Harvard Just Said What Integration Coaches Have Known for Years: Psychedelic Experiences Need Spiritual Support

You have one of the most important experiences of your life.

The boundaries of your self dissolve. You encounter something. God, the void, an overwhelming love, a terror that rewrites your understanding of existence. It lasts minutes or hours, and when you come back, everything looks the same. You're not.

And then someone asks you to rate your anxiety on a scale of 1 to 10.

This is the gap that Harvard Divinity School just put a name to. It's about time someone did.

The problem Harvard found

In February 2026, Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) published findings from their multi-year investigation into psychedelic care in the United States. What they found shouldn't surprise anyone who's done this work. It carries weight when Harvard says it, though.

Here's what they found: Most psychedelic facilitator training programs acknowledge that spiritual experiences are central to psychedelic therapy. Most of them don't actually train people to work with those experiences.

The study, led by Dr. Roman Palitsky of Emory University and Dr. Caroline Peacock of Emory Spiritual Health, reviewed 13 established training programs across the country. The barriers were consistent: not enough time, not enough expertise among instructors, and no clear best practices for what they call SERT care (spiritual, existential, religious, and theological support).

Even in Oregon and Colorado, where regulatory frameworks for psilocybin facilitation now exist, spiritual care competencies remain "largely unaddressed."

As Palitsky put it: "Training competent psychedelic facilitators will be absolutely essential to any rollout of psychedelic care in the U.S."

Half the patients left alone

The numbers that stuck with me came from Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital in Boston, where Harvard Divinity School students served as chaplaincy interns with ketamine patients.

Only about half of the patients receiving ketamine treatment connected with the chaplaincy interns before or after their sessions.

The other half processed their experiences on their own.

Sit with that for a second. These are people receiving a dissociative psychedelic in a clinical setting. A substance that regularly produces altered states of consciousness, ego dissolution, and experiences that patients themselves describe as spiritual or religious. Half of them had no one trained to help them make sense of what happened.

This isn't a ketamine problem. This is a systemic gap in how we think about psychedelic care.

Why clinical support alone isn't enough

Research has consistently shown that the spiritual dimension of psychedelic experiences isn't a side effect. It's often the mechanism of healing.

A Johns Hopkins study found that 61% of participants receiving moderate-to-high doses of psilocybin reported complete mystical experiences, compared to 4% in the control group. These mystical experiences were the strongest predictor of lasting therapeutic benefit. At 14-month follow-up, participants who had the deepest spiritual experiences during their sessions rated them among the most personally meaningful experiences of their entire lives.

The science is clear: the spiritual experience and the therapeutic one are the same thing.

Our care infrastructure treats them as different worlds. Clinicians check vital signs and screen for adverse reactions. Therapists process emotions and behavioral patterns. The spiritual dimension, the thing that actually drives the transformation, gets a polite nod and nothing more.

What Harvard is building

To their credit, Harvard isn't stopping at the diagnosis. They're building something.

Jeffrey Breau, program lead of Psychedelics and Spirituality at the CSWR, is one of the pioneers of what they're calling "psychedelic chaplaincy." He completed an internship providing ketamine integration chaplaincy at Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital and now leads the CSWR's effort to establish professional competencies, training protocols, and standards of care for spiritual support in psychedelic settings.

In 2025, the CSWR ran two intensive workshops:

• September: Clinical settings. Therapists, hospital chaplains, and medical practitioners.

• December: Community settings. Psychedelic churches, plant medicine groups, and recreational contexts.

The December workshop drew participants from across the United States and as far as the Netherlands.

They're also conducting IRB-approved research with chaplaincy students, medical residents, and patients to study the efficacy of psychedelic chaplaincy. Their goal: develop approaches that work for ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, and other psychedelics as they become more widely available.

Laura Tuach, assistant dean for Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School, noted that requests for field internships in psychedelic chaplaincy have grown since the pandemic. "I feel the field will continue to grow because chaplains know the language of support, and can help patients with their spiritual and existential experiences."

What this means for integration coaches

I want to be honest about why this matters to me personally.

I'm a certified 5-MeO-DMT integration specialist. I work with men who've had life-altering psychedelic experiences and need help making sense of what happened. The emotional part, yes. The spiritual part even more. The men I work with aren't looking for someone to adjust their medication or teach them coping skills. They're looking for someone who understands that when you experience ego death and encounter the infinite, "How does that make you feel?" isn't the right question.

Integration coaching exists because this gap exists.

What Harvard is doing validates something that practitioners in this space have known for years: you can't separate the spiritual from the therapeutic in psychedelic work. The experience is inherently spiritual for most people who go through it. Pretending otherwise, or not having the tools to address it, is a failure of care.

A Harvard program formalizing this, building training protocols, and publishing peer-reviewed research means the broader medical and therapeutic establishment may finally start taking spiritual care in psychedelic settings seriously.

The bigger picture

We're at an inflection point. Oregon and Colorado have legalized psilocybin services. The FDA has granted breakthrough therapy designations for psilocybin and MDMA. Clinical trials are expanding. A growing number of people are seeking psychedelic experiences outside of clinical settings, through churches, underground practitioners, and personal exploration.

These people will have spiritual experiences. Many of them will have the most important spiritual experiences of their lives. Right now, the infrastructure to support them through those experiences barely exists.

Harvard's psychedelic chaplaincy program is a step in the right direction. One program at one university. The real work, the daily person-to-person work of helping someone integrate a psychedelic experience that shattered their understanding of reality, is happening in integration coaching sessions, men's circles, and communities around the country.

If you've had a psychedelic experience that changed something fundamental about how you see yourself or the world, and you're still trying to figure out what to do with that: you're not alone. The fact that Harvard is now studying why you need support isn't news to the people already providing it.

It's just nice to have the backup.