12 December 2025
Learning to Live and Die Well: Why I Started the Survivorship Collective
By: Anne Hamilton, J.D., MA
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV
Introduction: Illness, Fear, and the Search for Meaning
If you had told me six years ago that I would be running a nonprofit dedicated to psychedelic care for people facing life-threatening illness, I would not have believed you. At the time, I was so consumed with trying not to die, that I had forgotten how to live.
I am an advanced stage breast cancer survivor. Diagnosis, treatment, and recovery were brutal in ways that went far beyond the physical. The surgeries and chemotherapy were harrowing, but what nearly broke me was something people rarely name out loud: existential distress, sometimes described as death anxiety.
I was raised Catholic, with a deep respect for ritual, mystery, and contemplative practice, even when much of it was mediated through institutions. I went on to study philosophy and literature at Notre Dame and Stanford, then earned my law degree from Yale Law School and clerked for a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit. I became both an attorney and a filmmaker. On paper, my life looked solid.
Being diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer as a young adult shattered that narrative.
After the hospital lights dimmed and the doctors signed off, I was left alone with questions that echoed like a bell. Am I going to die young? What can I hope for if cancer might come back at any time? What does my life mean now that I have lost so much. That I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror.
On paper, I was a success story. Inside, I was living with a fear I could not outrun. Relationships felt inauthentic. Work lost meaning. Nights were sleepless, filled with panic and a creeping sense that reality had shifted irrecoverably. I tried therapy, meditation, medication, support groups. Some helped a little. The dread kept returning.
Then one morning at my kitchen table, coffee going cold, I read about clinical studies using psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients. At Johns Hopkins and NYU, participants reported large and sustained reductions in depression and anxiety, along with increased quality of life and meaning after a single dose of psilocybin given in a carefully supported setting. You can read two of the landmark studies here: the Johns Hopkins trial by Griffiths and colleagues and the NYU trial by Ross and colleagues.
Participants in these studies described facing mortality with less fear and more peace.
That possibility felt like oxygen.
The single psilocybin session I eventually experienced was one of the most profound experiences of my life. After, the world felt connected again. I was still me. Not just a patient or a survivor, but a whole human being. Later, I discovered that many people in my cancer community were suffering unnecessarily and wanted safe, legal pathways to healing.
That is why I founded the Survivorship Collective with other patients and survivors, with palliative care at the heart of everything we do.
Palliative care is often misunderstood as a synonym for hospice or imminent death. In reality it is an approach to relieve suffering at any stage of serious illness and to address physical, psychological, social, and spiritual distress. The World Health Organization defines palliative care as care that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing life-threatening illness. Psychedelic-assisted care can support this mission by helping people contact meaning, reduce fear, and reconnect with life when cure is uncertain and recurrence is an everyday shadow.
Facing Death Without Flinching
In the first year after treatment, I lived with what felt like a split screen in my mind. On one side was the possibility of dying young. On the other was the possibility of living decades more. I did not know which story I was in. The uncertainty was paralyzing. Often I prayed simply to outlive my parents so they would not bury a child.
Psychedelic therapy offered something different. The chance to sit directly with my mortality rather than run from it.
In my session, I watched my body disintegrate and die. My instinct was to resist. But slowly, as my facilitator reminded me to breathe, the fear began to shift. Death was no longer only a shadow waiting to devour me. It was a friend.
There is a strange metamorphosis that happens when you face death directly in a safe, supported environment. Death stops being a phantom at the edge of life and becomes a magnifying glass. Everything becomes more alive. My mother’s voice. The way light falls across a kitchen counter. Birds in the trees. All of it suddenly sacred.
This is what I wanted to share with others. Not only relief from anxiety but a transformation of perspective. Mortality becomes not the enemy but an essential part of life’s depth and beauty. Now, I genuinely believe that serious illness can be a doorway to profound, positive transformation.
The Birth of a Collective
The Survivorship Collective began not in a boardroom but in living rooms and hospital waiting rooms. A close friend living with metastatic breast cancer wanted a safe, legal way to access psilocybin to cope with end-of-life fear. A small group of us survivors gathered to try to make it possible.
What began as a circle of friends became a nonprofit led by and for patients and survivors. We saw clearly that people with serious illnesses needed more than medical treatment. They needed community, ritual, meaning-making, and spaces where their emotional and spiritual realities were not afterthoughts.
