1_10 Adam Aronovich: Nature of Madness, Psychedelic Narcissism, and Finding Humor in Chaos

Adam is a doctoral candidate in Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry. He is an active member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC) and has spent close to 5 years living and working in the Peruvian Amazon, facilitating workshops and retreats while conducting extensive fieldwork and qualitative research. He is currently the Director of Therapy and Integration for Rē Precision Health while maintaining a private practice with individual clients and online groups, offering a unique approach to mental and emotional health that blends insights from Psychology, Art, and Integrative Psychotherapy all rooted in a grounded relational framework.

You can learn more about Adam's work on his satire page: https://www.instagram.com/healingfromhealing 

Transcript

[00:00:43] RS: So I'm always very curious about how people's journey started. How did you grow up? Where did you grow up? What were the circumstances under which you grew up that you feel informed the person that you are? So maybe you can start at, let's say, not day zero, but maybe, when you're five, six to seven years old... let's start there. 

[00:01:01] AA: Okay, great. Well, I mean, I grew up in Mexico City in times when Mexico City wasn't ideal place to grow up in, I guess kinda the mid 80s, early 90s violence in securities, so and so forth.

That period of time is something that I, just have these memories of always being very, guarded, like everywhere I went, there was always a mediation of an adult. I didn't really get to explore the world, other than being in the house or a car or, whatever sports I was doing in the afternoon or going to a friend's house.

Like I didn't have like immediate personal contact with the world. Like I didn't hang out in forest or parks or nature. , like everything was very sterile and sanitized because there was a climate of fear, right? I, there was a palpable, like parents were afraid, like adults were afraid and obviously teach children so and so forth.

So yeah, it's kinda like my memories from early childhood is just like that that isolation and separation from the world, I guess that very much marked the unfolding of my path. I haven't really thought about it before in that way, but, since you asked. So yeah, I left Mexico City when I was 13 and actually with my whole family, we moved out of the country and we started a new life in Israel. So I'm gonna Israeli Mexican mixture, cultural, hybrid, and things in Israel were very different. Yeah. There's much more of a... much more possibilities or opportunities of, being in the street and like being outside.

That was a new concept for me. I was 13 years old and the concept of being outside was kinda like a new idea. 

[00:02:30] RS: Did you find any correlation between, and I've never been to Israel, so I'm really curious cuz Israel's a bit of a melting pot itself. So we have a global diaspora living in Israel. The political situation, and I don't know what it was like back then, did you find any parallels between growing up in Mexico and then going to Israel? This sort of, at least perception of fear or anything like that?

[00:02:51] AA: Well, I mean, It's very different, in Mexico back then it was mostly about violent crime and , , mm-hmm. , I grew up in the, in a Jewish community in Mexico City, which. A bubble of privilege in many ways, right? Like private schools country club. Not that we were particularly wealthy or anything, like everything is relative and there's always kinda like this class divides obviously.

Mexico is a country that is very much divided by class and much of that class depends on where your family's from, right? There's like all of the Spanish people that you know, there are still like the offspring of Spanish colonizers and immigrants and German communities, and Irish communities and Korean communities, and obviously the Jewish community that's been in Mexico for 150 years at least.

But yeah, I mean they tend to create kind of these bubbles that are very exclusive and very guarded from the outside world because there is a perception of the outside world being unsafe in different ways. Israel is very different. The insecurity and the violence in Israel is different, it is not necessarily violent crime in terms of class struggles and exploitation of like richer classes and exploited classes, but obviously more about oppression and occupation and different forms of colonialism . Yeah, I mean there definitely was, there was fear. There was always a sort of fear in Israel, everybody knows somebody, whether it's a family member or friends, or a family member of a that has been killed or injured in terrorist attacks. In late 90s and 2000s, it was much more like every other weekend there would be like a bus blowing up in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. But it's different kind of violence. it's actual, like Ireland conflict. It's terrorism. It's kind like a Yeah, it's a whole other, it's a whole other story, but there's definitely fear. It's just, it's a different flavor of fear. 

