Safety & Ethics of Our Psilocybin Retreats

Ethics and Standards of Care at MycoMeditations

The therapeutic psychedelic field is still young. As it grows, the standards that protect the people who take part in it are still being written, and no single authority has set them yet. MycoMeditations has spent more than a decade building and refining a model of care, and the principles on this page are the ones we hold ourselves to on every retreat.

Our priorities are simple: The safety of our guests comes before everything else, and the quality of the therapeutic experience comes right behind it.

The Mission and Vision of MycoMeditations

Our Mission

To provide the most therapeutic psychedelic retreat experiences in the world.

Our Vision

To legitimize, normalize, and actualize the therapeutic use of psychedelics within society.

Clinically Informed Psychedelic Retreats

With over 10 years in operation, MycoMeditations has served more than 2,500 guests and administered over 7,500 psilocybin therapy sessions, while establishing the standards for hosting the safest and most effective psychedelic retreat environments.

We are not a medical clinic, but neither are we an informal, purely wellness-driven psychedelic retreat. Our model sits between those worlds, combining rigorous psychological care with the warmth and humanity of a retreat environment. We provide clinically-informed therapeutic care at every stage of our retreats, including before, during, and after.

Many of our facilitators are licensed mental health professionals with training specific to psilocybin-assisted therapy, and the way we prepare, support, and integrate guests draws on the same evidence base used by leading research institutions such as Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London. We have extended that work through what we have learned on the ground over more than ten years.

Working with psilocybin is as much an art as it is a science. We aim to create the optimal conditions for a guest to feel completely safe to do the necessary work and supported with the most extensive care to process and make sense of the experiences afterward. We tend to the psychological, emotional, and physical sides of the experience without treating the people in front of us as patients to be fixed.

How We Ensure Guest Safety

Safety is built into every part of the structure surrounding the experience, and we have refined that structure over more than a decade of practice.

A Rigorous Screening Process

Every guest goes through a structured and rigorous screening process before an application is approved. Our team of licensed therapists reviews each applicant’s psychological history, medical status, and overall readiness to work with psilocybin. Some people are not suited to this work, and we say so.

Applicants may be declined for reasons that include but are not limited to a personal or family history of psychotic disorders, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, certain personality disorders, unmanaged cardiovascular conditions, pregnancy, or the use of medications that are contraindicated with psilocybin. In some cases, we ask for additional consultation before reaching a final decision.

Where participation is not appropriate, we decline guests in the interest of safety and responsible care. Turning away applicants is one of the clearest demonstrations of an ethical retreat provider and is simply necessary for adequately assessing the wide range of people interested in these therapeutic experiences. As a result of our own screening practices, MycoMeditations declines about 15% of applicants to ensure safety and a positive fit.

Medication and Your Prescriber

Certain psychiatric medications are contraindicated with psilocybin, and many others will cause significant dampening of psilocybin’s therapeutic potential. For that reason, weaning off a range of antidepressants and other psychiatric medications is a requirement of attending a retreat. We do not make changes to anyone’s prescriptions, and we do not advise on what those changes should be. This process is the responsibility of the prescribing professional who knows the guest’s history.

What we do is provide all of the necessary documentation, within appropriate time ranges, so that a guest can work with their prescriber to taper safely and meet the requirements of attending. This keeps the medical decisions where they belong, and it gives the guest the information they need to make those decisions safely.

Medical Support on Every Retreat

A nurse is staffed on every single retreat. A medical doctor and a psychiatrist are on call for every single retreat. There is a hospital thirty minutes away.

Our team is present throughout the entire course of the week, and remains on call into the evenings and nights after the team has retired for the day.

Informed Consent

Before taking part, every guest completes an informed consent process that sets out the nature of the experience, its risks, and the limits of what the program provides. Psilocybin experiences can be psychologically and emotionally intensive. We are honest about that, and we are honest that outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Individual responses to psilocybin vary, and a retreat is not a substitute for licensed medical or psychiatric care.

A Manual for Every Situation

Our team works from an internal facilitation manual of more than one hundred pages that sets out how every situation on retreat is handled, from the ordinary to the genuine emergency. It forms part of the training for every new member of the therapy team, so that the way we respond to a given moment is considered and already understood before it ever arises.

