Ten Trips

The New Reality of Psychedelics

By: Andy Mitchell

Narrated by: Andy Mitchell

The more we learn about psychedelics, the less we seem to understand them. . . . In this engrossing, sometimes hilarious, always dramatic chronicle, a neuropsychologist deflates the hype, explores the limitless possibilities, and reveals a much-needed perspective about psychedelics, giving us a scientist’s first-person experiment with ten different compounds in ten different settings.

Once demonized and still largely illegal, psychedelic drugs are now officially a “breakthrough therapy” in treating mental illness, used to heal trauma, conquer addiction, and enhance well-being. But as Andy Mitchell reveals, this approach to psychedelics is overhyped, and most importantly, neglects what is so unusual and valuable about them: the psychedelic experience itself.

In Ten Trips, Mitchell takes ten different drugs in ten diverse locations—including a neuroimaging lab in London, the Columbian Andes, Silicon Valley and his friend’s basement kitchen—to document their remarkable effects. Along the way he encounters a cast of distinctive characters: scientists and gangsters, venture capitalists and philosophers, psychonauts and shamans, musicians, monks, therapists, poets, and conmen. His experience opens a doorway to psychedelics’ full potential: for healing and trauma, for ecstatic one-ness and utter terror, for transcendence and corruption, for profundity and laughter.

Mitchell argues that by removing psychedelics from their cultures and rituals, both indigenous and underground, we risk rejecting the expertise and the contexts which hold the key to understanding them—and from which their real benefits may derive. In the drive to standardize, control, and monetize the psychedelic experience, we may ultimately destroy what makes them potent: their ability to transform our whole perspective on mental health and reenchant us with the world.

A hallucinogenic experience nearly as mind-blowing as actually taking psychedelics themselves, Ten Trips is Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind written by Hunter S. Thompson with a PhD in neuroscience—a perception-altering odyssey that will change the way we see these substances and the world.

©2023 Andrew Mitchell (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

A Clinician’s Trip Report

Mitchell has tied together a multitude of complex worldviews and substances in a subjective account and objectively researched jaunt through the current milieu of psychedelic research. With a history of substance abuse, deep meditation practice and specific forays into indigenous sacred plants and cosmovisións, Mitchell takes us on a challenging, entertaining, hilarious, and endearing ride. The author has attempted to, and succeeded in, updating his audience on the current state of western advances in utilizing psychedelics as treatment for depression and PTSD. Is the medicine, evermore synthesized for capital gain, going to circumvent it’s original guardians, nature and indigenous shamans? Mitchell cannot conclude one way or another, as no one can quite yet, but this account belongs on bookshelves or audio libraries as an important stepping stone in navigating this roaring brook.

Amazing!

The author takes us on a whirlwind tour through the world of psychedelics. Equal parts Oliver Sacks and Hunter Thompson. He brings the skeptical eye of a trained clinician and the eye of a poet, a stereoscopic vision that renders the world of modern psychedelics in full 3D with all of its potential problems and promise.

Long, chaotic trip

I was excited about this book as I enjoy hearing others experiences and perspectives, especially when coming from a person who works in the space. However I found it hard to finish the book. There was no clear journey here, just chaotic stories that felt half-done. Would not recommend the book.

Occasionally interesting, overall tiresome.

He is a strong wordsmith. However he could have said twice as much by editing out 30-35% of what he wrote. After he misstated The Eightfold Noble Path as “the fourfold path of Buddhism “, and that Buddha said that “all is suffering “ (Buddha said that there is suffering, and it is to be understood.) he lost the majority of his credibility.