[00:04:41] RS: I can definitely relate to that cuz I grew up so I was born in Bangladesh, but I grew up in Saudi Arabia, which is and in Bangladesh until recently in the last couple of years, there's been not, since the War of Independence in 71, there's been instability, political instability.

It's a very homogenous country otherwise. So there's no like religious instability, although there's four or five major religions living together. But it's political dynasties fighting each other, right? Who gets to control the version of history, really? But I go to Saudi Arabia, although it's a monoculture, it's a very authoritarian state... the sort of the political instability was just narratives around religion. So I can definitely relate when you talk about it's a different kind of politics, different kind of political violence.

Okay, you go to Israel, you go with your family, and so what was it like growing up and I'm interested in how that experience, and I have a feeling you moved around quite a bit, how did that experience inform the kind of work you've come to do over the last couple of years, including your PhD work?

[00:05:37] AA: that's a good question. I don't know if my childhood or like the experience of immigration is obviously know, difficult one for everybody, right? Like uprooting yourself from the culture that you know, and the people that you know. And moving to a new country, learning a new language feeling at home in a new country.

There's a new culture they need to absorb and know kinda like the right things to say and how to act. And it was a process. For me, it was an incredible process, right? It was kind like a, like I was blooming during that time. And again, I think like a lot of that is related to the change of environment. There is there is a story by Thich Nhat Hanh and he used to say this sometimes as lecturers says, if you're a gardener and you're cultivating or you're trying to grow lettuces and the lettuces are not growing great, then you don't go and get mad at the lettuces and start yelling at the lettuces. You go and check the soil, right? Like what are the parameters that these lettuces are growing in? Is it enough humidity? Is it enough water? Is it fertilizer working? Is it soil? Whatever it is. And then if not, then you go and kind of change. So thinking about my 13 year old self I think that changed the story of immigration was also like a massive readjustment of the soil and the conditions that was growing up in living Mexico.

Like the things that I just shared about like never really having any direct, immediate contact with the world, with without a mediation or responsible adult, the climate of fear, the very guarded, kinda like middle class exclusive mindset. There's many things there.

And then accidentally at 13, like walking to school, playing outside, having friends that I could just call up and then, kinda like the archetype, like the, just like standing underneath somebody's window and throwing pebbles in their window and for them to kinda go I never had that growing up.

So suddenly it was connect this realization that there may, there is an interface where a person can be in the world and feel safe , know, and interact and kinda suck in the whole of the human experience in that. Nature like barracks and forest and like just having weekend trips and like I was accidentally was a much happier lettuce. The soil was different. The fertilizers were better, like the family, like everything was just much better. Fast forward, I think, The thing that really maybe had the most influence. And I probably gonna go back to that experience because most of my work, or the main focus of my work is exactly at that intersection between the links and intrinsic relationships between the health of individuals and the health of communities.

So the health of societies. And the health of environments. And the health of cultures, right? This is exactly what I do. And I think actually this is the first time that I kinda link probably how my early experiences of not growing up in a healthy culture or a healthy society or a healthy environment had a massive impact in how I came to understand this correlations.

Yeah, I that's most of the thing, right? Like we tend to have an increasingly an almost exclusive perception of health as being the responsibility of the individual, right? Like even this is the narrative that Western Medical establishment, I think, mostly when it comes to mental health, even though that distinction in itself is artificial, but when it comes to the quality of our experience, we do tend to have a very individualistic. View on it. If a person is anxious and depressed, there's something wrong with the person. And increasingly more not only with a person as a holistic being, but like more smaller and smaller parts of our body, right? Like now it's our brains. Now it's our, the dopeminergic system or serotonergic system. And depression is pretty much equated to an imbalance of neurotransmitters with very little concern about the actual circumstances that the life of that person unfolds in. Community, society, culture that's kinda like the main focus of many of the things that I do write about. 

[00:09:12] RS: There's so much there... happy lettuce. I think that's the part that sort of sticks out -happy lettuce because it is really about the context, right? Because human beings are fundamentally relational beings. And so the soil or the context in which you grow up, really does inform a lot, and we know now that age two to five are really core areas. When the brain develops a sense of identity and a sense of place in the world starts to develop.

At what point did mental health, psychedelics or medicine come into the picture?

