Rick Strassman, the psychiatrist whose 1990s clinical trials helped restart modern psychedelic research, has released a new book that turns the lens inward. Titled My Altered States, it is published by Park Street Press and carries the subtitle A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Trauma, Psychedelics, and Spiritual Growth.
Rather than a laboratory chronicle, this volume is a literary memoir that traces Strassman’s encounters with altered states across a lifetime. He frames the project plainly: “This, then, is a memoir of altered states of consciousness, from ‘before birth’ to the closing of a Zen monastery’s gates behind me twenty two years later.”
The narrative moves through formative experiences, periods of intensive meditation, episodes of illness, and a long engagement with psychotherapy, giving readers both incident and reflection.
A defining feature of the book is its two part rhythm. Each chapter recounts a discrete state of mind or episode, and most are followed by “Reflections”, in which Strassman steps back to interpret what has just unfolded. He explains that these exegetical notes appear after every narrative except the last, to clarify both how experiences occurred and what they might mean. This structure lets the memoir double as an inquiry into mind and development, rather than simply a catalogue of experiences.
Strassman draws on the full range of frameworks he has lived and taught. He describes decades of psychoanalytic training and practice alongside long commitments to Zen Buddhism and later study of foundational Judaism, then applies those lenses to his own material.
Across the “Reflections”, he returns to recurring themes from consciousness research, including set, setting, intention, and dose, and how they shape any altered state induced by drugs, practices, or life events.
He also offers a compact primer for readers, outlining set as one’s mental, physical, and spiritual condition going in, setting as the surrounding context, and cause as the agent or method and its dose.
The work situates itself in a lineage of writing on mind altering states, but what gives it distinctive force is Strassman’s willingness to treat his own episodes with the same curiosity he once reserved for clinical volunteers. He notes that his earlier career at the University of New Mexico involved supervising hundreds of DMT and psilocybin sessions, work he chronicled for a wide audience in DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
In My Altered States, he uses those research tools to interrogate memory, meaning, and change within a single life.
Visuals play a role as well. Each chapter is paired with artwork by Merrilee Challiss, which is described as capturing an episode’s mood and the characteristic qualities of the state under discussion, from novelty and meaning in psychedelics to focus in meditation and disinhibition with alcohol. The images aim to express what words alone cannot, extending the memoir’s enquiry into a visual register.
Strassman is candid about motives and limits. He writes that, like many academics, “research is me search”. He also avoids neat moral endings, stating there is “no final redemption, no tidy ending”, only an account of trying to become free while hoping to make some contribution. That tone may help the book reach readers who are curious about the science of mind yet want to see how theory meets the contingencies of a life.
The table of contents signals the range. Early chapters such as “Flying Baby” and “Prayer Wheel” sit alongside later pieces like “LSD Chicken”, “Death Valley”, and “New York Breakdown”, all framed by sections on nature and nurture, and on finding a path in young adulthood. That span allows for close reading of single moments and for patterns that emerge only over decades.
For those who know Strassman primarily through his clinical work, the memoir also revisits that history without repeating it. He reminds readers that his UNM studies in the early 1990s helped catalyse the renewal of sanctioned psychedelic science in the United States, and he connects those trials to later explorations of biblical prophecy and consciousness. The bridge between laboratory and life is where this book tries to walk.
My Altered States is released by Park Street Press, a division of Inner Traditions International, with 2024 copyright and print and ebook editions.
Readers who want a personal, psychologically informed tour of altered states, written by one of the field’s most recognisable voices, will find an accessible and unguarded account here.
