A new memoir from Johns Hopkins trial participant Erica Rex demolishes the wellness industry’s favorite trip
There’s a glossy myth circulating through wellness Instagram, venture capital pitch decks, and celebrity-backed “healing brands” right now: that psychedelics are the answer to America’s trauma epidemic. Pop a mushroom, book a retreat, microdose your way to enlightenment. Simple. Profitable. And according to journalist Erica Rex—who was actually there at the beginning of modern psychedelic research—complete baloney.
Rex’s forthcoming memoir Seeing What Is There: My Search for Sanity in the Psychedelic Era (She Writes Press/distributed by Simon & Schuster, January 2026) doesn’t traffic in easy redemption or Instagram-worthy breakthroughs. As one of the first participants in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin trials back in 2012, Rex has watched the so-called psychedelic renaissance transform from rigorous clinical research into what she sees as Big Pharma’s latest cash grab. Her book is a reckoning—with psychiatry, with therapy culture, and with an industry that’s packaging profound altered states like they’re boutique skincare.
This isn’t some outsider critique. Rex has the credentials to back up every claim: she’s reported for The New York Times and Scientific American and won a National Magazine Award for fiction. She was a Bollinger Science Journalism Fellow at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When she entered that Hopkins trial as a breast cancer patient struggling with depression, she documented the experience in an essay for Scientific American Mind titled “Calming a Turbulent Mind”—one of the earliest first-person accounts of clinical psychedelic therapy.
But Rex refuses to let that single moment define the narrative. Seeing What Is There positions her psilocybin session within decades of psychiatric violence she survived as the daughter of two psychiatrists—including a mother who trained under Henry A. Murray, the Harvard psychologist whose experiments helped create Ted Kaczynski. The childhood “treatments” Rex endured left her with Complex PTSD, a diagnosis shared by roughly 13 million Americans who remain poorly served by mainstream mental health care.
What makes Rex dangerous to the psychedelic wellness machine is her willingness to name what commercialization actually does to healing. When asked about venture capital’s entrance into the trauma industry, she doesn’t mince words: “Commercialization is designed to create efficiencies of scale, maximizing throughput as though humans and healing were components of computing systems. By its nature, commercialization removes all of the curative humanistic and cultural ingredients from the experience in order to maximize profit. These include: community, authentic connections with other human beings, taking part in a ritual or sacramental curative process. All venture capital exists to do is to extract the maximum profit out of any material or any generative system, including human relationships and cultural practices. It is murderously destructive to institutions that serve precisely the people who stand to benefit most from psychedelic treatment, and voids any consideration of the aspects of the psychedelic experience which make us human.”
That’s the language of someone who’s done the work—and watched investors strip it for parts.
The book threads investigative journalism through personal narrative, examining why vulnerable people (especially women) get retraumatized in psychedelic settings where emotional exposure is extreme and regulation is minimal. Rex documents boundary violations, financial exploitation, and power abuse inside therapeutic environments, then asks the questions no one in the wellness sphere wants to answer: Why are so many psychedelic advocates using spiritual language to disguise commercialization? Why is a drug once tied to counterculture rebellion now sold in glossy packaging as fast-access transformation?
Her central thesis cuts through the hype: altered states alone don’t heal trauma. Psychedelics might crack open suppressed memory and emotion, but without ethical guidance, community support, and economic stability, the outcomes can cause more harm. True recovery requires structural safety—not just chemically induced breakthroughs sold by aggressive clinics and celebrity brands.
Rex also recovers erased history, detailing how psilocybin research actually originated at the French Museum of Natural History in the 1950s, with early clinical trials happening at Paris’s main psychiatric hospital—facts conveniently omitted from America’s self-congratulatory psychedelic origin story.
The memoir deliberately resists the conventional arc readers have come to expect from trauma literature. When asked whether it was important to avoid the typical “healing journey” narrative, Rex is characteristically blunt: “Yes. If you want accounts of romps with psychedelics or ‘how I ate ‘shrooms/went to the ayahuasca retreat/microdosed with LSD/smoked DMT and saw stuff’ there are plenty of books and articles to read. This isn’t one of them.”
What it is instead: an unflinching look at systems that pathologize suffering while ignoring its causes, written by someone who survived those systems and refuses to let psychedelics become another tool of extraction. Jeffrey Masson, author of Assault on Truth, calls it “a brave, passionate, and powerful book that combines research and lived truth. Difficult at times, but impossible to put down—it will leave you wiser, shaken, and opened in ways few books ever do.”
Seeing What Is There arrives as psilocybin and MDMA move toward FDA approval, psychedelic startups pull in billions, and states rush to legalize or medicalize. Rex’s timing is urgent: her warning that a psychedelic “revolution” without justice will simply replicate existing harms lands at precisely the moment the industry least wants to hear it.
The book is available for $17.99 in paperback and $12.99 as an ebook through major retailers. Rex remains available for interviews and has presented at the NIH/NCI’s psilocybin research series and advised the Congressional Psychedelic Therapy Caucus.
For women tired of being told the answer to systemic trauma is another pill, another treatment, another purchase—this book offers something far more valuable than false hope: the truth.
