Frequently Asked Questions
Information about Psilocybin
What Is Psilocybin Actually Studied For?
Psilocybin research has grown a lot in the last decade, and it’s worth knowing what the science actually shows — not the hype, the actual data. Here’s a plain-language rundown, based on peer-reviewed research, with an emphasis on meta-analyses (studies that pool results across many trials, which give a more reliable picture than any single study on its own).
Depression. This is where the evidence is strongest. A 2024 meta-analysis pooled 8 randomized controlled trials (524 adults) and found a large reduction in depression symptoms with psilocybin-assisted therapy compared to control conditions [1]. A separate, ongoing “living” meta-analysis (drawing on 15 trials and over 800 participants) found a similarly large effect [2].
To put “large effect” in plain terms: the improvement wasn’t small or marginal — it was substantial compared to what we typically see with standard antidepressants in trials. That said, it’s worth being honest about the caveats: most of these trials are still fairly small, many have design limitations (like difficulty truly blinding participants to whether they got psilocybin or a placebo), and a more recent 2025 analysis found that placebo/control groups in psilocybin trials tend to do worse than control groups in SSRI or esketamine trials — which complicates how we interpret the size of the effect [3]. In short: promising, but the field is still young, and I’m not going to oversell it to you.
Who Can Request a Session? Do I need a diagnosis?
What Regulation Provides
Colorado's regulated system creates accountability around the entire Natural Medicine Experience, including facilitator education and qualifications, participant screening, preparation, administration, integration, ethics, professional conduct, cultural considerations, continuing education, payment, documentation, and safety.
The medicine itself is also subject to testing and regulatory requirements, providing greater certainty about what is being administered. We cannot make the experience predictable, but we can reduce uncertainty about the medicine itself, including how much is being taken.
And it provides an established framework for responding to medical emergencies. Most experiences do not involve an emergency, but if one occurs, your safety comes before protecting the secrecy of the experience.
For me, regulation is not about taking the soul out of Natural Medicine work. It is about creating a structure strong enough to hold it.
Touch Is Explicitly Defined
Touch can be meaningful during a Natural Medicine experience, but it can also be deeply vulnerable. For that reason, touch in this space is never assumed or improvised.
Before the experience, we will clearly explain and demonstrate how touch may be used and establish an explicit touch agreement with each participant. You will know what kinds of touch may occur, where touch may occur, and how to communicate if you want touch to stop or change. We will make sure that this agreement is understood before the experience begins.
Touch is limited to three areas: the hands, feet, and shoulders. No other areas of the body will be touched by facilitators.
Your agreement to touch is not a blanket agreement. You can change your mind at any time, and you never need to explain why.
The purpose of these boundaries is not to make the experience rigid. It is to create enough clarity and safety that you can let go into your own experience without having to wonder what might happen next.
Your experience belongs to you.
Training Is Never Finished
Working responsibly with powerful medicines requires more than completing an initial training.
Colorado's regulated system requires ongoing education and professional development, including ethics education and current Basic Life Support certification. Consultation and continued learning provide opportunities to learn from colleagues, experienced practitioners, emerging research, and the people we serve.
I believe that is exactly as it should be.
This is a young and rapidly evolving field. We are still learning about these medicines, their potential benefits, their risks, and the many ways people respond to them.
Everyone working in this field should keep learning. I know I will.
Holding Mystery Without Abandoning Rigor
I have enormous respect for the mystery of Natural Medicine experiences.
People may encounter something psychological, spiritual, mystical, symbolic, relational, neurological, or something they simply don't have words for. I don't think we need to prematurely decide which explanation is the “right” one.
We can remain curious.
We can also remain rigorous.
Wonder and science can be friends.
For me, the regulated space creates room for both: the rigor of good healthcare and the mystery of experiences we do not fully understand.
The goal is not to control what happens or tell you what your experience means.
A Container With Boundaries
Natural Medicine experiences can involve profound vulnerability. That makes boundaries particularly important.
My approach is intentionally non-directive. I am not there to tell you what your experience means, convince you that it was spiritual or that it wasn't, or interpret every vision, emotion, or sensation for you.