[00:09:39] AA: I studied psychology in Israel, and this is after I finished my military service. As any other Israeli person, we have to go to the Army, which, there's a whole story in there on its own, but kinda like fast forward, I studied psychology and I was working for a few years in a psychiatric hospital and a few other different psychiatric environments.

Mostly kind of midway homes for people that were diagnosed in the. Faces or stages of schizophrenia different personality disorders and so on and so forth. And very quickly I realized that as much as I really enjoyed working with people and helping people and having conversations with people and listening to people and hearing out about people's experiences and experiences of suffering at, very quickly, I did realize that my capacity to help was very much hindered by the limitations of the system that I was part of. realized that more than anything I was really just kind like an agent of social control. And my role was pretty much to police people's intake of pills. That was kinda what my role was. I did have like personal relationships with most people, but what was expected from me really was to make sure and oftentimes convince people that they needed to take their medications sometimes four or five times a day.

And I just started realizing that something was not quite right in the way that we address human. And yet my limitations were very self-evident. I didn't really have many options on how to address or help people other than just being present with them and say this is the system that I'm working from, and you need to take your pills and you need to do all of these things that you're kind, like required to do if whatever it is that you're doing.

But at the same time, like human to human, I can listen to you, I can hold space for your story. I can believe in what you're saying, particularly when it comes to experiences such as acute psychosis, for example, right? Where people experience things that are very much in conflict with consensus reality in many ways.

There's always a matter of trust, right? Do you believe that what I'm saying is true for me, it doesn't have to be true in a ontological way for everybody, but, this is my experience, so it's kind like a tendency to just squash down people's experiences and not really listen to. I can ascribe everything to malfunctioning and errors in the brain. So I really got interested in the far reaches of the human mind in many ways. And what are the experiences that we oftentimes ascribe to madness or insanity, and whether they're actually experiences of madness or insanity or something else.

That was like hand in hand with my discovery of psychedelic drugs. So you can imagine that. Huge influence on the way that I perceived altered or non-ordinary states of being because I was, experimenting with different substances. I was very active in the scene in harm reduction and some different things.

I had a very good grasp of the range of human experience and how limited the institutional. Definitions of normalcy and sanity are, and how narrow our ideas of what normalcy and sanity are when it comes to the human experience or the breadth and depth of what is possible.

Mm-hmm. . . Rave culture was kinda like my initiation into many of these things. Before I went to school, I've been traveling for a while and I spent some time living in London and particularly the 2005, 2006 rave quad party culture in London.

That's where I cut my teeth with electronic music or drugs and so on and so forth. When, like very early on I caught on to the fact that, yeah, I these things are really fun and really fun to party with, but also there's so much more to that, right? I immediately recognize the massive amount and scope of the therapeutic properties, particularly when it came to mushrooms, LSD or MDMA, which was like a massive realization for me of feeling.

It's one of the main topics that we all usually kind talk about... just the capacity to really regain our emotional literacy. For me, it was an awakening of being able to feel all sorts of things after being numb for so long. It's oh wow. Like I can feel joy. I can feel like all of these things again, right?

Or for the first time sometimes, or I don't really recognize what is, oh, this is ecstatic, joy, or this is empathy. It has been a process, the benchmark of has been developing emotional literacy. And I think as men, we oftentimes have similar experiences.

The point that I wanted to make, kinda not elaborating on it too much. There came a point where I started kinda like intuitively realizing that there was many parallels between psychedelic experiences and what the establishment calls psychotic experiences or non-ordinary experiences, or arter states and so on and so forth.

And obviously, back then I was much more naive and I thought maybe schizophrenic people are not really schizophrenic people, but maybe they're shamans in hiding or they're not really understood or their experiences are just misconstrued and they're just being medicated because Western Society doesn't really honor the role of that person who is able to see beyond the limits of normal perception and tap into the stages that I'm able to tap into with mushrooms really and so on.

Maybe like those persons get their naturally and nobody teaches them how harness those gifts for the benefit of their communities and maybe they, they'll get afraid and we just medicate them and suppress their experiences. Today I don't think that's true. I think that's very far off .I do think that, mental illnesses particularly psychotic disorders are real and we don't know much about them, but I wouldn't say that every schizophrenic is a misunderstood shaman. 

