Lydia Unger is a Registered Psychologist who has been practicing since 2010. She obtained her undergraduate degree in psychology and then completed her Masters in Child and Applied Psychology at the University of Calgary. Lydia has had the opportunity to work with diverse populations, providing assessment and diagnosis, interventions for social and emotional difficulties, education for parents, and supervision of students at the University of Calgary.

Her areas of expertise are trauma, learning disabilities, ADHD, anxiety and depression, behavioral difficulties, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.  Lydia is also a recent graduate of our Fundamentals of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy course and is excited to begin her journey in the field.

From Interest to Execution: Finding the Right Program 

Lydia has been a practicing psychologist for the past fourteen years, but it is just within the past few years that her interest in psychedelic-assisted therapy has swelled.  As an academic, she dove into the literature and research on the benefits of psychedelic medicine as well as any conferences she could be a part of and podcasts she could devour. 

She cites the integral work of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a partner of Numinus, in introducing her to alternative ways to treat PTSD and treatment-resistant depression with psychedelics.  Unger also had important, informal psychedelic experiences earlier in life that shaped who she is today and left her with some of the “favorite parts about myself”. 

It was this fervor that led her to begin researching psychedelic-assisted therapy training programs.  After an exhaustive search and attending our All About Numinus informational session with our Director of Training, Amanda Giesler, she ultimately chose Numinus to begin this new and exciting next chapter of her career. 

Why I Chose Numinus 

The educational opportunities and knowledge offered in Numinus’ Fundamentals of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy course aligned with what Lydia was looking for in her training program.  Numinus was a clear choice with its rigorous instruction, including an emphasis on ethics and trauma-informed care.  As a fan of our podcast, Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers, it also appealed to Unger that Dr. Steve Thayer was one of the lead course instructors and had lots of practical experience and wisdom to share. Our contacts in Unger’s local Vancouver community finalized her decision and she was now on her way to begin on her new path. 

“My experience in the course was above and beyond what I expected” 

The holistic coursework, including evidence-based material, research articles, and the experiential component, was incredibly important to Unger.  This included quite a bit of role-playing as well as skills practice in small groups. This allowed her to connect with the material, assimilating the content differently from the didactic academic setting to which she is accustomed. 

Lydia also cites the competency of our course instructors -- their level of skill and knowledge, as well as their care and support -- at the core of her experience.  Learners are encouraged to experiment outside of their comfort zones, and the instructors’ acceptance and unconditionally affirmative regard exemplify the qualities that one would hope to see in a psychedelic-assisted therapist. 

The varied life experiences and viewpoints of her cohort members made for an academically challenging and scholarly environment. Unger’s cohort continues to be actively engaged with one another past the conclusion of the course. 

The Importance of Integration: Next Steps 

We know that integration is a really important part of the psychedelic experience, and going back to one’s “real life” after PAT training is no different.  Lydia looks forward to the next step of our certification pathway in Numinus’ Applied Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: Cases, Conditions, and Context.  She looks forward to building upon and employing the skills that she learned in the fundamentals course.   

While Unger is not [yet] formally practicing PAT, she has laid groundwork via a website stating her core commitments and beliefs as it pertains to the subject, and is actively volunteering in the psychedelic harm reduction space.  Lydia has been meeting with the Numinus team to discuss her career development and opportunities, and the team could not be more excited for her to start a fulsome psychedelic-assisted therapy practice after she’s completed her certification. Go Lydia! 

You can learn more about Lydia by visiting the website of her current practice, The Family Psychology Place. You can also keep up with her psychedelic-assisted therapy journey on her personal website, Journey to Wellness. 

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How to Read Published Psychedelic Science Research

by Matt Wall

About the Author: Matthew Wall ​​is a Psychologist, neuroscientist, & fMRI specialist at Invicro and Imperial College London. He works closely with Robin Carhart-Harris, supporting their research into the effects of Psilocybin, Cannabis, and other novel compounds on the brain through brain imaging. Matthew is a friend of Numinus but is not affiliated directly with our team. This guest blog is his generous contribution to the Psychedelic Ecosystem so everyone, regardless of background, can understand the research emerging in the field of Psychedelic Sciences. A sincere thank you for your time and contributions to the Psychedelic community! 

Introduction: Diving into a New Landscape in Science

The current wave of research on psychedelics is notably different from the previous wave in the 1950s/60s in lots of ways, but one of the most important ones is that we now have research methods and technology that just weren’t available back then. A lot of modern psychedelic research has taken advantage of this and focused on understanding the details of how psychedelics act on the brain and how these brain effects translate to the acute, subjective, and longer-term clinical effects of these drugs. There’s a huge amount of public interest in these results, but unfortunately, the research methods used are often highly technical and use a large amount of scientific jargon. This means readers without a strong background in neuroscience, biology, statistics, psychology, or related disciplines can struggle to understand the primary research literature.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can use to extract what you need from a paper, even if it’s not in your field of expertise. Most scientific papers follow a pretty standard format, so it’s fairly easy to focus on the important bits without getting bogged down in all the technical stuff.

