Psychedelic Practitioner Training: Advanced

Thinking about how training can evolve alongside the field

The landscape around psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted care is changing.

Research continues to develop. Interest from healthcare professionals is growing. Regulation and policy are beginning to emerge. And across Europe, questions are increasingly being asked about how psychedelic-assisted approaches might eventually sit within established healthcare systems.

These are questions we are thinking about at ETI too.

In particular, we are interested in what this changing landscape might mean for the way practitioners are educated and trained.

Training for an evolving landscape

ETI’s current practitioner training has been developed for the landscape we work within today.

It supports facilitators and practitioners who want to work safely, ethically and responsibly around psychedelic experiences, with a strong emphasis on preparation, facilitation, integration, screening, boundaries and relational practice.

That is not the same as training someone to deliver a recognised psychedelic treatment pathway within healthcare.

Future clinical models are likely to bring additional requirements around professional scope, clinical assessment, prescribing, governance, multidisciplinary working, supervision and accountability.

But there will also be important areas of overlap.

Skills such as building trust, preparing people well, understanding risk, navigating challenging experiences, maintaining boundaries and supporting integration are likely to remain relevant across many different settings.

The question for us is not how one existing training programme becomes the training for the future.

It is how different forms of training can continue to develop for the different roles, settings and responsibilities that emerge.

What are we training towards?

This creates something of a chicken-and-egg problem.

If psychedelic-assisted treatments become more widely available, people will need the skills and experience to deliver them responsibly. We cannot necessarily wait until every professional standard and care pathway has been finalised before we begin building that capability.

At the same time, good training needs a clear understanding of what practitioners are being prepared to do.

This is why we are interested in the development of clearer frameworks around psychedelic-assisted care.

Questions around competencies, professional roles, supervision, governance, screening, preparation, integration and clinical responsibility can help educators understand what different practitioners may need to know, experience and demonstrate.

Training can also inform those frameworks by showing what works in practice, where gaps remain and which capabilities are most important.

Rather than one happening before the other, we see the potential for both to evolve together.

Not one pathway, but several

We do not expect the future of psychedelic-assisted care to involve one profession, one setting or one training route.

A psychiatrist working within a medical treatment pathway may require a very different education from a psychotherapist supporting integration, a nurse working within a multidisciplinary team, or a facilitator supporting psychedelic experiences outside a clinical treatment model.

Some competencies may be shared. Others will be specific to a particular role, population or setting.

Understanding those similarities and differences could help the field develop training that is appropriate to the responsibility being taken on, rather than trying to create a single model for everyone.

Questions we are interested in

Among the questions we find ourselves returning to are:

• What competencies should be shared across psychedelic-assisted care?

• Which competencies should be role or profession specific?

• How should experiential learning sit alongside academic and clinical education?

• What standards should exist around preparation, screening, consent, facilitation and integration?

• What forms of supervision, governance and accountability are needed in different settings?

• How should training evolve as research, regulation and models of care continue to develop?

We know many others are already thinking about these questions.

A conversation we would like to be part of

At this stage, we are interested in listening, learning and connecting with others working across psychedelic practice, healthcare, research, education, professional standards and regulation.

We want to better understand what work is already happening, where different perspectives overlap, where important differences remain, and what this might mean for the future development of psychedelic training.

Over time, those conversations may help contribute to a clearer picture of what a Dutch framework for psychedelic-assisted care could become.

Looking ahead

As these conversations develop, we hope to bring some of the emerging thinking together in a short report exploring what future training and professional frameworks for psychedelic-assisted care in the Netherlands might need to consider.