The Austin Chronic: Crying at a SXSW Panel About Psychedelics
The power of healing evokes feelings on a trip down to the conference
By Kevin Curtin, Fri., March 21, 2025
South by Southwest hits different for me these days. In the decade I worked as a full-time music journalist, I would try to see 75 bands over the course of a week. That took a sick kind of dedication of which I now seem lazy by comparison.
It’s light work being a cannabis columnist at a time when SXSW’s spotlight on weed has dimmed to a flicker. Where there had been 40 cannabis panels in 2019, now SX presents just one ... and it had the word “entrepreneurship” in the title so I skipped it.
Just so my Interactive badge didn’t go unscanned, I decided to spend an entire afternoon attending panels on a related topic: psychedelics.
Although it’s not an interest I often write about, I’m a believer in the powers of high-vibration substances like psilocybin and LSD – and I’ve had my passport stamped a great many times for trips that were often clarifying and sometimes harrowing. Particularly profound were my experiments with DMT, a biological compound that can provide paradigm-shattering effects. In one instance, I forgot about my body and went to an all-white place where a disembodied voice delivered a lovely presentation about varying types and levels of human perception. It was illustrated with a hierarchical pyramid showing that some being had access to perception that is beyond what I’d previously understood. That lesson seemed to last a half hour, but when I came back into consciousness – in a backyard with my hand in the air like I’d hit a 3-pointer – my friend told me it had only been about two minutes since my last inhale of DMT.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately as I listen to this wonderful podcast called The Telepathy Tapes, in which nonverbal people with autism, using typing, discuss their ability to communicate mind-to-mind and also visit incorporeal places of learning. I wonder if I’d traveled to such a place after “blasting off” on DMT... and if those figures atop the pyramid were the severely autistic.
All this is to say, I believe in both the healing and evolutionary power of psychedelics.
At the same time, I’m wary of the self-unaware wellness crowd now embracing psychedelics, and I’m mistrustful of the business community that’s moved to patent aspects of naturally occurring substances with ancient practices. So I carried some skepticism with me up the escalator to the second floor of the JW Marriott as I camped out for a day of psychedelic panels, but I ended up being extremely moved by two of them.
The first was titled Breakthrough Addiction with Psychedelics. It was so visceral to hear Danielle Nova, a prominent trainer of microdosing facilitators in California, describing the debilitating physical purge she endured in getting sober from opiates and the upward of 20 psychiatric medications she’d been prescribed since adolescence.
“I’d never lived my life as an adult without having to take handfuls of pills to function, and the only thing that helped me were psychedelics,” offered Nova, who participated in over 100 ayahuasca therapy sessions while managing severe opiate withdrawals with microdosed psilocybin. “Microdosing is an incredible tool for interrupting addiction because it creates neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. In addiction, you have deeply ingrained neuropathways, and psychedelics can help create new ones, which is powerful.”
I was especially impressed by Marlena Robbins, a third-year doctor of public health candidate at UC Berkeley and member of the Diné Nation, who advocates for therapeutic models that integrate Indigenous systems of knowledge with Western health. In her culture, medicines are relatives and they include Grandfather Peyote and mushrooms, which she equates to “little holy people who like to play.” Having both researched and experienced the healing power of psychedelics, Robbins wants to see more culturally informed psychedelic-assisted therapy models established in tribal health care systems.
“We need to start working with the Indigenous people and building these bridges when we’re working with these medicines,” she said.
One thing that I appreciated about that panel was how everyone onstage was living proof: people on sober journeys who now work to help others. Their stories of psychedelic healing weren’t all rosy; they were often raw, deep, and painful. When Kevin Franciotti, a clinical psychotherapist who’d used ibogaine to overcome his own addiction issues, talked about being “gifted” a vision of his little baby boy who’d just died during birth, and how it served as a message of hope, my heart broke.
Having tears streaming down my face in a conference room at the JW Marriott hadn’t been on my SXSW bingo card.
And, surprisingly, I wasn’t the only person crying in room 204 that day. Five hours later, while moderating a panel titled Beyond the Mind: Psychedelics to Heal the Body, Court Wing, co-founder of the Psychedelics & Pain Association, became profoundly choked up three separate times ... which might seem surprising since the session largely consisted of researchers showing slides of data.
That panel was fascinating to me. It featured three medical professionals sharing results from recent studies testing the efficacy of psychedelics on diseases that are historically challenging to treat. Joel Castellanos, a medical director at UC San Diego, recently led a study where amputees suffering from a psychologically horrifying condition called phantom limb pain were treated with single doses of psilocybin; Julia Bornemann, a researcher at the Imperial College of London, presented findings on a study with fibromyalgia patients being likewise given doses of the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms; and Johns Hopkins University’s Albert Garcia-Romeu ran down the results from a study of psilocybin as a potential aid for post-treatment Lyme disease.
While all three studies were formative, with modest sample sizes, the accompanying data ranged from “statistically significant” to “stunning.” For example, the nine patients in the phantom limb study reported a 70% decrease in pain described as “high-intensity flares” four weeks after getting a single dose. And that, to me, was the mind-blowing theme across all three studies: a small amount of mushrooms (less than I take recreationally) seemed to provide sustained relief from chronic pain conditions a month later.
At one point in the panel, while referencing a Yale study testing the efficacy of mushrooms for cluster headaches, Wing was once again brought to tears.
“For anyone unfamiliar with Court, it is never a conversation without him showing how much this means to him and how much he cares,” interjected Castellanos.
“I’m a crybaby,” Wing sniffled.
