PSA's Sunday Sound-Off: The race to commercialize psychedelic therapy is accelerating, but at what cost?

Psychedelic State(s) of America’s Sunday Sound-Off: September 13th, 2026

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The Sunday Rundown

1. Repeated Patterns of AI, SSRIs & GLP-1s: Considerations Critical for Sustainability, Health and Happiness
2. The race to commercialize psychedelic therapy is accelerating, but at what cost?
3. PSA NewsWire Highlights of the Week: September 13th, 2026

Repeated Patterns of AI, SSRIs & GLP-1s: Considerations Critical for Sustainability, Health and Happiness

By Gianna Biscontini

Years ago, at a psychedelic-assisted therapy training in the redwood forests of Northern California, a teacher made the personal observation that Western culture values “speed, certainty and status”.

When I hear things like this, I often consider the behaviors involved in aligning to these cultural values. I also tend to follow the road back to its root.

Humans are programmed to behave according to:

• what gets us what we want (or think we want)
• in the shortest amount of time
• with the least amount of effort and resources needed

In looking back only a few years, its clear that we are still, as a society, battling a basic pattern in human behavior: blindly following the path of least resistance, driven by a sense of scarcity, urgency or, most currently, outsourcing our thinking.

What is not inherent to our behavior is what is most concerning today— that the monetary- and ego-driven desires of a few are globally making decisions for the many, without consent or full understanding of process, alternatives, or possible long-term outcomes.
If we look back over the last half century, a clear pattern emerges:

1. A promising new thing arrives.
2. We trust the marketing and embrace it without question, because we want to believe that our cheap, easy, and healthy solution has finally arrived.
3. We overuse it for everything as marketing and late stage capitalism take hold.
4. We later realize we overused it for everything.

Then, instead of pausing, listening more intently to the science, and returning to the wisdom that came long before the tech booms and money-making ventures, we continue our misuse.

We can’t help ourselves. We’ve already habituated, normalized, given up on ourselves. 

The substance, the program, or the gadget has so threaded itself into our increasingly comfortable existence that we cling to it at our own peril rather than admit there’s a better way.

The Chemical Imbalance Theory 

In the 1980s and 90s, psychiatry was trying to solve a big problem: depression was complicated, slow to treat, and hard to measure. Then came an appealing explanation— a chemical imbalance in the brain must be responsible. Pharma rushed to the rescue, creating a world of lever-pulling and re-dosing that still presides over psychiatry today. At the last conference I attended, a well-known psychiatrist stood on stage, sighed, and admitted, “We are still really just guessing.”

It has become clear that what goes without mention in medical school is that the chemical imbalance theory was never actually proven. It was a working hypothesis that made intuitive sense and helped us consider the brain, but the neuroscience never quite shook out in the way psychiatry would have liked it to.

Clearly, that didn’t stop the medical field from building an entire framework around it.

SSRIs were dubbed the answer and were designed with a specific purpose: stabilize patients for three to six months while in therapy, thus providing the emotional stability required to do the psychological work that sustainably produces change. The medication was the bridge. The therapy was the destination.

We kept the bridge, but abandoned the destination.

Millions of people stayed on SSRIs for years—sometimes decades—without the therapy that was supposed to happen in tandem. They weren’t chemically addicted to the medication, but they’d developed something just as durable: a psychological dependence on the idea that their problem was chemical and therefore didn’t require their participation to solve.

The system worked brilliantly, if the goal was treating symptoms and getting through the day. It worked terribly if the goal was generating lasting change. Most people didn’t notice the difference until years later, when they realized they had outsourced the emotional resilience and deeper exploration they could have been learning on all along. They were functional— able to go to work, take care of the basics in life, and likely have friendships and relationships.

But the sadness, grief, anxiety, and heaviness eventually returned, side effects took hold, and when life threw challenges— as it does— many individuals realized they were no closer to handling them with strength and equanimity than they were a decade earlier.

The opportunity for strengthening themselves by going through instead of around was missed. This lack of psychoeducation, in my opinion, is one of the most harmful mistakes made by the pharmaceutical and psychiatric fields.

Something can be medically safe and psychologically risky at the same time. A tool can solve the immediate problem while simultaneously preventing us from developing the skills we actually need long-term.

