Tony Bossis

Tony Bossis is a palliative-care psychologist and psilocybin guide whose work with Patrick Mettes gives the New York University cancer trial its human scale. Bossis prepares Mettes to meet frightening material rather than flee it, remains with him through a turbulent session, and later helps him make sense of what followed. His approach is compassionate and spiritual in emphasis, yet pragmatic about whether the experience’s visions are literally true: for Bossis, the urgent question is whether they ease the distress of dying.

Identity and Setting

Bossis works with people approaching the end of life, a role that places him alongside patients whose suffering includes not only physical illness but also depression, anxiety, and fear. He calls this complex existential distress, and says that psychiatry has very few tools to address it. In his view, a conventional medication such as Xanax is not the answer; if there is an answer, he believes it may be more spiritual than pharmacological. That outlook informs his participation in a clinical trial without reducing his patients’ experiences to either medical symptoms or settled claims about the afterlife.

The treatment room where he works is designed to feel less like a hospital suite than a comfortable den. A long couch, art books, spiritual objects, and a glazed ceramic mushroom soften the clinical space, though hospital fittings remain visible. It was there that the narrator interviewed Bossis and Stephen Ross, the psychiatrist directing the trial, and first heard about Mettes’s session. Bossis appears hirsute and bearish, like a Manhattan therapist interested in alternative therapies; his warmth and compassion are also part of how the account describes him. The room and its guides together create a carefully arranged setting for an experience that can be emotionally unpredictable.

Preparing Patrick Mettes

Mettes, a television news director with bile-duct cancer that had spread to his lungs, volunteered after reading a newspaper account of research at New York University. He and Bossis were roughly the same age and immediately hit it off. After the trial accepted Mettes, Bossis became his assigned guide. Their connection did not remove the gravity of the treatment: Mettes was confronting a diagnosis that might prove fatal, and his wife, Lisa Callaghan, had initially opposed his decision because she wanted him to keep fighting.

Before the dosing sessions, Bossis met with Mettes for preparatory psychotherapy and explained what to expect. The trial scheduled two sessions, one with a high dose of niacin as an active placebo and one with twenty-five milligrams of psilocybin. Mettes would spend most of a day lying on the couch with eyeshades and headphones, accompanied by two sitters: Bossis and Krystallia Kalliontzi. They were to speak little but remain available if he needed help. The music playlist included Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Pat Metheny, and Ravi Shankar, alongside classical and New Age compositions. The arrangements made the guides present without making them the center of the journey.

Bossis offered Mettes a compact mantra: “Trust and let go.” He encouraged him to follow the experience wherever it led, imagining staircases, doors, paths, and landscapes. Most important, he advised Mettes to move toward whatever seemed threatening rather than escape it: to look directly at a monster or frightening presence and ask what it was doing in his mind, or what he could learn from it. The guidance gave a practical form to surrender—not a promise that nothing frightening would occur, but a way to respond if it did.

Sitting with the Journey

During the January 2011 session, Bossis and Kalliontzi greeted Mettes at the treatment room in the New York University dental school. The trial was housed there because Bellevue and the university’s cancer center wanted distance from research involving psychedelics. At nine in the morning the guides presented Mettes with a chalice containing a pill; for at least thirty minutes, none of them would know whether it held psilocybin or placebo. Mettes stated his intention: to cope better with the anxiety and depression brought on by cancer and to work on what he called his regret in life. He placed photographs of himself and Lisa on their wedding day, and of their dog, Arlo, around the room.

The inner account and the outward scene diverged sharply. In his later written description, Mettes recalled meeting Ruth, his sister-in-law, who had died of cancer more than twenty years earlier. He described her as a guide and wrote that the journey’s feminine presence brought him to an image of being born again. His account described the rebirth as smooth and comforting. From outside, however, Bossis saw him crying and breathing heavily. Mettes clutched Kalliontzi’s hand, drew up his knees, and pushed as if delivering a baby; he seemed to be convulsing. In that physically intense moment he said, “Birth and death is a lot of work.” Bossis’s presence connects the language of rebirth to the visible exertion of the body, without pretending that the two accounts cancel each other out.

Bossis later told the narrator about sitting with Mettes as he traveled to a place in his mind that seemed to lift the siege of terror. He recalled two hours of silence before Mettes began to cry softly and repeat his observation about birth and death. For Bossis, being present was humbling and deeply rewarding. His account emphasizes not a guide’s control over the experience, but the responsibility of staying beside someone as the experience unfolds.

Aftermath and Meaning

A few weeks later, Bossis met with Mettes for a follow-up session. Mettes interpreted the journey as a window onto an afterlife and spoke of an infinite plane of existence founded on love. In later sessions he described his body and cancer as a kind of illusion. The account presents these ideas as Mettes’s interpretation, not as conclusions Bossis establishes. The reported effects in daily life were more concrete: Mettes meditated regularly, felt more able to live in the present, and said he loved Lisa even more. Two months after the journey, while his cancer was progressing, Bossis recorded that Mettes felt happier than at any point in his life. Mettes’s own declaration, “I am the luckiest man on earth,” gives that change a voice without disguising the illness still advancing around it.

Bossis does not claim authority to decide whether such experiences reveal a reality beyond the physical. When asked whether his patients’ accounts of cosmic consciousness were real or fictive, he replied, “That’s above my pay grade.” The answer is not indifference to what happened: it marks a boundary between the therapist’s work and metaphysical certainty. The account contrasts this practical restraint with the extraordinary beliefs patients may bring away from treatment. Bossis’s focus remains their suffering and the possibility that it can be relieved. In Mettes’s case, the guide’s preparation, watchful presence, and follow-up support form part of a treatment whose significance lies both in the patient’s interpretation and in the changes he reported living afterward.