What Modern Psychiatry Can Learn from Indigenous Healing Traditions
Before We Begin
Be The Medicine is not a psychiatric or psychological institution and we do not present ourselves as one. What follows is a third-party perspective on a conversation we believe deserves more space. It is not psychiatric advice, clinical guidance or an attempt to speak on behalf of Indigenous peoples, traditions or knowledge systems.
Our interest lies in the space between these worlds.
The philosophy behind much of our work is that the future of psychedelic and entheogenic practice should not require us to choose between modern psychology, psychiatry and the knowledge held within Indigenous and traditional healing systems.
Instead, we believe there is value in bringing them into meaningful conversation.
This is also why Beyond Protocol brings together psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists and practitioners alongside meaningful connections with Indigenous wisdom keepers and traditional knowledge holders. Not to suggest that these perspectives are interchangeable but to create space for the questions that emerge when different ways of understanding the mind, medicine and healing are allowed to meet.
And some of those questions are uncomfortable.
Here Is One of Them
Modern psychiatry is increasingly interested in medicines that Indigenous peoples have worked with for generations, while considerably less attention is given to the knowledge systems that surround them.
We study the compound.
We measure what happens in the brain.
We develop the clinical protocol.
We ask whether it works.
But how often do we ask what may have been lost in translation?
Across many Indigenous healing traditions, medicine has not historically existed as an isolated intervention. It may sit within a much wider relationship involving community, ceremony, land, ancestry, spirituality, responsibility and generations of accumulated knowledge.
There is, of course, no single "Indigenous approach". Indigenous peoples, cultures and healing traditions are distinct. Collapsing them into one convenient philosophy would undermine the very point of this conversation.
But there are questions these traditions invite modern psychiatry and psychology to consider.
What happens when we treat the individual but overlook the community?
What happens when we understand the mechanism but overlook the meaning?
And perhaps the hardest question, which we will return to in Insight 4:
What happens when we take the medicine but leave the knowledge system behind?
That is where this conversation begins.
Insight 1: What If the Individual Is Only Part of the Story?
Modern psychiatry largely begins with the individual.
What symptoms are present?
How long have they been present?
What diagnosis might explain them?
What treatment could help?
This framework has brought enormous value to mental healthcare. But it can also narrow the field of vision.
Across many traditional healing systems, wellbeing may be understood through relationships between the individual, family, community, culture, spirituality and the wider environment.
The question becomes larger than:
"What is happening within this person?"
We might also ask:
What has happened around them?
Where do they belong?
What relationships have been disrupted?
What has travelled through generations?
What is their relationship with community?
What gives their experience meaning?
This is particularly relevant to psychedelic practice.
An altered state may happen within one person's consciousness but healing rarely happens in isolation.
Keep that idea of relationship in mind. It becomes particularly important when we reach Insight 4.
Insight 2: Community Is Not an Optional Extra
Western therapy is often private by design.
One practitioner. One client. One room.
Yet across generations, humans have often healed collectively.
Traditional healing practices may involve family, elders, healers, ceremony and community. Research into traditional and Indigenous approaches to mental health continues to explore the importance of social, cultural and ecological relationships within understandings of wellbeing.
That raises a difficult question.
Can we adequately address disconnection using models of healing that are themselves highly individualised?
Consider psychedelic integration.
Someone may have a profound experience during ceremony or psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Then what?
They return to their partner.
Their work.
Their family.
Their habits.
Their community.
Their culture.
Integration does not happen in a vacuum.
Perhaps the environment someone returns to deserves as much consideration as the experience they are returning from.
Insight 3: Meaning Matters Alongside Mechanism
Psychiatry has become increasingly sophisticated at explaining mechanisms.
Neurotransmitters. Neural networks. Pharmacology. Neuroplasticity.
Psychedelic research is adding fascinating new chapters to that understanding.
But imagine someone describes a profound experience of connection with an ancestor during an altered state.
We could ask:
What happened neurologically?
Or we could ask:
What did that experience mean to them?
Those questions do not necessarily compete.
They are looking at the same human experience through different lenses.
This distinction matters because people may understand psychedelic and entheogenic experiences through psychological, spiritual, cultural or sacred frameworks.
A practitioner does not need to confirm someone's spiritual interpretation.
But nor should we automatically translate every experience into the language we understand best.
Sometimes clinical humility means resisting the urge to explain.
