Psychedelics, Madness, & Awakening Conference: An Interview with Tehseen Noorani and Erica Hua Fletcher

So Many Wings

Join us for a conversation with Tehseen Noorani and Erica Hua Fletcher where we discuss the origins and highlights of the Psychedelics, Madness, and Awakening Conference, as well as each interviewee’s personal research and links to these subjects.

Topics we cover include:

• Why madness is excluded from psychedelic therapy and left outside the emerging conversation, and how to involve mad folks in these conversations
• Community harm reduction responses to spiritual awakening, and harm reduction with psychedelics
• The consequences of psychedelic exclusion criteria
• How themes of overground and underground experimentation and healing show up in each participant’s research
• And more!

About Tehseen Noorani and Erica Hua Fletcher:

Tehseen is an independent researcher in the final stages of a five-year postdoctoral project documenting how 'psychedelic' and ‘psychotic’ experiences, practices and histories are connected. This has involved an ethnography of the overground and underground experimentation happening with, (1) psychedelics, including leading qualitative research with the psychedelics research team at Johns Hopkins University, and (2) madness, including as a long-standing ally of the Hearing Voices Network, and more recent membership of the Hearing The Voice project. His book - planned for publication in 2021 - puts these twinned sites into conversation, locating their joint possibilities within the raced and gendered politics of contemporary drug-taking and spirit-making.

Erica is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the co-chair of the Society for Medical Anthropology's Mental Health Interest Group. Over the last decade, she has worked closely with community members, peer support specialists, and community health workers on collaborative alternatives to traditional psychiatric treatment. Erica writes about contemporary mental health social movements, community health and healing, and carework; her scholarship spans the health humanities, social medicine, and mad studies.

About the Conference: Psychedelics, Madness, & Awakening: Harm Reduction & Future Visions

To watch recorded presentations and panel discussions with the Psychedelics, Madness, and Awakening’s conference, check out the PMA website: http://www.psychedelicsmadnessawakening.com

Find Tehseen online:

• On Twitter @tehseennoorani
• To download Tehseen’s articles: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tehseen-Noorani-2

Find Erica online:

• On the web: https://ericahua.weebly.com
• On Instagram @erica.hua
• To download Erica’s articles: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Erica_Fletcher3

Links to relevant resources:

• Anthropology & Mental Health Interest Group: http://amhig.medanthro.net
• Alternatives Conference: https://www.alternatives-conference.org
• Hearing Voices conference: http://hearingvoicesnetworkireland.ie/intervoice-congress-2021/

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