Introducing Set & Setting
When you think about overpriced healthcare, big pharma, and people not having access to the medicine they need… you might think of things like medicaid or the Affordable Care Act; pharmaceutical company CEOs raising the price of medicine astronomically overnight.
What might not come to mind is psychedelics.
Research on the way psychedelics could help treat a variety of mental health issues has created new promising avenues for healthcare, along with new growth in the pharmaceutical industry. Psychedelic therapy will soon become more accessible to many, but not to everyone.
Amber is a woman with autism who finds herself homeless shortly after dropping out of college. She experiences depression and PTSD and has little luck with prescribed antidepressants.
When Amber attempts to self-treat with psychedelics, she finds that the healing she’s seen in documentaries and experienced herself in the past, is not always easy to access.
WHY IS AMBER GOING BY A PSEUDONYM ?
No matter how many new books come out about microdosing and how normalized it may seem to admit publicly to using psychedelics, unfortunately not everyone can assume that it's safe to disclose their use of psychedelics that are federally regulated, schedule I substances. If you listen to the podcast, you'll see that Amber has already come up against a lot of challenges in her life and she's still young. At this time, she's working to establish a new career and she may be looking for new housing at some point. These things have the potential to be impacted by her disclosure of drug use because of the law and the persistent social stigma surrounding drug use. For this story, neither I nor Amber thought it was necessary for her to put herself at risk in these ways.