Psychedelics & Mental Health: What Does it Mean to Get Better?

Psychedelics in Society & Culture | Initiative-Supported Event A Conversation with Clinicians Julie Holland, Liam Modlin, and Franklin King About the Event Psychedelics are not like most other mental health interventions. They expose assumptions about where problems live, who holds expertise, what counts as health, and what kind of futures we are building through medicine. The rise in interest in psychedelics exposes something more fundamental about the field of mental health: diagnoses and prescriptions are rising, yet there is much disagreement about causes and what treatment should look like. Who gets to decide, how, and why? This event is part of the Social Life of Psychedelics talk series. What do psychedelics reveal about the people and culture who work with them? Psychedelics shape society, politics, religions, law, music, or medicine. They gain their power not just from their psychopharmacology, but from the many ways that people use them: to influence others, form relationships and identities, negotiate hierarchies, imagine futures, and create transformative social worlds. This talk series will use psychedelics as a probe to consider the assumptions, desires, and imaginations of cultural ecosystems. Social Life of Psychedelics talks will take place every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the spring 2026 semester in the Thompson Room (Barker Center 110). Contact Amadeus Harte with any questions. About the Speakers Liam Modlin, PhD, is a clinician and researcher specialising in complex mental health. At Compass Pathways, he serves as Director of Clinical Care Research & Training for PTSD, where he shapes provider training and contributes to research and service models aimed at setting future standards in the field. He integrates research, training, and applied clinical knowledge to design and implement trauma-informed approaches to participant support in psilocybin clinical trials, improving participant safety and care quality. In previous roles at King’s College London (IoPPN), he worked as a research therapist, investigator, and lecturer on psychedelic clinical trials, leading training, supervision, and care-model development. Franklin King, MD, is a Psychiatrist and Director of Training and Education at the Center for Neuroscience of Psychedelics, Massachusetts General Hospital. His focuses include the implementation and innovation in psychedelic-assisted therapies and utilization of PAT for functional medical conditions. He is currently the Principal Investigator in a study of psilocybin-assisted therapy for IBS and is Co-Investigator for a study on the effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for fibromyalgia. With colleagues, he is also co-developing a training initiative, the Harvard Interdisciplinary Program in Psychedelics. Julie Holland, MD, is a psychiatrist and author. Her five books, include NYT Bestseller Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER, a memoir documenting her experience as the weekend attending of the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. An advocate for the appropriate use of consciousness expanding substances as part of mental health treatment, she is a medical monitor for MAPS studies, which involve, in part, developing psychedelics into prescription medication.

Number of Attendees: 50