The Johns Hopkins psilocybin trial for cancer patients brought a question about mystical experience into a clinical setting: could a psilocybin-occasioned state help relieve the anxiety and depression that can accompany cancer? The results described in the book were striking. For many volunteers who underwent a mystical experience, fear of death greatly diminished or disappeared, making the trial at once a therapeutic investigation and a test of how science might study experiences of profound personal meaning.

Clinical Aim and Reported Results

The Johns Hopkins team investigated psilocybin as a treatment for the anxiety and depression of cancer patients. At the time of the account, Roland Griffiths was about to submit an article reporting the trial’s results. The study, as described, produced one of the largest treatment effects ever demonstrated for a psychiatric intervention. The account does not specify the size of the sample or the trial’s full design, so the finding is presented as a reported result rather than as a complete evaluation of the evidence.

A particularly consequential result concerned death anxiety. Among the volunteers who had a mystical experience, a majority reported that their fear of death had either greatly diminished or completely disappeared. The distinction matters: the reported finding links this change to volunteers who experienced the mystical state, rather than claiming that every participant had the same experience or response. It also places the trial’s therapeutic significance in the quality of the experience it occasioned, not merely in the administration of a drug.

Patrick Mettes’s Treatment Sessions

Patrick Mettes’s participation gives the research a concrete clinical shape. After calling about the trial, completing forms, and answering questions, he was accepted and assigned to Tony Bossis. Bossis explained that Patrick would first have three or four preparatory sessions of talk therapy, followed by two dosing sessions. One involved a high dose of niacin, used as an active placebo because it produces a tingling sensation; the other involved a capsule containing twenty-five milligrams of psilocybin.

Each session was expected to last most of the day. Patrick would lie on a couch wearing eyeshades and listening through headphones to a curated playlist that included Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Pat Metheny, Ravi Shankar, and classical and New Age music. Bossis and Krystallia Kalliontzi would sit with him throughout. They were expected to say little, while remaining available if he needed help. In preparation, Patrick received the flight instructions written by Hopkins researcher Bill Richards.

Bossis advised Patrick to trust the experience and let go, and to move toward frightening material rather than flee from it. This guidance formed part of a structured treatment, not an instruction to leave the participant unsupported: the preparation, music, eyeshades, and continuous presence of two sitters all shaped the conditions in which the session took place. Patrick’s wife, Lisa Callaghan, had opposed his decision, saying she wanted him to fight rather than have an easy way out; he enrolled anyway. The account does not establish his individual outcome, and his story should not be mistaken for a report of the trial’s aggregate results.

Mystical Experience as a Research Question

The trial belonged to a broader effort by Griffiths and his colleagues to investigate spirituality and the betterment of well people, alongside possible therapeutic uses of psilocybin. The distinction between the drug and the state it occasions is central to the researchers’ framing: the proposed therapeutic significance lay in the mystical state of consciousness, which psilocybin could occasion with a high degree of probability. Griffiths regarded that repeatability as opening mystical states to prospective scientific study.

That scientific framing did not resolve what such experiences mean. Experiences that seem to persuade participants that consciousness is not confined to the brain raise difficult questions about their authority and implications. Griffiths approached those questions with curiosity rather than claiming to settle them. In the cancer trial, the reduction in fear of death made the experiences clinically consequential; their power to reorganize a person’s understanding of death also left an open question that the reported treatment effect alone could not answer.