 Think what I'm trying to say is that when it comes to, know, the narratives and stories that we share with people about what these substance are for, what these plants are for, and we prime them towards a certain range of experiences, particularly when it comes to re-experiencing childhood trauma or recovered memories, there's a huge controversy, within psychology about the validity of these experiences and the dangers of just assuming that these things are true and that there's such a thing as a suppression or repression of memories because of trauma, which is not necessarily true.

 So when a person comes out of a ceremony and they're like, oh, I have this incredible, like really powerful experience where I saw all of these things that happened to me when I was a child, and like the source of all these different patterns that I have as an adult and like it involves these other people because that person did so and so to me, but then did that actually happen? Was that like a symbolic metaphor? Was that something that like confabulation. Why was that and if that person doesn't have a facilitator who can actually help them navigate the multiple possibilities and intricacies of what that experience means, and they let them just go with the idea that actually is a recovered memory and that actually is what happened. And that actually is something then that can be incredibly devastating, not only for themselves, but other people may be implicated in that. And this is kinda like a very tricky thing, right?

Like to what point do we assume that our experiences with substances are more valid than other experiences so that the information that we receive on those experiences is more real than real or that we can rely or that we can trust, right? That whatever is that we saw or we experience, or the information that was handed down to us or whatever, that we want to conceive of that exchange of knowledge or data that happens was the ultimate... reality. And if we're not critical about it, if we're not self-reflective about it, if we don't question the premises of this kind of work and we just assume that all of these things are always true, then I mean we're kinda like priming people for shitload of problems. And I think we're seeing that in mass scale.

With a lot of people who, have gone into like psychedelic experiences and psychedelic trainings and becoming facilitators and, kinda like not developing at the same time other critical faculties and other ways of understanding diversity of opinions and particularly like learning the philosophy of knowledge and epistemologies and ontology, and what ways of understanding the world we have... There's just so many things that need to be developed in tandem with our self-development and our introspection and our capacity to look at our own stuff. There's also like external, more intellectual and more emotional paths that people need to take.

And when these things are not done, one with the other, then this will blow up into some sort of like psychedelic narcissism, I think is the best word I have for that. Like assuming that everything that I experience is what it is and that, there's no criticism about it. 

[00:18:08] RS: Totally.

And in some ways, it charts the same typical history of humanity, which is we know the tools, but we expect the tools to evolve in a vacuum, but it doesn't, one scientific definition of psychedelics is that they're non-specific amplifiers. That might be scientifically true, but it is not value neutral. So it's subject to the surroundings, the container. So the same reason that you know, the CIA used LSD and MK Ultra, those experiments to train soldiers and see how mind control works. You can also use LSD and Microdosing to heal or to focus. It is subject to the value and the container that you use these tools and these substances. And indigenous communities have perfected that container over thousands of years. It didn't come automatically. And with this psychedelic renaissance, for a lack of a better word, It's evolving in the absence of that tradition.

Right? And which is why we are seeing some of these issues. I wanna pivot to this sort of last question, which I think is really interesting. I find it hilarious. Something's happened in the last two years . We'll call it spiritual narcissism, psychedelic narcissism, you're seeing this weird authoritarian bend to health and wellness, right? Something weird has happened, and in that, came along this Instagram page or Facebook group you created called Healing from Healing, which I think is the smartest, most hilarious thing. And I find in a time when things get so complex and confusing, humor, satire, and comedy actually presents a very compelling path forward because to me comedy is a way to integrate conflicted information, conflicted views on the world, and you can almost be agnostic and hold both views at once. So what was the genesis of healing from healing? Did you anticipate it to become what it is? And tell us a little bit about what it represents to you and why is comedy so important? 

[00:20:00] AA: That's a great topic, something very present for me. But I think like you you were saying about the technology not developing in tandem. I think that's a, kinda like a crucial point. Takes me back to Edward Wilson's saying, like the real problem of humanity is the following - we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology. And I think in a sense, yeah, psychedelics do give us that kind of God-like perspective but we don't really have the other level.

