This short bonus clip is from Reconnect, the London Real documentary in which Brian Rose takes part in three ayahuasca ceremonies in Costa Rica with Dennis McKenna. It looks at the role some believe ayahuasca can play in mental health, and at what Brian found when he faced his own anxiety in ceremony.
Dennis echoes the Rolling Stones to explain how the medicine works: “You don’t always get what you want with ayahuasca but you always get what you need.” He says psychedelics disrupt the brain’s default mode network, so the ego steps aside and you notice what you usually ignore.
Brian arrives at Soltara admitting that he sometimes feels anxious and unappreciative of what he has. His first ceremony shows him to be grateful. His second, after a stronger brew, is far harder: he sees himself as a seven-year-old boy at the time of his parents’ divorce, building walls to keep people out, and realises how much his drive to achieve has cost his family.
Back in London, Dr Gabor Maté helps him trace his restlessness to one question: “am I enough?”
This clip is part of the bonus material for Reconnect. Watch the full film.
0:00 You don’t always get what you want with ayahuasca, but you always get what you need. In an epidemic of depression, the rates of depression are going up all the time. Our current model for dealing with it is not working. 300 million people with depression around the world. You have a suicide rate that’s climbing rapidly.
0:29 And mental health care has very few tools to address this. Anti-depressants are like taking a painkiller for a toothache. It just, it numbs the pain, but the infection is still there. It’s a kind of temporary numbing thing rather than a deep treatment, so it’s not supposed to be for life. But people often stay on them because when they try to come off them, the withdrawal can be absolutely horrific.
0:55 We’re giving people psychiatric drugs that are incredibly toxic, much more toxic than LSD or psilocybin. It’s not just about psychedelics. It’s not just about psilocybin or any of the others. a new way of approaching our suffering and rather than numbing and taking a tablet it’s about going towards the suffering. The evidence is there that these compounds used in the right professional way can be very helpful. Something’s going on, the culture is ready to have this conversation.
1:44 Although the plants take longer and sometimes the process is more challenging, more difficult, that actually cures the root cause, it doesn’t just cover the symptoms. What we don’t understand about psychedelics is a very thick book. they can help you orient yourself morally, but look the hell out. Trauma, you didn’t intend for that, but it hits you and it’s pivotal. What happens now is gonna change your life.
2:34 And typically, you know, it goes in an awful direction. It was probably the most intense ceremonies that I’ve been through. It took me back to some points in my life where there were pivotal points, I feel like. suffering depression and anxiety. The roots of it is a 13-year-old boy that lost his father. I was shown on a different level that hadn’t really dealt with that. Child trauma which does not have to be overt, it does not have to be dramatic. It can simply be when your knees aren’t met and you have to constrict yourself as a result and trauma simply means a wound. It’s an unhealed wound.
3:24 With psychedelics, what you’re doing is you’re providing this window of opportunity, another pivot state. It’s a chance to kind of go again. In a way, the irony is that you have to go back to go forwards. I think that ayahuasca shows us information and then it’s our job to interpret and process and heal. One of the biggest misconceptions is that it’s a silver bullet, that it will fix everything and that when you process something with ayahuasca it’s it’s done. You’ve healed it. You don’t think that that’s true. Some of the hardest work is when you go home. You don’t always get what you want with ayahuasca but you always get what you need.
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