Disruptive Psychopharmacology

Danforth, Alicia

Access to the Internet has upended long-standing myths and misconceptions about autism as autistic individuals are enabled through technology increasingly to influence the dialog around neurodiversity, the experience of being autistic, and the effectiveness of mental health interventions for autistic adults. Autistic self-advocates are speaking up in support of including neurodivergent adults as a population that might benefit from the burgeoning psychedelic medicine field, in an absence of many other mental health treatment options that have been researched and shown to be effective for them. Autism is a genetically-determined neurocognitive variant with considerable heterogeneity across the broad autistic phenotype spectrum. Therefore, enthusiasm for investigating psychedelics to cure or alter the course of autism is most likely ill-informed and misdirected; psychiatric and psychopharmacological interventions do not alter the genome. However, autism frequently co-occurs with clinical conditions such as anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and trauma that have been investigated as indications for clinical trials with classic and atypical psychedelics. The purpose of this chapter will be to inform researchers and clinicians on the history of clinical research with classic psychedelics with autistic minors, recent and current clinical trials of atypical psychedelics with autistic adults, and considerations for providing psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies that are compatible with autism.