Antinatalism is the view that procreation is morally wrong. Its most well-known current defender is David Benatar, a professor of philosophy at the University of Capetown, who explicated this moral position on procreation in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. However, antinatalism long predates Benatar’s work. Antinatalism has…
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Psychedelic therapy involves a psychedelic session in which an individual takes a psychedelic while being supervised by one or more trained therapists. It is the combination of the psychedelic experience with psychotherapy. However, psychedelic therapy, as traditionally understood, is not simply therapy with the adjunct of a psychedelic; it specifically involves a single high dose…
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Depression is not normally a condition that is associated with pain. When we think of pain, we might think of the acute pain of stubbing your toe, the more sustained and intense pain of breaking a bone, or the chronic pain of a physical disease or condition. But depression is painful. It’s just a difficult…
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The writer Andrew Solomon is best known for his book The Noonday Demon, a harrowing personal account of clinical depression. In it, he captures the essence of the condition in one sentence: “The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality.” While depression undoubtedly varies between individuals, it seems to commonly feature this loss of…
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Phenomenology is a philosophical movement, founded by Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938), which concerns itself with direct experiences. Phenomenologists study the nature of consciousness as it is experienced subjectively in the first person. Through systematic reflection on experiences from the first-person point of view, Husserl believed we could better understand the structures of consciousness and…
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