As a result, we become dependent.

GLP-1s Continue the Pattern

GLP-1s came into play in 2005 for individuals with diabetes and moved into the weight loss market in 2021. Again, what began as helpful for individuals under medical care became an environment ripe for misuse and overuse. Now, in many cases including celebrity overculture, GLP-1s are a continued example of the behavioral pattern that arrives alongside the newest quick and easy answer.

We now have a generation of people willing to take GLP-1s indefinitely—not for metabolic reset, not as a bridge to behavioral change, but as a lifestyle hack to losing weight.

In a growing number of cases, their use is not medicine or pharmacology. It is a simple and somewhat predictable continuation of the same quick-and-easy (and lucrative, for some) approach, with marketing that takes advantage of an un-evolved human condition, and with a host of willing influencers and “wellness experts”.

Modern medicine is once again failing to ask the hard questions before going to market with an understudied product:

• Can we trust people to use them responsibly?
• Can lawmakers and medical professionals use the science of human behavior (the same science used to addict us to phones) to build protective factors into the prescribing and use of these substances, so people are protected from the innate human tendencies we can’t simply override?
• Will pharmaceutical companies actually invest in research that proves they should be used short-term, or will they invest in research that justifies indefinite use?
• Do we know the long-term effects of having an entire generation on sustained appetite suppressants? What are the genetic effects?
• What effects will undesired results, like reported muscle loss, have on longevity?

Weakening Is Not Wellness

Similar to my point on the overuse or misuse of SSRIs potentially weakening our ability to build resilience and tolerate discomfort, thus rendering dependent upon them, GLP-1s can also keep us coming back for more short-term, but not long-term, benefits.

Alongside recurrent weight gain once regular dosing has stopped, GLP-1 use is also shown to reduce muscle mass, a critical factor in longevity and mortality. Research suggests that muscle loss while taking a GLP-1 is equivalent to any calorie-restricted diet or bariatric surgery, but this has not been my personal experience.

This summer, I took a GLP-1 for a sugar addiction. No matter how hard I tried, I could not manage to reduce my intake and, as a result, I experienced brain fog and mood effects to the point of concern. My recent Substack article shares my personal story, successes and concerns, but in the matter of muscle loss, it shook me to my core to attend a simple yoga class, my normally athletic legs struggling through sun salutations as never before.

According to research at the National Institute of Health, muscle mass and strength is an independent and important predictive factor for lower all-cause mortality and longer lifespan. If adequate muscle is healthy, less muscle is unhealthy. If GLP-1s as they currently stand are overused or misused, it may absolutely contribute to a physical weakening of the body.

Same pattern. Same culture. Same desperate reach for the shortcut, and the dollars.

Editor’s Note: This excerpt is from an essay that was originally published by Gianna Biscontini over on Substack. Be sure to like, share, and subscribe today!

ICYMI: The race to commercialize psychedelic therapy is accelerating, but at what cost?

From “Beyond the FDA Hearing: How PSA and The Psychedelic Bar Association are Shaping the Future of Psychedelic Discourse”

In a culture driven by quick fixes and rapid corporate expansion, treating mental health like mass-market medicine poses serious risks. Psychedelic-assisted healing is inherently relational, deeply personal, and requires careful integration — not a fast-tracked rollout like standard pharmaceuticals.

Scaling too quickly risks diluting ethics, care quality, and the transformative potential of the medicine itself. Do we want fast access, or do we want sustainable, safe healing?

PSA NewsWire Highlights of the Week

Weekly dispatches from across the psychedelic landscape.

📜 Law & Policy

From our Friends at Psychedelics Today

Beyond the Foxhole: How Psychedelic Policy’s Coalition Is Growing Past Veterans

By Logan Davidson

💰 Business

From our Friends at Marijuana Moment

There Will Be ‘Enormous Demand’ For Psychedelic Treatments, RFK Says, Praising Trump’s Action On The Issue

By Tom Angell

🎨 Culture

From our Friends at DoubleBlind Magazine

Donald Trump-Shaped Pressed Pills Are Not Ecstasy, Dutch Officials Warn

By Mary Carreon

💊 Science & Research

Over at Politico

Psychedelics are on the FDA’s mind

By Lauren Gardner