Tony Bossis's Psilocybin Therapy for Patrick Mettes

Tony Bossis’s therapeutic relationship with Patrick Mettes took shape in a New York University trial testing whether psilocybin could ease the anxiety and depression associated with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis. Bossis was not simply present for Mettes’s drug session: he helped prepare him for it, stayed beside him through frightening and physically intense moments, and met with him afterward as he made sense of what had happened. The relationship’s significance lies in that continuity of care—and in the way a guided psychedelic experience appeared to alter Mettes’s relationship to dying.

A relationship formed in the cancer trial

Mettes entered the trial after reading a New York Times article about research at New York University. He was fifty-three, working as a television news director, and living with cancer of the bile ducts. His diagnosis had come three years earlier, after his wife, Lisa Callaghan, noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010 the cancer had spread to his lungs, and an especially debilitating chemotherapy regime had left him confronting the possibility that he might not survive. Although Mettes had no prior psychedelic experience, he decided to volunteer. Callaghan opposed the idea at first: she wanted him to keep fighting, rather than find what she feared might be an easy way out.

After completing the forms and screening questions, Mettes was accepted and assigned to Bossis, a palliative-care psychologist roughly his own age. The two hit it off at their first meeting. Bossis worked alongside Stephen Ross, the psychiatrist directing the trial, whose purpose was to assess whether a single high dose of psilocybin could relieve the depression and anxiety that can accompany cancer. That institutional framework mattered: Mettes and Bossis’s meetings were part of a research protocol, but they also involved an individual confronting fear, regret, and the meaning of his remaining life.

Preparation and the therapeutic agreement

Bossis explained the structure of the trial before the dosing days. After three or four preparatory sessions of talk therapy, Mettes would have two sessions: one with an active placebo, a high dose of niacin that produces tingling, and one with a capsule containing twenty-five milligrams of psilocybin. Each session would last most of a day. Mettes would lie on a couch wearing eyeshades and headphones, listening to a playlist that included Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Pat Metheny, Ravi Shankar, and classical and New Age compositions. Bossis and a second sitter, Krystallia Kalliontzi, would remain present, speaking little but available if he needed help.

As part of that preparation, Bossis and Kalliontzi shared the flight instructions written by Bill Richards, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Bossis offered Mettes the phrase “Trust and let go” as a mantra, and encouraged him to follow the experience rather than try to control where it went. His practical advice was to approach threatening or monstrous material, look at it directly, and ask what it was doing in his mind or what he could learn from it. This guidance made the therapist’s role active before the session began: Bossis helped establish how Mettes might respond to fear, without dictating what the experience would mean.

Accompaniment through an intense session

In January 2011, Callaghan had an important meeting and Mettes traveled alone from their Brooklyn apartment to the treatment room in the New York University dental school on First Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. Bossis and Kalliontzi greeted him and reviewed the day’s plan. At nine in the morning they gave him a chalice containing the pill; none of them would know for at least thirty minutes whether it contained psilocybin or the placebo. Mettes stated that he hoped to cope better with anxiety and depression about his cancer and to work on what he called his “regret in life.” He placed photographs of himself and Callaghan on their wedding day, and of their dog, Arlo, around the room.

During the journey, Mettes encountered his deceased sister-in-law Ruth, who had died of cancer more than twenty years earlier. In his later account, he described her as a guide and understood part of the experience through images of feminine energy and rebirth. The inward experience seemed comforting to him; outwardly, Bossis observed him crying and breathing heavily. Mettes clutched Kalliontzi’s hand, drew up his knees, and pushed as if delivering a baby. In the midst of this intense physical passage, he said, “Birth and death is a lot of work.” Bossis’s role was to remain present while Mettes moved through an experience that was emotionally powerful and difficult to read from the outside.

Later, Mettes asked to pause because the experience had become too intense. He removed his eyeshades and headphones and spoke with Bossis and Kalliontzi. He said that everyone deserved such an experience and imagined that, if people had it, they would no longer harm one another or wage wars. The room, the sitters, and even the possibility of germs seemed beautiful to him. Although he was reluctant to return to the journey, he eventually put the eyeshades and headphones back on and lay down. His account and the sitters’ observations together show two sides of the session: the extraordinary meanings Mettes reported and the distress that required the guides’ calm, practical presence.

Follow-up and the meaning of the experience

The relationship continued after the dosing. Trial volunteers were asked to write about their journeys soon afterward, and Mettes took the task seriously, spending the weekend after his Friday session trying to make sense of it and put it into words. Callaghan shared his account, and Bossis allowed the researcher to consult both his session notes and notes from follow-up psychotherapy. Those records made it possible to consider not only the peak experience but also how Mettes carried it into ordinary life.

At a follow-up meeting a few weeks later, Mettes described the journey as a window onto a possible afterlife, beyond the physical body, and spoke of an infinite “plane of existence of love.” In subsequent sessions he discussed his body and cancer as a kind of illusion. The reported changes were also practical: he meditated regularly, felt more able to live in the present, and said he loved Callaghan even more. Two months after the session, while his cancer continued to progress, Bossis recorded that Mettes felt the happiest he had ever been. The evidence describes a change in his emotional life and his view of death, not a remission of his cancer.

The therapist within the treatment

The account of Bossis and Mettes also exposes a difficulty for conventional drug research. Psychedelic trials are hard to blind because participants and guides can often tell whether the drug or placebo has been administered. Researchers must also reckon with the influence of preparation, expectation, the treatment room, music, and the therapist’s presence. In this case, the medicine was given within a deliberately organized relationship: Bossis helped Mettes prepare, stayed with him through the session, and returned to the experience with him in psychotherapy. The episode therefore cannot be reduced, in the narrative, to a capsule acting alone.

A 2017 follow-up study of New York University volunteers, led by Alexander Belser, examined patients’ experiences of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy and emphasized connection to loved ones, movement from separateness toward interconnectedness, and the role of the psychotherapist. Jeffrey Guss, a coauthor, described the drug’s possible effect as loosening the ego’s boundaries, allowing rigid thought patterns to relax and new meanings to emerge. Bossis’s work with Mettes belongs to this broader question of how pharmacology and therapeutic presence interact. The narrative presents the relationship not as proof that every patient will respond in the same way, but as a concrete instance of care at the crossing of clinical research, psychological support, and spiritual interpretation.