited, leading to underspecified AE profiles, inconsistent measurement, and potential undercounting of AEs. The development of safe, effective psychedelic therapies and treatments for AEs when they occur requires a thorough assessment of psychedelic-related AEs, their phenomenology, risk factors, and longitudinal duration. This article proposes that research on meditation-related AEs, which overlap in important ways with the phenomenological and contextual characteristics of psychedelic-related AEs, has engaged many methodological challenges present in the study of psychedelic-related AEs. Thus, meditation-related AE research offers thematic and methodological insights that are valuable to psychedelic AE research. An integrative review of extant AE research in both psychedelics and meditation is provided, and an agenda for leveraging meditation research to advance the investigation of psychedelic AEs is recommended. This includes the utility of meditation-related AEs as a comparator condition for psychedelic-related AEs, as well as recommendations for the adoption of (1) detailed and comprehensive, (2) user-informed, (3) impact-based, (4) standardized, (5) unbiased, and (6) representative measures of AEs and (7) examining factors that influence their impacts and trajectories.

Keywords: Psychedelics; adverse effects; measurement; meditation; psychedelic-assisted therapy.