Samuli Kangaslampi | “Enhancement or distortion? Recalling your life under psychedelics”

Since the very first LSD research 70 years ago, psychedelics have been claimed to provide unique access to otherwise inaccessible memories, including early childhood memories or repressed memories. Now, with the use of psychedelics growing clinically and in other contexts, reports are emerging of people recovering traumatic memories under psychedelics with sometimes therapeutic but other times distressing and confusing outcomes. In this talk, I discuss and evaluate claims made about psychedelics enhancing autobiographical memory recall and providing access to inaccessible memories, explore the question of whether psychedelics may instead increase potential for false memories, and present findings from a recent longitudinal survey study on memory experiences under psychedelics. I aim to present what we know and what we still need to know about recalling and processing life events under psychedelics and its potential therapeutic and problematic outcomes, and provide ideas for how clinicians working with psychedelics or with people who have taken psychedelics might best approach these issues.

Bio

Samuli Kangaslampi, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist, works as university lecturer in clinical psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, and as senior researcher at INVEST, University of Turku, both in Finland. He also acts as chairperson of the Finnish Psychotrauma Society, vice chairperson of the Finnish Association for Psychedelic Research, and board member of the Finnish Psychological Society.

His research focuses on psychological trauma and the treatment of trauma-related symptoms, stress and development, autobiographical memory, as well as psychedelics. In relation to psychedelics, he has published on mystical-type experiences, the potential application of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD to adolescents, methodological issues in psychedelic research, and on the effects of psychedelics on memories and memory recall.