The Right to Heal: Psilocybin and Queer Trauma

I’ve been to a lot of therapists over the years, whether it be due to changes in insurance or me just not finding a certain therapist to be a good fit. With that has come a number of different diagnoses for my myriad mental health issues. Some diagnoses I agree with more than others. One psychiatrist who specialized in OCD and had the logo for an OCD medication splashed all over her office suggested I have, you guessed it, OCD, and my insistence that I experience a lot of obsessions but very few compulsions didn’t stop her from prescribing me OCD medication. But the one that stuck with me the most is the person who said I appear to be suffering from some form of PTSD. That makes sense because I’m always on alert like I’m constantly in danger and preparing to fight or flight. But what trauma am I reacting to?

The main trauma in my life came from my mother’s death when I was 23, which certainly affected me heavily. But PTSD is usually associated with witnessing a traumatic event first-hand. My mother died several states away from me, and I was informed about it on the phone. Not to downplay that sort of trauma for others who have experienced it, but I always wondered why that would give me such a trauma response.

Our writer and contributor Jesse Proia, who works as an LGBTQ+-specialized psychotherapist, makes the argument queer people basically have some form of PTSD or C-PTSD because, as a people, we experience trauma on a regular basis. From the Pulse and Club Q shootings to the Trump administration’s attempts to erase queer people, there’s a lot of traumas that we share simply from being queer people in a queerphobic society. 

“Formally PTSD, according to the DSM, is fairly limited in its definition of what is or is not trauma,” explains Proia. “The Williams Institute National Crime Victimization survey states that LGBTQ+ people are five times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime. Being a victim of a violent crime would fall more clearly within the traditional concept of PTSD.

“The term Complex Trauma or C-PTSD is not yet recognized by the DSM but is used within trauma recovery and trauma-based-therapy worlds,” Proia continues. “For my therapeutic work with LGBTQ+ populations, I am always holding a C-PTSD lens, not just to be trauma informed, but also culturally reflective.”

In many ways, not being able to freely be myself until my 30s has resulted in a great deal of trauma for me, but so has the process of coming out. Since I initially came out in the mid-2010s, I have been misgendered and deadnamed constantly, derided online from countless transphobes, and I felt like my life was put in danger by how often trans people like myself are reported as murdered by the news media. 

“Already as a base line, our communities face countless microaggressions just existing in contemporary society,” says Proia. “Trans folks being misgendered and deadnamed, queer couples not being recognized, hearing anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech in the workplace or public. All of these are forms of erasure and invalidation that over years tell us we are not safe, unwanted or not valued. This falls more within C-PTSD as it is easily overlooked by cis-centric and heteronormative culture.”

So how do we treat this type of trauma? Personally, I believe that mental health issues should be treated with therapy first and foremost and then add medication if that seems the best for the situation. I’ve been in therapy for a long time and cycled through pretty much every SSRI on the market. There are only a few medications that have really helped me deal with my trauma responses. One is benzodiazepines, which I’ve since weaned myself off of because I started to abuse them and because they were starting to erase my memory when I used them. The other is psilocybin, which is pretty much the only drug that gives me the calm I’m looking for without me developing a problematic relationship to it.

“Psychedelic-assisted therapy, particularly psilocybin-assisted therapy, shows significant promise for treating trauma, including Complex PTSD (C-PTSD),” explains Sa’ed Al-Olimat, a Doctor of Pharmacy who is the co-founder and a board member of the Psychedelic Pharmacists Association. “While most clinical research to date has focused on conditions like major depressive disorder, treatment-resistant depression, and PTSD, the therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics such as enhanced neuroplasticity, increased emotional openness, and the potential for profound, often mystical experiences make them especially compelling for queer individuals healing from identity-based or systemic trauma. Although formal clinical trials specifically focused on LGBTQ+ populations are still lacking, both the theoretical rationale and growing anecdotal evidence are highly encouraging.”

Al-Olimat argues that psychedelics like psilocybin “can help the brain process trauma by creating the right conditions for emotional re-learning. They quiet down the default mode network, which is the part of the brain tied to rumination, negative self-talk, and re-experiencing painful memories. This makes space for new insights and perspectives to emerge.” Furthermore, they help with neuroplacticity, which Al-Olimat describes as, “the brain’s ability to form new connections. This is crucial because healing from trauma isn’t about forgetting what happened. It’s about learning not to fear the memory or automatically react in the same way. In neuroscience, this process is called fear extinction, which is essentially unlearning a trauma response by building new, safer associations. That kind of learning requires a brain that’s flexible, and that’s exactly what psychedelics may help with.”

With the laws regarding psychedelics rapidly changing, not only in Colorado, but in states across the country, I hold a lot of faith that access to psilocybin will help me and other queer people heal from the trauma that comes with being a queer person. One might say that, in a world that forces that trauma on us, one of the rights that queer people should be demanding is the right to use therapy that can help us heal. In that sense, the fight to legalize psychedelics for use in treating trauma is a battle for queer rights, and one that we can’t give up on.