edna

While doing this project I learned that the extent of potential of psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy is largely unknown. However, with more funding and more well-designed case studies more can be discovered on the effects of these drugs. Psychedelics like Psilocybin has been proved to make a great impact with those who have anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, treatment resistant depression, and addiction. Overall, our planning and research went quite smoothly, however, creating the project proved to be quite a hassle for our group.

mike

I feel this project has allowed me to research an area of psychology both interesting and promising in regards to application. I feel our brainstorming and action path for the question was quite smooth, with the later research being engaging but slightly disorganized. I learned a lot about the neurology of psychedelics from my article, and was impressed with the level of promise that psychedelics show in terms of combating depression and anxiety. The presentation i expect will go smoothly, but the activities for such a contentious issue are few and far in between.

kevin

While doing this project I have learned the potential of psychedelic drugs in the field of mental issues illnesses. I am particular excited about this as it may lead to major break through in the efficiency and effectiveness of treatment in mental illness individuals.

carolyn

Planning: I wanted to focus mostly on journal articles becaue I wanted to see if the language of these more academic writings would still be accessible enough for me to use. Peer-reviewed work is also often more reliable, and I wanted to look through some more reliable sources.

Research: The topic of psychedelic drugs is very broad and could encompass many different ideas. As a group, we had decided to focus on impacts and applications of the drug, and we had some general categories in mind to look through: medical applications, historical uses, and cultural or spiritual traditions. Personally, I have never known too much about psychedelics and had no idea where to begin. When it came to planning what I wanted to research, I decided to leave myself a lot of space to explore. Instead of first restricting the topic into something smaller, I decided to browse through articles and journals related to psychedelic drugs first and see which ones appeared the most interesting. Then, I tried to find more articles related to or discussing similar topics to the ones that had first caught my interest.

Creating: Personally, I find myself understanding readings better after I have actively engaged with and reorganized the content for myself. For that reason, writing longer and more detailed summaries, sometimes in a reframed structure, for the articles I read helped me pick out interesting and relevant information that I would want to mention in our presentation. There were a lot of varying part to this project, and our technology was not always fully cooperative, but we did get everything structured largely how we wanted it to be.

Sharing: We plan on presenting more of the applications in our talk. For the sake of time and space, some of the interesting tidbits from our readings and summaries have to be left out.