Begin Here: The Abstract of the Paper

First, read the abstract. This is the summary at the beginning that normally contains a brief outline of the methods, results, and conclusions. If this gives you all the information you need, then great – you’re done! However, if you want to start digging a little deeper or be able to evaluate the results critically, you’ll need to read at least a few more sections. Rather than reading straight through the paper, it’s better to flip back and forth and read the following sections:

• The introduction sets out the background to the research question, and often references previous studies that have looked at similar or related questions. The final paragraph of the introduction is worth taking a close look at, as it usually sets out the precise aims of the study and the hypotheses.

• The first paragraph of the discussion section is usually a summary of the key results, often in simpler language than in the results section, so that’s an important part to read carefully as well.

• Often towards the end of the discussion there will be a paragraph or two which outlines the strengths and limitations of the study. This can give really important information about how to critically evaluate the study’s conclusions.

• The final paragraph of the discussion is usually a fairly plain-language summary of the key conclusions.

• The figures in neuroscience papers are often the most important part of the results section. These might be images of brains with colored blobs that indicate areas of significant increased or decreased activation, or if it’s a pre-clinical (i.e., work on animals) paper, they might be images of cells. There are also usually a number of charts, graphs, tables, or other kinds of diagrams. The figure/table captions are usually helpful in understanding them but can sometimes be quite technical.

fig 1: Whole brain voxelwise changes. Significant clusters showed increased (hot colors) or decreased (cool colors) responsivity after therapy (cluster corrected, z > 2.3, p < .05). **

If you really want to dig deep into a particular paper, then you’ll need to tackle the methods section. This sets out exactly what the researchers did in a fair amount of detail. In neuroscience papers, this usually contains a large amount of technical jargon, which can be really hard to get through if you’re not familiar with the research field. You may need to look up particular words and phrases as you go or even do some background reading of other papers to understand exactly what the researchers did. If you’re lucky, there’s sometimes a figure or diagram in the methods section that summarizes the methods used.

Other Sections to Look Out for While Reviewing the Details: 

• In clinical trial papers, there is usually a CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) diagram. CONSORT is actually a whole set of detailed guidelines for how to report randomized clinical trials, but what’s normally referred to as a ‘CONSORT diagram’ is a flow-chart-like figure with arrows and boxes, which details the recruitment of subjects, how they were allocated to particular treatments or trial conditions, how many dropped out, how many were excluded from the analysis, and the reasons why.

• Often hidden away at the end of the paper, there is usually some kind of statement about how the study was funded and the potential conflicts of interest of the authors. This is important because studies funded by commercial interests report favorable results more often than those funded by independent sources, which may be evidence of bias. In addition, the individual authors may disclose that they act as consultants for or are employed by commercial interests.

• Pre-registration. Most clinical trials will be pre-registered on https://clinicaltrials.gov/. This means the author will post a fairly detailed summary of the trial protocol, what they expect the main outcomes to be, and other details online. This prevents people from being able to selectively report trial results or change the outcomes halfway through the trial so as to get a more positive result. There’s a general movement to pre-register more kinds of studies, so you may see that even some basic science studies have pre-registered analysis plans and outcomes, often on websites like the Open Science Foundation (https://osf.io/). Suppose the authors pre-registered their outcomes and analysis plans. In that case, you can be more confident that the results are genuine and not the outcome of some process where the researchers tried a bunch of different analyses on their data and picked the one they liked the best.

• Open code/data. Similar to pre-registration, there’s a general movement towards more ‘open science’ practices, and this means sometimes papers will include links to data repositories, or analysis code that they’ve used in the study. This is also a good sign, as it suggests the authors have nothing to hide, and that anyone can independently verify their methods.

Summary and Next Steps:

Learning to read scientific papers is a skill and something that definitely gets easier with practice, though even experienced researchers can sometimes still struggle when evaluating a paper that’s outside their (often fairly narrow) range of expertise. If you’re struggling, don’t be afraid to ask questions; social media sites like Twitter or Reddit are a great place to ask questions, and you can even look up one of the study authors and ask them questions directly. Most researchers will be happy to talk about their work and will be pleased that someone is reading it! If you start to dig into a particular research area, you’ll start to pick up some of the more common terms and jargon, making it easier and faster, too. With many scientific publications now being open-access and not paywalled, there is a great opportunity for anyone to engage with the scientific literature, and non-scientists can still get a lot out of it. Unfortunately, there can be a lot of misinformation about particular topics, and going to the source and looking at the original research is the best way to counter that. Hopefully, this short guide can be an entry point for anyone interested in reading about psychedelic science or any other research topic you may be interested in.

If you are interested in participating in clinical trials in Psychedelics and diagnostic-specific research in the Psychedelic landscape, please visit Numinus' Clinical Trials page for our actively recruiting trials. If you are a researcher seeking to expand your knowledge and include Psychedelic Research in your work, we encourage you to participate in our Info Friday sessions, where you can learn more about our various training programs and certification pathways. 

Discover more about Matthew and his work on Linkedin, and read his research on Google Scholar.

**Images were taken from "Increased amygdala responses to emotional faces after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression" by Leor Roseman, Lysia Demetriou, Matthew B. Wall, David J. Nutt, and Robin Cart-Hart Harris.