Veronika Gold's unsuccessful request for corrections

After a year of attacks, the core of my critique of MDMA-assisted therapy passed a review by the editorial board at The American Journal of Bioethics.

On April 22, 2025, I felt an unprecedented sense of relief when two related emails appeared in my inbox. The first was support for my work from Jules Evans in Ecstatic Integration — the first explicit, public endorsement of my bioethics work on the dangers of “facilitated communication” that I had seen in the psychedelic field:

“Psychedelic culture is a bubble in which Dionysian ethics prevail – high doses, fuzzy boundaries, harms not talked about or rationalized with pseudo-spirituality, and guru-figures claiming deep spiritual wisdom and a license to do whatever they want. And Nese Devenot is right - guides are sometimes taught that they magically know what a client needs, as in Facilitated Communication. Maybe they need to be groped. People get caught up in this Dionysian bubble and don’t necessarily realize how weird and, sometimes, dangerous it is…. You can be the victim of ethical transgressions, or you can be the perpetrator, even with the noblest intentions.”

Nine things you should know before entering the psychedelic industry

The second was a major decision from the editorial board of The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), which had published the core of my critique of MDMA-assisted therapy (MDMA-AT) as a bioethics commentary in January 2025: “Focused Bodywork as Facilitated Communication: Cautionary Perspectives on Touch in Psychedelic Therapy.”

MDMA-AT as facilitated communication for the "inner healing intelligence"

In March — a month prior to their decision — the editors at AJOB forwarded me a request for corrections to my commentary from Veronika Gold, the MAPS Phase 3 therapist, trainer, and supervisor who advocated for the use of a “safe word” to moderate psychodramatic enactments of struggle with therapists during altered states of consciousness. In response to this request, I assembled a document with extensive supporting detail for all of my claims.

As I waited for the editorial board to review the materials and deliberate, the decision felt high-stakes. Since last summer, I had been hounded by harassment and threats for supposedly misrepresenting MDMA-AT and “lying” to the FDA about this analysis, driven by a desire to sabotage the psychedelic industry. (This false narrative was eventually formalized in the New York Times hit piece against me and Psymposia by Andrew Jacobs and Rachel Nuwer.)

Reading Psymposia's response to the NYTimes hit piece

On April 22, I received the verdict from the editorial board: my original commentary would not be corrected. In addition to standing behind my commentary, the editors invited me to respond publicly to Gold’s letter for a future issue of the journal.

More than a year after this saga began, Gold’s letter and my response were just published today. This marks the first time my analysis has undergone rigorous review by leading bioethicists outside the psychedelic field.

This is a significant development, since the support from AJOB’s editorial board contradicts the narrative presented in Jacobs and Nuwer’s New York Times article. Instead, it reinforces the position of Jamie Brownlee and Kevin Walby — the authors of Psychedelic Capitalism — as they recently stated to Columbia University Press:

“This backlash [against FDA’s MDMA-AT decision] included a hit piece in the New York Times that placed most of the blame on the activist group Psymposia. We have a different interpretation. In our view, the interventions by Psymposia and others represented a principled stance. They were concerned about the direction of the field and potential harms to vulnerable populations.”

On AJOB’s website, the opening lines of Gold’s letter to the editor are visible above the paywall:

“I am requesting a correction to the article “Focused Bodywork as Facilitated Communication: Cautionary Perspectives on Touch in Psychedelic Therapy” by Neşe Devenot (Citation2025). The article contains factual inaccuracies and mischaracterizations creating professional and ethical concerns regarding the portrayal of trauma-informed somatic therapy in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

“I am a trained psychotherapist with advanced trauma training.¹ While it is unlikely that the nuances and details of trauma-informed somatic treatments and interventions could be fully appreciated by those without specialized training and relevant licensure, the failure to acknowledge these limitations underscores the lack of due diligence in representing these important issues as well as in accurately representing my work.”

My response to Gold’s letter is open access, and I will also include the full text below.

Note: The Version of Record of the following manuscript has been published and is available in American Journal of Bioethics, 7 Jul 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2526976

Response to Veronika Gold’s Letter to the Editor

Veronika Gold’s objections with my commentary are not based on factual errors, but rather on discomfort with how her own words and actions have been critically examined. By framing her response as a request for correction, she attempts to obscure legitimate ethical critique under the guise of factual dispute.^[1] As Gold’s letter demonstrates, MAPS/Lykos’ training culture empowered therapists to override verbal refusals of touch when they believe these refusals are part of “trauma processing.” Since this is precisely the mechanism that enabled the on-camera assault during MAPS/Lykos’ Phase 2 clinical trial of MDMA-assisted therapy (MDMA-AT) in Vancouver, these methods cannot be ethically deployed in clinical settings.