Today, we run a robust multi-week program that includes an option for a state-regulated psilocybin group ceremony experience with one of our licensed service center partners in Oregon, with expansion underway in Colorado and the Netherlands. These are not recreational experiences. They are carefully designed environments with medical screenings, safety plans, and oversight, where survivors and their loved ones can face fear, process grief, and rediscover joy.
Patient Voices from the Work
The heart of this work is not protocols. It is the voices of people who have walked through illness and emerged changed.
This year alone, we have hosted several retreats in Oregon, and in 2026 that will expand to Colorado and the Netherlands. We will soon publish a study on our outcomes. Survivors deserve more than anecdotes. They deserve data, rigor, and transparency, and we intend to contribute all three.
The stories are extraordinary. One young mother with metastatic breast cancer said her experience gave her “the strength to live with metastatic breast cancer.” Another participant told us that after years of feeling shut down emotionally, she laughed in her sleep for weeks. Families tell us they see their loved ones return more present, more open, and more emotionally available. When one person heals, the entire household changes.
The Science and the Sacred
Research reflects what these women describe. In addition to the Johns Hopkins and NYU cancer trials that showed rapid and sustained improvement in mood and anxiety, newer work is building on that foundation. A recent review in Cancers summarizes the use of psilocybin for depression among cancer patients, and a JAMA Oncology paper reviews psilocybin therapy for patients with cancer related distress. There is also emerging work on psilocybin enhanced group psychotherapy in serious illness, which aligns with what we see in our group-based retreats.
Interestingly, psycho-oncology has recently developed interventions explicitly focused on meaning. Meaning-centered group psychotherapy, grounded in the work of Viktor Frankl, has been shown to improve spiritual well-being and reduce despair in patients with advanced cancer. You can read about it in this clinical trial in advanced cancer and its adaptation for cancer survivors after treatment.
The overlap is striking and it reflects a huge need in cancer care. Whether through meaning-centered therapy or carefully supported psilocybin sessions, patients describe a shift from being consumed by fear to being anchored in purpose, connection, and a sense of something larger than the self.
In these meaning-making approaches to healing, preparation and integration are not side notes but core components. Thoughtful guides across the field emphasize that psychedelic sessions work best when embedded in a longer process of intention setting and follow-up support. A concise overview of that logic can be found in this discussion of preparation and integration in psychedelic therapy.
Building a Movement
Since our first retreat, the Survivorship Collective has grown into a network of survivors, caregivers, clinicians, and allies. We host psilocybin retreats with state-licensed, vetted partners, create individualized safety plans that integrate medical, psychological, and personal history, conduct qualitative research to capture patient experiences, and build community through integration circles and survivor leadership councils. You can watch a short video and learn more about our work on our website.
This is more than a program. It is a movement to reimagine palliative and cancer care. A movement that insists that spiritual and existential suffering deserve the same level of seriousness that we bring to chemotherapy regimens and clinical trial design.
A Call to Reimagine Care
The survivors in our community remind me that healing is not only about surviving disease. It is about finding meaning. Reclaiming joy. Rediscovering embodiment. Remembering that even in the midst of illness, life is sacred.
As writer Zadie Smith reflects in her essay on climate grief and the “new normal,” “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons”, there are shifts that reveal what we have taken for granted and what we stand to lose. Serious illness does something similar on the level of a single life. It strips away the illusion of endless time and asks, often quite frankly: What matters now.
Where Psychedelic Care Must Go
As access expands, it is becoming clear that medical buildings and therapist’s offices alone are not enough. For survivors, those spaces are often where the trauma happened. Survivors want healing in nature, in community, and in environments that feel grounded and organic rather than clinical. They want evidence-based practice that coexists with ritual, music, and belonging.
My hope is that we evolve toward full ecosystems of care, not isolated interventions. Healing takes time.
The Survivorship Collective began with patients helping one another. Today it is a movement calling for care led by patients, held by community, and grounded in both science and the sacred.
Palliative care is not only about dying well. It is about living fully in the time we have.
Learn more at survivorshipcollective.com
Anne Hamilton, J.D., MA
Anne Hamilton is the founder and executive director of The Survivorship Collective, the first non-profit connecting the cancer community to safe, legal, psychedelic-assisted therapies. After surviving advanced-stage cancer as a young adult, she became an advocate for better mental and spiritual care for cancer patients, survivors, and their loved ones. Hamilton is a former litigator, 9th Circuit Clerk, and a current member of the Psychedelic Bar Association. She has worked in government, with nonprofits, and in higher education as a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is a 2025 Mira Fellow, a certified mediator, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Stanford University, and is a graduate of Notre Dame and the American Film Institute.
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