Welcome to issue #15 of The Ethical Trip! This fortnight:

• How much (or little) could psychedelic therapy cost if you have private health insurance?

• Are client testimonials ethical?

• Can tripping on the couch really be patented?

For all this, plus an idiosyncratic roundup of recent research and alleged humour, read on!

Huge thanks to everyone supporting this work via buy me a coffee cactus. Also massive amounts of gratitude (and maybe a little concern) to the person who bought one of my unfeasibly cursed t-shirts.

Table of Contents

1. Industry Insights:

   1. Research Round-up

   2. How much will psychedelic therapy cost if I have p …

   3. Patent Nonsense?

2. Philosophical Brief: Testimonials

3. Reminder - Garden States!

4. A word from our sponsor:

Industry Insights:

Research Round-up

Valentic (2025) investigates the phenomenology of people making major life decisions after psychedelic experiences.

Bender et al (2025) looks at provider perspectives on challenges in treatment during psychedelic therapy. This paper, IMO, makes important contribution to how common challenges intense (but normally temporary) dysphoria or client disappointment with treatment outcomes are.

Bublitz (2025) gives us an extremely interesting paper, which investigates the epistemic implications of the REBUS (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics/Anarchic Brain) model and introduces the idea of epistemic harm-reduction.

Finally, Sotillos (2025) wrote such a good review of Psychedelic Capitalism that I will probably buy myself a copy.

How much will psychedelic therapy cost if I have private health insurance?

Earlier this year, Medibank, Australia’s largest private health insurer, announced a pilot scheme where they’d dedicated $10 million to providing coverage for MDMA assisted therapy, in partnership with Emyria, to be provided via their Empax Centre.

This came to my attention again more recently when Optimi Health $OPTHF ( ▲ 3.69% ) got a little over-excited with their public communications over a one-off purchase of their product.

Given that insurance coverage for mental health in Australia is notoriously lacklustre, I was curious about how this would work and what the out-of-pocket costs to people seeking this treatment under this pilot program would be? No one seemed to be talking specifics, if the scheme was mentioned at all.

In order to get some clarification, I contacted Emyria and Medibank. The insurer didn’t get back to me, but Michael Winlo, CEO of Emyria did. His reply email and our subsequent chat gave me some answers that I genuinely didn’t expect.

Get the full story here: Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and Health Insurance in Australia 

Lots more good stuff below, but only for subscribers!