In her letter, Gold justifies continuing physical resistance with a patient undergoing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) who angrily exclaimed, “Get your fucking hands away from me!” As she acknowledges in the original case study, the patient pushed Gold’s hands away “with increasing vigor and force” over the course of “several minutes” while Gold continued to physically engage the patient (Gold 2024, 116). In defending this account, Gold asserts that she was responding to the patient’s “inner process” and using her clinical judgment to discern the difference between literal refusal and symbolic enactment directed at a traumatic perpetrator. This claim—which relies on the same faulty epistemology as facilitated communication (FC)—depends on the assumption that therapists can intuitively know what the patient really means, even when the patient is saying the opposite.

Despite Gold’s contention that I mischaracterized and mislabeled her actions, Gold’s intervention clearly meets the definition of focused bodywork as used in MDMA-AT. In a 2024 paper co-authored by Gold, the authors cite version 8.1 of MAPS’s therapy manual to characterize the Phase 3 clinical trials:

“As part of the FDA approval process, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has created a detailed treatment manual for MDMA-AT that will presumably guide the dissemination of the therapy should it be approved for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.... The manual cites that the principles guiding the use of touch are based on those of Stanislov Grof, an early researcher of psychedelic psychotherapy.” (Luoma et al. 2024, 26)

The cited therapy manual contains this definition of “focused bodywork”: “Throughout this manual, ‘focused bodywork’ is used to refer to touch in the form of giving resistance for the participant to push against” (Mithoefer 2017, 13). In Gold’s letter, she describes her actions in identical terms: “I described providing resistance for my client to push against, not a struggle.” Gold’s technique clearly qualifies as “focused bodywork” within this therapeutic model, which she has acknowledged as the foundation of her ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) practice.^[2] Furthermore, Gold’s use of a “safe word” system is identical to the guidelines for focused bodywork in the MAPS therapy manual:

“[Participants] should be asked to use the word “Stop” (or some comparable alternative word if it is preferred by the participant) if there is ever any touch the participant does not want…. This convention will avoid confusion between communications that are meant to be directed to the therapists and statements that are expressions of the participant’s inner experience.” (Mithoefer 2017, 19)

Gold’s own statements further confirm that her methods are rooted not only in the MAPS therapy manual but also in the Grofian tradition from which these practices originate. In a 2019 podcast, Gold explicitly acknowledged using Grofian focused bodywork to accentuate somatic “symptoms of trauma” in MAPS’s clinical trials: “In the MDMA clinical trials, we use more of the same bodywork as Stan taught in holotropic breathwork and the LSD Psychotherapy book” (Psychedelics Today 2019). In the referenced book—which was published by MAPS—Stanislav Grof refers to that focused bodywork technique as “psychodramatic enactment of struggle,” which “might require physical strength and be better suited to a male therapist” (Grof 2008, 141). He characterizes the client’s reexperiencing of trauma as “dramatic emotional abreaction,” which is often marked by intense physical reactions such as “screaming, violent choking, coughing, and profuse secretion of enormous amounts of thick, greenish nasal discharge” (Grof 2008, 290). Grof explicitly endorses the use of focused bodywork to intensify these episodes—even to the point of “inflicting” physical pain—as a means of facilitating emotional release (Grof 2008, 196).

Gold’s acknowledgements of Grof’s influence invites a closer examination of how Grof describes and justifies focused bodywork in his writings. In Beyond the Brain, Grof presents an account with striking similarities to Gold’s technique, including the reliance on a “safe word”:

