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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Belgium, this paper examines the emergence of psychedelic-assisted therapy by analysing how scientists, therapists, activists, and legislators negotiate knowledges, practices, legitimacy, and authority, and how competing conceptions of mental health are articulated.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the emergence of psychedelic-assisted therapy as a field of mental health in Belgium through an ethnographic study of the various social groups involved in the definition of the knowledges, techniques, and practices that constitute it. Bringing together a wide range of actors – mainly, scientists, underground and aboveground therapists, as well as activists and lobbyists, legislators, and patients – with diverse knowledges, interests, and understandings of mental health and healing, this new field is marked by tensions and controversies across the medical, economic, social, and political spheres, making it a valuable site for examining broader transformations in the domain of mental health. More specifically, this paper investigates two dimensions. First, it aims to study the different types of knowledges and practices held and enacted by these groups in Belgium, looking at how they are shaped through transnational circulations and through their interactions. It examines how these knowledges and practices are legitimised, as well as the tensions, boundaries, and hierarchies arising from the confrontation of distinct epistemologies and ontologies – asking which types of knowledge and practices are deemed valid, legitimate, and authoritative enough to inform legal and potentially reimbursed therapies. Second, it explores how various conceptions of mental health (biomedical, psychosocial, spiritual, somatic, etc.) and healing are maintained, contested, or transformed across these various groups. Hence, the tensions and contestations in these two dimensions provide a window to study the broader crisis in scientific authority and knowledge production in Global North societies today.