By Anne Hamilton, JD, MA
When people talk about psychedelic therapy, the focus usually stays on depression, trauma, or neuroplasticity. These conversations matter, but they rarely touch the existential fear that defines the lives of people facing life-threatening illness. I write this not only as an attorney and psychedelic nonprofit executive director, but as someone who has lived this terrain myself as a cancer survivor.
I was raised Catholic and grew up with a respect for ritual and mystery, even when filtered through institutions. My early life followed a logical sequence. I studied at Notre Dame, earned a master’s degree at Stanford, graduated from Yale Law School, and clerked for a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit. My identity was built around structure and reasoning. Then, at thirty-five, I was diagnosed with Stage 3C breast cancer. I survived surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. From the outside, it looked like I had “won.”
In reality, surviving was the beginning of a psychological unraveling no one prepared me for.
The Unspoken Crisis in Cancer Care
Many survivors describe the same aftershock: fear of recurrence, dissociation, the loss of desire or identity, the sense that the body returned from battle but the self remained out of reach. Medicine treats the tumor but rarely the terror.
Women, in particular, often arrive at survivorship with a long history of being dismissed or minimized in clinical settings. These patterns do not disappear when they enter healing spaces, including psychedelic ones.
I tried everything that was available: therapy, SSRIs, meditation, exercise, support groups. Nothing reached the core. It was a carefully supported psilocybin session that allowed me to face mortality without collapsing under it. For the first time after treatment, I felt meaning return. I felt myself return.
That experience aligned with what researchers had already begun demonstrating. In the Johns Hopkins trial, people with life-threatening cancer experienced substantial and sustained reductions in depression and anxiety after a single psilocybin session.
The NYU team found similar long-term improvements in cancer-related distress.
Recent reviews in Cancers and JAMA Oncology continue to build on this evidence. Early work on psilocybin-enhanced group psychotherapy is beginning to mirror what many survivor communities report anecdotally.
Psycho-oncology has also shifted toward meaning-centered interventions, grounded in Viktor Frankl, which have improved spiritual well-being in both advanced cancer and survivors after treatment. Across these threads is a clear throughline: survivors need help with meaning, identity, belonging, and mortality.
Why I Founded a Survivor-Led Approach
In 2023, I looked around and saw that no one was building the kind of space survivors actually needed. Research was happening in universities. Retreats were happening abroad. But there was no survivor-centered ecosystem that brought safety, legality, lineage, and long-term integration together. Nothing grounded in lived experience.
So a small group of us, all survivors ourselves, did what survivors have always done. We created what we needed. Initially, we came together simply to help a friend. What began as an act of care has grown into a movement. Survivors are shaping the model. Peer leadership is emerging. Cultural lineages are being honored in ways that go beyond performance. And participants are demonstrating, over and over, that meaning and presence can return after years of shutdown.
Patients and Survivors Need a Different Model
Many psychedelic settings unintentionally recreate the same unhealthy power dynamics survivors already face in medicine. Work with people living with cancer and serious illness requires humility and real caution. Yet a pattern appears again and again: someone has a profound psychedelic experience and suddenly believes they are “called” to offer it to others, as though insight alone qualifies them to hold profoundly vulnerable people.
This is not care. It is ego. And for those navigating illness — women and men, and especially young women — it can feel unsafe.
Survivors do not need to be managed, molded, or guided by someone else’s revelations. We do not need facilitators, clinicians, or doctors whose personal awakening becomes the organizing force of the space. And we especially do not need well-meaning newcomers positioning themselves as leaders in a field they have not yet contributed to or been shaped by.
What we need is to be trusted. To be listened to. To be in environments built around our boundaries, our wisdom, and our lived reality.
What Survivors Need From This Field
Across survivor communities, several themes appear consistently:
- The ability to speak about mortality plainly.
Survivors benefit when facilitators meet mortality with steadiness rather than reassurance. That requires presence, not talk therapy. - Facilitation grounded in humility, not personal revelation.
Survivors are highly sensitive to ego, projection, and spiritual bypassing. Insight alone does not prepare someone to hold people who have lived with serious illness. - Approaches that combine evidence with culture and ceremony.
Preparation, supported sessions, and integration matter. So do music, ritual, and lineage. Many survivors respond best when these threads coexist. - Community and continuity.
A single psychedelic session can open the door to healing, but the return to daily life requires weeks or months of integration and shared inquiry. - Environments that feel alive rather than clinical.
Medical buildings often trigger memories of diagnosis. Survivors gravitate toward nature-based or community-rooted spaces where their bodies can finally relax. - Cultural and ethical accountability.
Survivors increasingly ask for clarity around training, lineage, compensation, and scope of practice.
These are not programmatic features. They are patterns emerging across the field as survivors articulate what safety and belonging actually mean.
What We Are Seeing as Access Expands
Across research settings, regulated centers, and community programs, similar shifts are beginning to appear. Survivors describe a return of presence after years of numbness. Some rediscover humor. Some reconnect with partners or children. One young mother with metastatic disease told us her experience “gave me the strength to live with metastatic breast cancer.” Another participant laughed in her sleep for weeks afterward.
The demand reflects this reality. Survivorship Collective now has a waitlist of more than one hundred people. We are running twelve retreats next year and expanding to as many as thirty in 2027. All of this has happened entirely through word of mouth. We do not advertise. People come because of our reputation, our ethics, and because the need is enormous.
The stories are powerful, but they also highlight the need for ongoing rigor, thoughtful pacing, and humility as this work expands. Scaling survivor-informed care will take time. It raises questions about access, cost, training, and cultural accountability. These challenges are real, and acknowledging them makes the work stronger, not weaker.
Where the Field Must Go
If psychedelic care is to meet the needs of people living with serious illness, we will need ecosystems rather than isolated interventions. Survivors benefit when research and ritual collaborate. When clinical knowledge and cultural lineage inform one another. When community holds the work long after the session ends.
Healing after serious illness is not a single moment. It is a long return.
A Closing Reflection
I am grateful to Psychedelics Today for making space for this conversation. If you are a survivor, clinician, facilitator, researcher, caregiver, or someone who has walked this terrain yourself, I hope this piece opens a path for further dialogue.
The future of psychedelic care for serious illness will not be built by one group or one perspective, but by a community willing to listen, adapt, and keep survivors at the center.
Learn more at survivorshipcollective.com.