Your beliefs about spirituality, religion, consciousness, healing, and non-ordinary states are your own.
I aim instead to support an unfolding, inner-directed process, one in which your own perceptions, questions, emotions, memories, insights, and meaning-making have room to emerge.
- Sometimes the most helpful thing a facilitator can do is listen.
- Sometimes it is to help you feel safe.
- Sometimes it is to remind you that you don't have to figure everything out right now.
Who Can Request a Session? Do I need a diagnosis?
One thing that surprises people: Colorado's regulated Natural Medicine program does not require a diagnosis, a referral, or a prescription. Unlike traditional psychiatric treatment, you don't need to be sick to access this work. Every participant still goes through a full health and safety screening — but the reason you're seeking a Natural Medicine Experience doesn't have to be a diagnosed mental health condition.
Every participant still goes through a full health and safety screening
The Colorado Natural Medicine Health Act itself describes this work in broad terms — including counseling, spiritual guidance, community-based healing, and personal growth, not just treatment of illness. In practice, people come to this work for reasons like:
- Working through depression, anxiety, grief, or trauma
- Processing a difficult diagnosis or major life transition
- Wanting to quit drinking or smoking
- Feeling stuck: creatively, relationally, or in a sense of life direction
- Spiritual exploration or a desire to understand consciousness more directly
- General curiosity and a wish for guided, supported self-exploration
You don't need to justify your reason to anyone in clinical terms. Part of my job is helping you get clear on your “why” for the work.
Why a Regulated Space?
“Why pay for a regulated experience when you could just take mushrooms with your cousin Marsha in her basement?”
There is thoughtful, compassionate, and important work happening outside formal systems. Many people have found meaningful support in unregulated or “underground” and community-based psychedelic spaces, and I deeply respect the people who have carried this work forward.
At the same time, I believe there is real value in the structure Colorado has created around natural medicine.
Because when people become deeply vulnerable, the container matters.
What does container mean?
By “container,” we mean the physical, relational, and ethical environment created around an experience: the boundaries, expectations, safeguards, and support that help a person feel safe enough to be vulnerable.
Natural Medicine experiences can profoundly alter perception, emotion, cognition, and our sense of self. They can also increase openness and suggestibility. In that state, a facilitator can have enormous influence over how someone understands what is happening to them.
That power deserves humility.
A facilitator can unintentionally or intentionally shape the meaning someone assigns to an experience, influence important decisions, blur relational boundaries, or position themselves as an authority on spiritual or psychological truths. In a field where extraordinary experiences can be interpreted in extraordinary ways, there is particular value in having clear ethical standards and professional boundaries.
I don't believe a facilitator should be the authority on someone else's inner experience.
That's one of the reasons I chose to work within Colorado's regulated natural medicine framework.
What Is Psilocybin Actually Studied For?
Psilocybin research has grown a lot in the last decade, and it's worth knowing what the science actually shows — not the hype, the actual data. Here's a plain-language rundown, based on peer-reviewed research, with an emphasis on meta-analyses (studies that pool results across many trials, which give a more reliable picture than any single study on its own). more>
Your experience belongs to you.
About Kate
Kate Dowden is a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner with more than 17 years of experience as a registered nurse, licensed to practice as a nurse practitioner in both Colorado and Utah.
Training Is Never Finished
Working responsibly with powerful medicines requires more than completing an initial training.
Colorado’s regulated system requires ongoing education and professional development, including ethics education and current Basic Life Support certification. Consultation and continued learning provide opportunities to learn from colleagues, experienced practitioners, emerging research, and the people we serve.
I believe that is exactly as it should be.
This is a young and rapidly evolving field. We are still learning about these medicines, their potential benefits, their risks, and the many ways people respond to them.
Everyone working in this field should keep learning. I know I will.
More F.A.Q
How Much Does It Cost?
I believe access matters. Natural Medicine Experiences require significant time, training, infrastructure, and support, and those realities come with real costs. At the same time, I do not want this work to become available only to people with substantial financial resources.
I am still determining the pricing structure for Anam Arbor Colorado. My goal is to find a model that balances affordability with the resources required to provide this work safely, ethically, and sustainably.