We haven't leveled up in the other way, so we can actually make better sense of it. And I think that's one of the reasons why healing from healing needed to happen. And why did it happen? I think it's kinda like a process that had been boiling off for a long time. I spent many years in the rainforest immerse in a culture that was out of wack in many ways where I saw these things firsthand over and over. But I think what was the last straw was the pandemic and when Covid started and I just started kinda like realizing how many people that I knew and respected and were friends and colleagues and people in my spheres and scenes were just spiraling down into this insanity. I don't know if you you remember this documentary 'Plandemic' that was put out? 

[00:21:11] RS: That was the first one of the cons. Spirituality, like conspiracy, all the stuff combined. 

[00:21:15] AA: We didn't touch on this, but part of my trajectory has been also like a couple of years and rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, and I'm very deep in it. I have a sort of, kind of respect to some extent about, alternative research and understanding that Yeah, I sometimes, powerful people to conspire behind our bags for nefarious purposes. When it came to pandemic, I that movie was so bad, so poorly made, so obviously like biased, so epistemologically bankrupt, and seeing so many people, like not only fall for it, but not only reshare it, but create like whole new identity around that shit, and these are at the same time where Qanon was happening and then just seeing like this conspiranoia and mindfuckery just taking over our sense and like the yoga world and the plant medicine world and all these like different rails that kind of are adjusting to each other and interlock in so many ways that I have been part of, in so many ways and suddenly like seeing how there were always that there were always that fertile soil for magical thinking, for lack of a epistemic humility and for medical libertarianism and privilege. And I started feeling really distressed about it. And I started like reckoning with my role in it.

Yeah. Like how deeply entrenched I was. I mean, I was working in an ayahuasca retreat center at the. So how deeply entrenched I was in this kind of culture and started to like really getting into researching what were the ideological substrates that were making this possible, what were the cultural parts of, these scenes that were facilitating this kind of dissent into madness and epistemic.

I got, started like researching that shit and getting like deeper into the new age culture, and kinda like the wellness culture and how entrenched these things are with consumerism and how entrenched these things are with a kind of magical thinking, that I always rallied against and.

But when I started talking about these things, the response was on one hand oh, thank God somebody's speaking about this and thank God, like somebody's speaking out against this insanity. On the other hand, there's lots of people who were like really upset about it and this is my truth, and my truth is just as valid as other person's truth.

And I was like, no, that's nonsense. Like your truth is not other person's truth. That's like such a bad take, such a bad application of post modern deconstructionism and relativism. With Qanon kinda like ravaging the yoga community and plant missing communities, like just going on epistemic worm holes about pandemics and all sorts of different things, I got really concerned with the intersection of psychedelics and how do we make sense of the world in also different ways.

Again, like one of the things that we discussed earlier, right? There's like this idea. I think that psychedelics provides kind like a better insight into things or the experience are very salient or they're truer than truth or . There's something about people who do psychedelics that tend to have a very overconfident and inflated sense of their sense- making capacities and information processing capacities and analysis capacities. I don't know if it's intrinsic or we just haven't figured out a way, like good integration, but it seems to be a link between people who do use psychedelics, particularly people who use psychedelics long term, particularly people who choose that as a path in the way that we makes sense of the world around us, and I got really concerned that something was like really outta whack. But when I was talking about it reception was very good from certain people, but also like I got like really ostracized and alienated by other people who started perceiving me as being condescending and, being kind of part of the establishment and shutting down, like discussion around or policing. Some of that is true. I can be condescending in snarky and I can have like very strong opinions about things, but I do try to keep an open dialogue around things, even though things that are like flatly ridiculous, right?

Such as so many of the ideas that we're circulating in our spheres for so long. It's still hard. And I think. At some point, I kinda realize that the way to do that wasn't by being condescending or confrontational or even like strongly opinionated or just like articulating things clearly because I wasn't really getting through to the people that I need wanted to get through.

mean you're preaching to the choir, that's fine. I You're of getting feedback and likes and comments from the same people all the time. But that's not exactly necessarily the. I thought should be engaging with what I was saying because this is important stuff, right? For all sorts of different reasons for different people.

