How do patients experience psychedelic therapy — before, during, and after the dosing session?

Co-designing the MIND Foundation doctoral fellowships program 2027

This grant-making process was designed by Christopher Schmidt, M.Sc., and Dr. Henrik Jungaberle.

• Saturday, October 3, 2026 · 9:40 a.m.–4:15 p.m. (CEST)
• MIND Foundation, Boxhagener Str. 78, 10245 Berlin, and via livestream
• Free of charge · Registration required · Working language: English 

The fellowship program – three doctoral stipends

The MIND Foundation doctoral fellowships program 2027 is dedicated to research on lived experience in the context of psychedelic-augmented therapies. It will support doctoral projects that study the experiences of

1. patients
2. psychedelic therapists in training and continuing education
3. people in the wider ecosystem around these therapies

in order to understand their needs, challenges, and the competencies needed to help create the conditions under which psychedelic therapies can succeed.

Methodologically, the program is committed to mixed-methods approaches that do justice to the subjective theories and external views, first-person and third-person perspectives surrounding this new form of clinical treatment. This includes methods of statistical research like surveys or self-assessment through questionnaires as well as qualitative research traditions, among them phenomenological approaches.

Why co-design? Participatory grant making – part 1

Psychedelic research is at a methodological turning point. While randomized controlled trials dominate the field’s current evidence base, the variety of patients’ lived experience throughout the whole journey — before, during, and after a psychedelic-augmented therapy — remains an open question. While the dosing session may be the epistemic core of psychedelic-augmented psychotherapy (PAT), there are also many other reports demonstrating the importance that context factors have for the success of therapeutic processes. Qualitative and phenomenological methods are indispensable for reconstructing the whole patient journey and the fundamental differences that we may detect – or not: how patients anticipate, undergo, and integrate psychedelic experiences, what that actually means to the individual, and how these processes relate to therapeutic change. 

Research on lived experience is strengthened when people with lived experience help decide what is researched and funded. We therefore develop the fellowship program in a participatory process, building on approaches in international health research and philanthropy in which patients, clinicians, and researchers set research and funding priorities together. Each symposium feeds its results into the next; the third consolidates them into the call for applications. 

What to expect on October 3

Lectures on current qualitative and mixed-methods findings provide the empirical ground — among them two sub-studies of the EPIsoDE trial on psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, conducted by the Central Institute of Mental Health (ZI), Mannheim, and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Cindy Jagorska (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) will introduce the concept of Patient and Public Involvement (PPI), its development, and its application in health research. 

At the center of the day is a lived experience round table with members of the newly founded MIND Foundation pPPI group — experts by experience who have participated in clinical trials with psychedelic substances or have undergone psychedelic experiences in existing clinical treatment contexts. Their perspective on the relevance, comprehensibility, and practical usefulness of research offers a rare corrective: a view of where researcher and patient perspectives converge, and where they diverge. 

In the afternoon co-design session, all participants — onsite and online — will work on the questions that matter for the 2027 fellowships: What do patients need before, during, and after the dosing session? Which challenges do they face, and which competencies do they bring? Which questions should doctoral research investigate from their perspective? The results will be documented, made publicly available, and carried forward into the next symposium. 

Participatory grant making – part 2 and 3

In the second symposium we will shift the focus to the other side – therapists and their lived experience with psychedelic augmentation: What are their needs, doubts, challenges? Which structures, knowledge, training, and support will make it possible to roll out and implement psychedelic-augmented therapy? 

Both perspectives will come together in the third symposium that will focus on the actual grant call. We will synthesize and evaluate the perspectives gathered in this process together – and prepare the call for the second quarter of 2027.

Program

The series at a glance

Who should attend

The symposium is open to everyone with a scientific interest in psychedelic therapy research. We expressly invite prospective applicants for the 2027 fellowships, patients and experts by experience, psychedelic therapists, and researchers, clinicians, and students in psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, and the social sciences and humanities, as well as PPI practitioners. Prospective applicants will have the opportunity to meet the research team and to help shape the program. Participation in the symposia is not a prerequisite for applying and will not be considered in the selection process.

Participation and registration

Participation is free of charge, onsite in Berlin or via livestream. Registration by name is required for both formats. When registering, please provide your institutional affiliation (if any) and a brief description of your interest in the symposium. While this is not obligatory, it helps us to build a network of debate around the grant.

Register for the symposium

The symposia will be recorded and made publicly available. Should privacy concerns arise for members of the MIND Foundation's PPI group, particularly during the lived experience round table, we may remove these sections from the recording.