I plan to offer both individual and group Natural Medicine Experiences, with group experiences creating opportunities to make this work more financially accessible while still supporting the quality and care this work requires.
Can Difficult Things Happen?
Yes.
Natural Medicine experiences can be meaningful, beautiful, challenging, confusing, or some combination of all of these. They are not risk-free, and they are not right for everyone.
Some people experience temporary physical effects such as nausea, headache, dizziness, fatigue, changes in heart rate or blood pressure, or difficulty sleeping. Psychological effects can include anxiety, fear, confusion, emotional overwhelm, changes in perception, paranoia, or feeling disconnected from yourself or your surroundings. In some cases, difficult effects can persist beyond the experience, including prolonged changes in mood, perception, or sense of self.
A Natural Medicine experience can also challenge the way someone understands themselves, their relationships, their beliefs, or the world around them. That can be meaningful, but it can also be unsettling. We cannot promise a particular experience or outcome.
This is why careful screening matters.
Certain medical, psychiatric, medication, and substance-use circumstances can make Natural Medicine experiences inappropriate or require additional evaluation. This may include pregnancy or breastfeeding, significant or unstable alcohol or substance use, certain psychiatric or medical conditions, or medications and other substances that may interact with Natural Medicine or cannot be safely adjusted or paused.
Our goal is not to convince everyone that Natural Medicine is right for them. Sometimes the safest and most appropriate answer is not now, or not at all.
Our goal is not to convince everyone that Natural Medicine is right for them. Sometimes the safest and most appropriate answer is not now, or not at all.
What Does Anam Arbor Mean?
Anam (pronounced AH-nuhm) is a Gaelic word for soul, with meanings that also encompass spirit, life, and inner essence. Arbor is Latin for tree.
Together, Anam Arbor evokes a grove: individual trees, each with their own roots, shape, history, and way of reaching toward the sun, yet connected by something larger and often unseen.
That feels like a fitting metaphor for being human.
We each have an inner world that is uniquely ours. Our histories, relationships, bodies, beliefs, questions, and ways of making meaning shape who we are. And yet, none of us exists alone. We are nourished by the people and places around us, by what has come before us, and by connections we may not always be able to see.
There is something about the word soul that I intentionally leave undefined. I don’t mean it as a religious claim or something that needs to be explained. I mean the mysterious, deeply human part of us that cannot always be reduced to a diagnosis, a brain scan, or a set of symptoms.
Like a tree, we are shaped by what happens above the surface and what happens below it. Roots reach into soil that is dark, complicated, and full of what has broken down and become nourishment. From that unseen ground, something living continues upward: into the trunk, the branches, and eventually the smallest leaf reaching toward the light.
Perhaps healing is sometimes like that. Not becoming someone different, but becoming more deeply rooted in who we already are, while remaining open to what might grow.
That is the spirit behind Anam Arbor.
Rooted in science. Open to wonder.
I believe there is a way to hold both rigor and mystery.
Natural Medicine experiences can touch places that are difficult to explain. They can bring us into contact with emotion, memory, embodiment, relationship, meaning, awe, and sometimes experiences that leave us with more questions than answers. I don't think we need to explain those experiences away, and I don't think we need to turn them into certainty.
- There is room here for neuroscience and mystery.
- For evidence and lived experience.
- For mental health and spirituality.
- For curiosity without certainty.
- For awe without needing to name exactly what we have encountered.
Most importantly, there is room for the person.
My role is not to tell you what your experience means or who you should become because of it. It is to help create the conditions for you to explore your experience safely, with thoughtful preparation, appropriate boundaries, genuine curiosity, and respect for your own capacity to make meaning.
I am interested in what these experiences might help us develop: greater capacity to meet difficult emotions, resilience in the face of uncertainty, a deeper relationship with ourselves and others, and perhaps a little more room for acceptance, wonder, compassion and possibility.
Some things may become clearer. Some things may remain mysterious.
I think both are okay.
I believe we can be deeply rooted in science without closing ourselves to wonder.
Rooted in science. Open to wonder.
The Anam Arbor Colorado Philosophy