Which brings us to the question we raised at the beginning.
Insight 4: What Happens When We Take the Medicine but Leave the Knowledge Behind?
Modern medicine is designed to isolate variables.
Which compound is active?
What dose is effective?
Which receptor is involved?
Can the intervention be standardised?
These are important questions within biomedical research.
But many Indigenous traditions do not necessarily understand plant medicines as isolated pharmacological agents.
The medicine may exist within relationships involving preparation, ceremony, song, community, spirituality, lineage, land and responsibility.
So what happens when we remove the compound from that network?
Chemically, we may have retained the active substance.
But have we retained the medicine?
Research exploring Indigenous knowledge systems and psychedelic science has raised important questions about what may be lost when traditional medicines enter Western scientific frameworks.
This does not mean reproducing Indigenous ceremonies inside Western clinics.
In fact, removing ceremonies from their cultural context and recreating them elsewhere raises another set of ethical questions entirely.
The lesson is more nuanced.
Context is not decoration.
And if we accept that, another question follows.
Who owns that context?
Insight 5: Learning Creates Responsibility
There is an uncomfortable reality within the psychedelic renaissance.
Western institutions are increasingly researching, professionalising and commercialising medicines connected to traditions that Indigenous communities have stewarded across generations.
The benefits do not always flow in both directions.
An Indigenous-led framework published in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas proposed eight interconnected principles for engagement with traditional Indigenous medicines:
Reverence
Respect
Responsibility
Relevance
Regulation
Reparation
Restoration
Reconciliation
These principles push the conversation beyond acknowledgement.
If psychology, psychiatry or the psychedelic industry benefits intellectually, clinically or commercially from knowledge connected to Indigenous peoples, we have to ask:
Who benefits?
Who is credited?
Who is compensated?
Who retains authority?
Who is invited into the conversation?
And who disappears from the story once the compound becomes commercially valuable?
Reciprocity cannot be a footnote.
It has to be part of the relationship.
Insight 6: Psychiatry Does Not Need to Have All the Answers
There is a danger of turning this into another binary.
Science or spirituality.
Psychiatry or traditional medicine.
Evidence or Indigenous knowledge.
That would miss the point.
Modern psychiatry brings extraordinary knowledge around diagnosis, pharmacology, psychological distress, safeguarding, contraindications and clinical care.
Psychology and psychotherapy have expanded our understanding of trauma, attachment, relationships and behaviour.
Traditional knowledge systems can invite us to widen that lens towards community, meaning, ceremony, spirituality, land, ancestry, relationship and responsibility.
One does not need to consume the other.
The World Health Organization's work on traditional, complementary and integrative medicine reflects a much broader global conversation about how different approaches to health can exist alongside one another.
Perhaps the more interesting question is not:
Which system has the answer?
But:
What can each system see that the other might miss?
So What Does This Mean for Practitioners?
For psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, facilitators and others working within psychedelic and entheogenic spaces, these questions are not theoretical.
They influence practice.
They ask us to consider:
Whose knowledge informs my work?
Where did that knowledge originate?
What cultural assumptions am I bringing with me?
How do I respond when someone's interpretation differs from my own?
Where does community feature in my understanding of integration?
Am I borrowing practices without understanding their context?
What does reciprocity look like within my work?
Am I genuinely listening to another knowledge system or translating it back into my own?
These are not questions that can be resolved by another checklist.
And they certainly cannot be resolved in a weekend training.
They are questions that may need to follow practitioners throughout their careers.
Beyond Protocol
This is one of the conversations at the heart of Beyond Protocol.
As psychedelic-assisted therapy moves further into psychology, psychiatry and mainstream healthcare, we need research.
We need screening.
We need safeguarding.
We need professional standards.
We need protocols.
But responsible plant medicine practice also asks us to understand what sits beyond them.
Culture. Power. Relationship. Ceremony. Spirituality. Reciprocity. Responsibility.
Across six months, Beyond Protocol creates space for perspectives from psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, traditional wisdom, ceremonial practice and lived experience to enter into meaningful conversation.
Not because modern psychiatry has nothing to offer.
Not because Indigenous knowledge should be repackaged for Western practice.
And not because one system needs to replace another.
But because anyone working seriously within this field should be willing to ask a harder question:
If we are prepared to learn from the medicine, are we equally prepared to learn from the people and knowledge systems that have carried it?