Teams Trained to the Highest Standard

Our team brings a rare level of experience to this work. Many of our facilitators are licensed mental health professionals, each with training specific to psilocybin-assisted therapy, and between them they have facilitated thousands of sessions. Because we host more retreats each year than most providers, our team has a refined sense for how this process tends to unfold and what a given guest may need.

Before anyone is considered a MycoMeditations therapist or facilitator, they must complete the MycoMeditations Facilitator-in-Training Program. That means training across six retreats, and therefore eighteen group psilocybin therapy sessions, before they hold that title. No one supports our guests on their own authority until they have earned it through that process.

Our Standards of Conduct

We hold ourselves to clear standards of conduct on every retreat, and our team operates by them whether or not a guest ever notices.

Touch is never initiated without a guest’s explicit agreement. During a session, a member of our team will only make physical contact, such as holding a hand, if the guest has asked for it or has agreed to receive it. There is never any sexual contact of any kind.

In scenarios where a guest has their session in their own room, we do not allow a facilitator of a different sex to be alone in that room with them. It is also a requirement that bedroom and bathroom doors are to be left ajar during sessions.

When a dispute or concern arises during a retreat, any member of our team involved completes an incident report, so that it is documented and addressed rather than left to memory.

These standards are built into how we train our team and into our facilitation handbook. They reflect a simple principle. The people who come to us are in an open and vulnerable state, and the responsibility to protect that state sits entirely with us.

Integration and the Responsibility After the Retreat

The experience itself is only part of the work, and what happens afterward often matters as much as the retreat week. We treat integration as a responsibility that any serious psychedelic practitioner owes their guests, whether they work as a solo practitioner, a retreat, or a clinic. The more support a person has after an experience, the safer and more lasting that experience tends to be.

During the retreat, guests take part in more than twenty hours of group work, preparing for and integrating around their sessions. In the weeks that follow, that support continues through further integration sessions. And it does not end there. All past guests of MycoMeditations have access to our bi-weekly alumni integration sessions, which we offer free of charge as part of the community.

For guests who work with a therapist or other mental health professional at home, The Bridge connects that provider with our therapy team before and after the retreat, so the work done in Jamaica can be carried into the work a guest was already doing. We call this system a bidirectional case transfer (BCT), a support infrastructure we pioneered. It is, to our knowledge, the first program of its kind among psychedelic providers. We established The Bridge to ensure MycoMeditations offers the safest and most effective program available for psychedelic therapy.

Honoring the History of Psychedelics

Psilocybin, like other psychedelics and plant medicines, has a long history in human cultures. Much of what is understood about working with these medicines comes from the wisdom of Indigenous traditions that carried this knowledge across generations. We hold that history with respect and gratitude, and we are mindful of the difference between honoring it and claiming it as our own.

MycoMeditations is built on a foundation of reverence towards how Indigenous traditions and cultures have always worked with these medicines. To integrate psychedelic medicines into our way of life requires a new way to work with them in the 21st century. We have developed a contemporary therapeutic approach rooted in modern psychology that maintains a connection to the ineffable and a respect for ancient traditions.

Our Mushrooms

The psilocybin mushrooms used on our retreats are grown on-site by MycoMeditations in Treasure Beach, Jamaica, where we operate. They are lab-tested, so that we know exactly what each guest is working with.

Measuring What We Do

We believe a retreat should be able to show that it does what it claims to do. Since 2021, we have asked every guest to take part in a series of surveys that track their outcomes from before the retreat through to one year afterward, using recognized and validated assessments: the PHQ-9 for depression, the GAD-7 for generalized anxiety, the APA Severity Measure for social anxiety, and the PCL-5 for PTSD.

That data holds us accountable, and it is consistent. One year after their retreat, our guests report an average 53 percent reduction in depression, a 58 percent reduction in generalized anxiety, a 52 percent reduction in social anxiety, and a 51 percent reduction in PTSD symptoms.

Collecting this information, monitoring our guests, and being willing to publish what we find is part of how we hold our standard. It is also how we can show, with evidence, that the MycoMeditations retreat model is a verified and proven process for lasting mental health and lifestyle change.

Read more about our outcomes and how we collect our data →

Operating Within the Law

MycoMeditations operates within the legal framework of Jamaica, where psilocybin-containing mushrooms are not prohibited. Operating legally allows our standards and our care to remain open and accountable, and it is part of why we are able to do this work in the way that we do.