Neşe Devenot, PhD
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neselsd.bsky.social
Neşe Devenot, PhD
@neselsd.bsky.social
1.4K followers 500 following 110 posts
Rhymes w/ paper mâché 🍉
Psychedelic humanities: literature, ethics, harm reduction 🍄
Senior Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University 🌐
University Writing Program 📝
Indigenous/Kurdish 🟥☀🟩 ND (they/them)
chemicalpoetics.substack.com
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neselsd.bsky.social
I encourage those who disagree with Psymposia's report to explain why the entire public health field agrees that these dynamics are dangerous. Respected experts at my university conducted parallel analyses of the opioid industry, as we note throughout. Should they be fired too?
November 17, 2025 at 12:24 AM
neselsd.bsky.social
Billionaire psychedelic funders portray working-class organizing as dangerous extremism.

Not coincidentally, it's the same rhetoric they pushed about Psymposia.

Since PSFC's admitted m.o. is reengineering groups from the inside, their conspiracy is a projection.

Pay attention.
November 4, 2025 at 5:20 AM
neselsd.bsky.social
Hamilton Morris described my FDA testimony: "It's a federal crime… This was…a knowing misrepresentation."

His followers brigaded: "Nese outright lied at the MAP advisory hearing. This is federal crime"

Finally, my analysis passed a review by The American Journal of Bioethics.
July 9, 2025 at 9:15 PM
neselsd.bsky.social
New post on my mailing list, riffing on a meme: "Everyone I Don't Like is Psymposia"—The Emotional Child's Guide to FDA Approval of MDMA-AT, now in The New York Times; plus, Psychedelics Today promotes "safe words" for restraint, and a new report shows how therapists are indoctrinated. Link in bio.
A children's book image with a rainbow and a Psymposia logo includes the text: "Everyone I Don't Like is Psymposia: The. Emotional Child's Guide to FDA Approval of MDMA-AT"
March 2, 2025 at 9:10 PM
neselsd.bsky.social
[Posted 9/27/24:] MAPS P3 therapist on Psychedelics Today 2021: Psychedelic therapists are discovering they have psychic powers during retreats & need support adjusting to this new reality.

PT 2024: Psymposia is definitely bad faith & deserving of hostility for describing MAPS as a therapy cult.
PT interview with two Phase 3 therapists: “I’ve seen this happen on retreats, where [psychedelic] therapists who had previously been more non-transpersonal actually open up to this more intuitive gift, or intuitive ability they have. “And then they start going through a big identity crisis around like, ‘Well, what if I go back and tell my [therapist] colleagues back home that I’m, you know...hearing ancestral voices, or, you know, picking up things [telepathically]. ”And so, I think there's a lot of support needed for therapists who are going through the, the transformation to become psychedelic therapists.” Psychedelics Today host, discussing "bodywork": , how do you pass that on? I feel like it, it is really tricky, and this is something that we've actually run into a little bit in, in our breathwork training.... We've been trying to figure out, like, some of the bodywork — how do you teach that? “Our teacher Lenny's always like, you know, there's certain techniques [...] Joe Moore: "There's evidence of blackmail and extortion-type stuff from some of these folks [i.e., Psymposia].... Deliberate efforts to like, ruin people.... With that...how can we...operate in good faith with these folks? And I think the answer is we cannot. And I hope we can collectively just say, okay, like, enough's enough." [...] Ingmar Gorman: "You're [i.e., Psymposia is] critiquing the integrity of us as therapists...for whom compassion, equanimity, [...] all of these qualities are so important to us. So when you say that we're a cult member...that completely undermines and attacks our integrity as people who are in a caring profession, and...when you say that there's allegations of fudging data, that cuts us at the needs of scientists, and so people aren't...necessarily connecting the dots, right? Like, they think they're critiquing the organization, but they're also impacting us as individuals. [...]
February 23, 2025 at 10:25 PM
neselsd.bsky.social
Much of the psychedelic field thinks telepathy is a valid tool for psychedelic therapy. Most others think no one would take 'therapeutic' telepathy seriously. As a result, both groups think that Psymposia must be acting in bad faith for engaging in harm reduction/public education relative to group 1
A cover of the recent book by Wade Richardson, titled "The Psychedelic Mindmeld: Telepathically Exploring Shared Consciousness," which includes a foreword by Martin Ball.
February 23, 2025 at 10:20 PM
neselsd.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/jame...
February 6, 2025 at 10:27 PM
neselsd.bsky.social
My personal response to the propagandistic & defamatory New York Times article on Psymposia @psymposia.bsky.social, which violated the Times' editorial standards. This transparently partisan attack politicized whistleblowers to appeal to the Trump administration on behalf of a pharmaceutical company
It's disappointing — but not surprising — that journalists with close ties to MAPS have resorted to such a transparently partisan political attack. This piece is an opportunistic attempt to politicize whistleblowers with a narrative that appeals to the Trump administration. While Jacobs and Nuwer attack Psymposia and me personally, they have failed to refute our core claims, which remain important and unrebutted. To be clear, their attacks are flatly incorrect and underscore their desperation to distract from the real story: that MAPS’s handling of its clinical trials was a disaster, and that Lykos is in financial disarray. To obscure this fact, the article offered a caricature of my research and of Psymposia's broader work in the field. I describe my actual motivations in a recent AJOB commentary: Lykos has never acknowledged how the on-camera physical and sexual abuse from its Phase 2 clinical trial was enabled by the therapy's reliance on Grofian “focused bodywork.” The Phase 2 participant had tried to alert the FDA to this connection for years, and it was only after those initial attempts were unsuccessful that we felt obligated to communicate this to the advisory committee, before this dangerous practice could be scaled. If MAPS had listened to this participant’s concerns when the abuse took place, they could have made their therapy safer years ago. I am not opposed to the psychedelic industry, but to the normalization of pseudoscientific practices when vulnerable groups are at stake.
February 6, 2025 at 6:34 PM
neselsd.bsky.social
MDMA-AT's overlap w/ facilitated communication was mentioned by @greennoise.bsky.social in The Guardian. My initial academic discussion of the parallels between FC & MAPS's focused bodywork—which rely on similar pseudoscientific foundations—will be published soon. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024...
Quote from The Guardian reads: "Neşe Devenot, a bioethics researcher affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and the psychedelic harm reduction non-profit Psymposia, organized opposition to Lykos’s treatment. Their research, which has not yet been published, found “the therapy component was based on pseudoscience very similar to Facilitated Communication,” a discredited technique ostensibly intended to help disabled people communicate, that actually gives their “facilitator” power to speak for them. "Kennedy boosted claims that Devenot’s opposition stemmed from hatred toward veterans, and blasted the FDA’s decision, suggesting it illustrated collusion with the pharmaceutical industry."
December 1, 2024 at 6:43 PM
neselsd.bsky.social
🧵 This new paper, which argues that the AI hype & psychedelics hype are interconnected, is possibly my most ambitious work. It synthesizes all of my previous work, from right-wing psychedelia to psychedelic capitalism & suggestibility in clinical trials: /1 akjournals.com/view/journal...
A cover image of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies with a rainbow-colored, swirling graphic in the background.
September 25, 2023 at 8:05 PM