HEALTH

My Year of Psychedelics

Sarah Napthali

Allen & Unwin, $34.99

Sarah Napthali is not the first to write a tell-a-little-bit about experimentation with psychedelics. She even confesses that she keeps secrets, although not enough to actually keep them secret from the reader. We discover a lot, maybe too much, about Napthali’s (briefly) internal monologues.

Napthali, a best-selling author with her previous hit Buddhism for Mothers (2003), translated into 13 languages, is ragingly enthusiastic about the use of psychedelics, and she’s not the first to go there either. I remember reading bits of ​​Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and thinking, “What the hell?” This was years after it came out, but the book was still iconic, if you liked that sort of thing. Here am I, some 50-odd years since that publication, and I’m having exactly that reaction to a book published this year: what the hell? And why? In a world where there is a mass of research on the effects of psychedelics, why are we getting highlights from one woman’s trip? Feels like it would be more at home on TikTok, alongside other wellness influencers.

As Beatriz Labate and colleagues wrote last year (and believe me, I’m paraphrasing here from academia), we need to take a good hard look at ourselves in an environment where psychedelics are being mainstreamed.

They wrote: “It is important to avoid the tendency to romanticise this landscape and to do a proper assessment of the contemporary challenges and ethical risks that we face in the future.”

There’s not a lot of that in My Year of Psychedelics, but it does build on current trends. Did the mainstreaming of psychedelics start with Casteneda? Of course not. Maybe we can assign responsibility to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, then Timothy Leary, immortalised alongside John and Yoko, by the Moody Blues, by The Who. Or even in the musical Hair: “Answer my weary query, Timothy Leary.”

More recently, we can also attribute some of the rise in interest to Ayelet Waldman’s microdosing memoir, A Really Good Day, and Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants and How to Change Your Mind. I love Pollan’s work on food but am more interested in eating fungi than getting high.

Napthali’s book is fascinating in the way that reading a book about bee pollination might be fascinating. On some occasions, these books give us an insight into a world we would never visit, from psilocybin in the Netherlands to bufo in Portugal (where we are encouraged to speak to the Toad, which pops up later), the power of the breath in Sydney, MDMA in Queensland, ayahuasca in Costa Rica, LSD in Sydney, DMT in Newcastle, mescaline and ketamine (not strictly a psychedelic) back in Sydney.

But this book also gives us insights into the author. She confesses that she overshares, but that oversharing offers me no insight into her character. At the end of the book, we even get a list of things the author would like to change about herself. I could make some suggestions.

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She tells one of her “medicine” guides, Dr Max: “I know that I’ll never have the thing I want more than anything, a sense of belonging to a group, or even a partner who cares for me. I’m just not a charismatic person, I’m not a people magnet.”

At no point does she identify her own self-absorption as part of the problem. While she says meditation allows her to “better regulate the tumultuous emotions of the Highly Sensitive Person that I am”, it doesn’t seem to give her insight into what she could do about her behaviours. Let me just say that the capital letters on “Highly Sensitive Person” are hers, not mine.

Sometimes you get midway through a book and wonder whether you should bother going on with it. I mean, sure, Sarah, your readers get you’ve got troubles. But not even that should excuse this sentence: “I didn’t want to reach the end of my life having missed opportunities to expand my mind, to benefit from epiphanies, great highs and deep insights.” For the rest of us, that’s an invitation to read more, love, travel scarily, enrol in a degree, learn to ride a bicycle and have better sex – not necessarily in that order.

Napthali’s response is to experiment with psychedelics. As a schoolgirl, she saw graffiti in the train tunnel near St Leonards: “Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs.” The book is a diary of her year handling drugs. And yeah, I prefer reality.

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