Anyone hoping to ‘solve’ the mental health crisis should think very carefully: am I going to make it worse? Unfortunately, every decade a new intervention becomes the hot new thing, the magic bullet that is going to save the world, and the people promoting it become wide-eyed evangelists. ‘We are saving the world! We are doing such important work!’ Such is their enthusiasm, they never stop to ask, ‘is it possible this intervention will harm some people?’

There are at least four definitions of ‘mindfuck’:

1) People fucking with other people’s sense of reality via disinformation or pranks for their own purposes (which could be to amuse themselves, to liberate other people, or to advance some other agenda)

For example: ‘Cambridge Analytica mindfucked the British voters over Brexit’

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Once upon a time there was an obscure mailing list. It only had about 100 people on it, yet in this digital village was arguably the greatest concentration of brain power since fifth-century Athens.

This week the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences project launch our study of difficult psychedelic experiences and what helps people who have them.

The first step is this online survey.

People sometimes ask me for writing and publishing advice. My main advice would be to find something else to do. This is a terrible way to make a living. The average book sells less than 500 copies, and authors typically make 10% of the price of each book sold, so at 50p a copy you’ll probably make £250 for your precious work. Might as well just give blood, it’s a quicker way to make money, and probably helps more people. But people still feel drawn to write, as I do.

The Spiritual Eugenics project explores the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics (for a definition of those terms go here).

My thesis is that, in New Age teachings, one often meets the idea that a spiritual elite are evolving into superhumans, while others are failing the evolutionary test and these failures should perhaps be sterilized or even exterminated.