Five (5) key points from the panel:

1. 1. The Price of Progress: Rapid advances in medicine and technology have delivered tangible benefits to us as a species, but they have also come with hidden costs. We are less connected to the wider ecosystem and to its natural cycles; The medicalisation of natural processes including death and birth has often placed them in a binary, pathological context. Instead of being seen as a potential rite of passage, death is viewed as a failure of care. Although it does not remove many of the emotional difficulties and challenges, shifting the cultural focus from cure to consciousness could help us to view these processes as a design feature, rather than a design flaw.
   
   
2. 2. Panoramic Perspectives: Paradigmatic shifts that allow us to holistically reintegrate into the cycles of life and death collectively re-humanize us, allowing us to grieve together in an embodied way. Demand for this shift is occurring at a point in time when the prevailing culture has become increasingly neoliberal and materialist. This has affected access to timely, qualitative end-of-life care, and altered our perspective of what a ‘good death’ might look like. There is evidence to suggest that the current cultural container does not have the capacity or resilience to work with the complexity of these intangible mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions.
   
   
3. 3. Nature and Nurture: The reorientation towards consciousness that is encouraged by psychedelic medicines is relevant to us all, not just those facing an end-of-life diagnosis. Transcendent experiences take time and preparation to integrate, with lessons that can be brought back into life. Neither are these benefits limited to the medicines themselves, as they are synergised by the warmth and care received within an environment of greater empathy, patience and connection. ‘Set and Setting’ needs to be re-evaluated on a systemic level beyond the scope of psychedelic intervention, especially if we are to avoid such medicines becoming just another thing on the conveyor belt of routinized care.
   
   
4. 4. Conscious of Contraindications: When it comes to screening, individuals must have the mental and physical capacity to cope with such treatments. This involves evaluating metabolic and cardiac functions, symptomatic management, and assessing degrees of psychological openness and resilience. When mitigating the risks of potentially challenging or overwhelming experiences, some factors to consider include levels of neuroticism, dose, relational background and previous experiences, embodied practices, and access to a like-minded religious, spiritual or existential community support network. An individual's willingness and ability to lean into these questions and perspectives also has to come from within, and cannot be externally encouraged or enforced. However while the current environment predominantly leans towards a modus operandi of striving and control, such processes often benefit from an ability to accept and to let go.
   
   
5. 5. Quality and Quantity: Finally, it may be that access to psychedelic care cannot be scaled in the traditional way. In spite of the demand, there is evidence to suggest that psychedelic-assisted care should not be rushed and rolled out en masse. In a society heavily focused on theoretical technicalities and qualifications - to have guides, practitioners or supervisors without any degree of personal experience is something that could present cause for concern; Sympathy is from the sidelines, but empathy is from experience. To medicalize and professionalize the nature of ritual, ceremony and community would take away from it, by transforming the nature of the question into something that it is not. For example, this could be akin to reducing an intangible holistic process like ‘love’ to its constituent hormones and molecules.