“The function of the facilitators is to follow the energy flow, amplify the existing processes and sensations, and encourage their full experience and expression.... The facilitators provide resistance if the client feels like pushing against something. By rhythmical pressure or massage they can encourage gagging and coughing spasms to the point of breakthrough vomiting or discharge of mucus…. The client has the option to interrupt all the external intervention by a specific agreed-upon signal. We ourselves use the word “stop”; this is considered to be an absolutely mandatory and imperative message for the facilitators to stop any activity…. Any other reactions of the subject are then ignored and are considered part of the experience. Such statements as “You are killing me,” “It hurts,” “Don’t do this to me,” unless they come in connection with the word “stop,” are taken as reactions to the symbolic protagonists, whether they be parental figures, archetypal entities, or persons from a past incarnation sequence…. It is important to use one’s judgment as to what constitutes a reasonable amount of pressure or pain.” (Grof 1985, 382–84)

Grof claims that therapists, by attuning to “the nature and the content of the experience that is unfolding,” may deliberately inflict pain by embodying a symbolic perpetrator. As an example, he describes using “localized finger pressure” to intensify pain during a perceived past-life regression involving “a wound inflicted by a sword, lance, or dagger” (Grof 1985, 383).

As these examples demonstrate, Gold’s request for corrections hinges on semantic disputes rather than factual inaccuracies, and her own descriptions support my critique. In her letter, Gold writes: “I was not applying force over the client, but rather offering resistance for the client to push against.” This distinction is meaningless, since resistance necessarily involves the application of force. Whether one describes this as “applying force” or “offering resistance,” the fundamental reality remains unchanged: the therapist is physically engaging with the client to accentuate sensations linked to traumatic events, in a context characterized by a profound power imbalance, where the patient’s capacity to consent has been diminished by a drug known to impair verbal recall (Kloft et al. 2022). This practice has no empirical justification and exposes patients to an undisclosed risk of retraumatization.

My commentary demonstrates that MDMA-AT was built on Grofian concepts, including the death-rebirth process and the use of focused bodywork to support symbolic trauma resolution. Descriptions of MAPS/Lykos’ therapy continue to reference therapist attunement, dynamic responsiveness to transpersonal states, and the use of body-based interventions (O’Donnell et al. 2024). Denying the presence of these practices in the MDMA trials does not remove the lineage or the training culture that shaped them. These methods are pseudoscientific, and the lack of transparency about their use in clinical trials represents a profound ethical failure. Drawing on Lutz and Sisti’s call for bioethicists to publicly reject pseudoscientific practices that endanger vulnerable populations, I argue that the psychedelic field cannot continue to excuse or obscure these dangers in the name of community loyalty or exceptionalism (Cohen and Marks 2025; Cheung et al. 2025).

Due to the presence of the pseudoscientific practices endorsed by Gold and other MAPS trainers, it is undeniable that MAPS/Lykos’ Phase 3 informed consent document included false information about the risks of its therapy model: “The psychotherapy and interviews you have during the study involve no specific risks or discomforts beyond those of a standard psychotherapy or a clinical interview situation” (Lykos Therapeutics 2020). MAPS/Lykos did not disclose that the risks of “focused bodywork” and “nurturing touch” far exceed the expected risks of psychotherapy.

Real science is built on the principles of transparency, replicability, and external review, and expertise in pseudoscientific therapy does not inoculate a practitioner from critical scrutiny. Practices that cannot withstand scrutiny from those outside its own self-reinforcing belief system do not belong in the practice of medicine, let alone in treatments for conditions that disproportionately impact the most vulnerable populations. Bioethics scholarship is fundamentally concerned with interrogating power dynamics, interpretive authority, and the epistemic risks posed by insular professional paradigms. My analysis reflects these scholarly responsibilities.

Footnotes:

^[1] Gold has repeated minimized my critique by mischaracterizing her therapeutic practices in the media. In a discredited New York Times article, she presented a misleading demonstration of her case study intervention, showing both herself and a patient stand-in seated upright (Jacobs and Nuwer 2025; MacBride 2025). However, her own earlier statements contradict this portrayal. In a 2019 podcast, Gold explained that her clients “lie down in a bed” during ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP), even when she applies somatic bodywork at lower doses (Psychedelics Today 2019). Gold’s pattern of selectively framing her methods to different audiences raises questions about her credibility.

^[2] In a 2020 podcast, Gold confirmed that her KAP practice was modeled on the MAPS MDMA-AT protocol: “Polaris [Gold’s KAP clinic] really came from this deep friendship of five of us who were working on the MAPS clinical trials and, you know, witnessing these transformations, and the healing potential of the medicine, and the desire to begin work with the medicine [ketamine] now [e.g., before MDMA is approved]” (The Psychedelic Therapy Podcast 2020).