The obvious choice was humor. There's a quote that I like a lot. It's actually my Facebook page header, I don't know if that's still a thing, but yeah have that in my Facebook. And it says - if you want to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh or they will kill you. That's kinda like the thing that motivates this page for the most part. Let's talk about like really important things about things that are really fucked up in kind of the interlocking spheres of wellness, psychedelics, plant medicines, yoga, so on and so forth. But let's make that funny, we're not gonna be able to get into actual depths of actual dialogue around it and it's hit and miss because to be honest, I. Very unhinged expectations about what the format of Instagram captions would allow me to do.

So I, I thought it would kinda initiate a conversation and people would chip in and we would have like interesting dialogues that were civilized. And that's obviously bullshit, , particularly around social media, Instagram. On Facebook, people are not there to have dialogues.

People are not there to have like fruitful discussions or sensitive topics. People are there to vent and people are there to be mean to each other. At some point I gave up on that idea like this is not gonna be useful for having actual interesting conversations around those topics, but at the very least, if I can make people laugh, then I made my thing.

 I don't really care about, celebrity or influencer clout or anything like that. But really it was kinda like a way for me to talk about things that I think needed to be talked about. But the thing that really, is important is that I started getting a lot messages and emails from people and like invitations to have conversations or certain things. And more than anything, like people who were really grateful that they felt seen and they felt heard, and they felt understood, and they felt like suddenly somebody was articulating the things that they were feeling for so long.

And these are, like a lot of people who were stuck in like spiritual colds for a long time or were like really unhinged, in like unhealthy environments that were at the intersection of these things. Yoga communities, plant medicine communities, retreat centers... yeah, I mean we've been living with these things for so long, but we were never really able to put them in words or see them, like the concepts that I started creating I think were instrumental. know, For myself, they're really important for me to start thinking about things in a more clear way, but like coming with these terms, right? Psychedelic narcissism and epistemic humility. I didn't come up with all of them, but I kinda repurpose them for this particular thing sometimes.

Trickle down healing, what does that mean? So all sorts of different ways and concepts and ways of thinking about things and like just like the support and the feedback and like feeling that really making a difference in people. The amount of just the amount of messages that I was getting like made it all worthwhile and saying maybe I'm not always hitting the net in the head.

And many of the things that I put out are things that I'm not like 100% proud of. I do know for a fact that there's a massive amount of people out there that are really appreciate it. And I think that's the thing that really keeps me going. Even when I feel that everything is stupid and nothing matters, which is half of the time or 60% of the time... every day I wake up and I go to my Instagram account and my first thought is, when the fuck am I gonna shut this? But then I can few messages and figure out that, it is a sacrifice, I'm not gonna lie. Yeah. Like being online has a massive impact in my quality of life.

Devoting the time that I need to devote, not only for writing and posting, but to reply to messages in comments and like it being more or less, in check with what's happening in the spheres. Like the amount of time. that it requires for me to be on Instagram, for example, is something that definitely 100% has a very detrimental, negative impact in my quality of life and my mental health.

And that's the main reason why I'm really ambivalent about all of it because I do realize that it is a sacrifice and having to do it obviously to some extent, but also every day that every, there's not one day that goes by where I don't think I really need to prioritize my wellbeing and I can't be terminally online. 

[00:29:35] RS: I think you make a really good point. Ultimately, it goes back to the conversation about tools, right? Just because we can, should we, and I think, if this was just an experiment that you shut down someday, it was a worthy experiment.

And I think from a perspective of somebody who likes the page, and I really love the content, I think you've given people the language to process what is happening, and I think this is where comedy is so powerful. It gives you a way to hold multiple truths at the same time and laugh at yourself. And in, in terms of epistemic humility, which you mentioned. It does actually provide some humility cuz you're like, you know what, I'm a flawed fuck, I know a lot of stuff, but I also don't know anything and I'm okay with that. So the cycle of growth can continue. With that, Adam, thanks so much.

This was a fantastic conversation. I feel like we could talk for hours and we have in the past. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you. Keep doing the work. I think it makes the world a better place and even if you decide to end it, it was all worth awhile.

[00:30:29] AA: Thank you so much. I appreciate that.