Traumadelic Book Release

How Trauma Culture Hijacked the Psychedelic Revolution and What We Can Do About It

I haven’t been posting much new writing here lately because I’ve been busy re-working, editing and designing a new collection of essays entitled Traumadelic: Re-Visioning Psychedelic Therapy (How Trauma Culture Hijacked the Psychedelic Revolution and What We Can Do About It.)

Since I started publishing my critical analyses of trauma culture and mainstream psychedelic therapy a couple years ago, people have been telling me, “this should be a book.” I’ve also noticed that some folks in the psychedelic space have been using the term “traumadelic” without attributing it to me, so I thought it was important to stake my claim.

Plus, I get the sense that there’s a growing skepticism toward the lofty promises of mainstream psychedelic therapy and trauma therapy gurus, so it seems a good time for a critical look and re-visioning of the whole endeavour. To paraphrase one of my guiding lights James Hillman, we’ve had 60 years of psychedelic therapy and the world’s getting even worse.

I think this little book will be a nice complement to Catherine Liu’s new book Traumatized that will be published next year — one from an outside/insider in the psychedelic therapy space, and the other from an academic cultural critic. I’m hoping to have Catherine on my podcast in January.

Traumadelic is now available on Amazon worldwide, and you can find links to purchase at http://traumadelicbook.com. Any reviews are greatly appreciated, and I’ll be available for podcasts and interviews in the new year.

Here’s the book description from the back cover:

This new collection of essays explores the ways in which trauma culture has hijacked the psychedelic revolution, co-opting substances traditionally used for divination, healing, and mind expansion, and using them to reinforce systems of disempowerment and control.

Inspired by James Hillman’s critical analysis of psychotherapy in the 1990s, Brian James puts psychedelic therapy on the proverbial couch and gives it a taste of its own medicine: challenging the limiting beliefs that form its central doctrine, and prescribing a treatment plan to put the soul back into psychedelics.

Thanks for your support,

Brian