Ed Prideaux

Chemical Collective • 8th December 2025

The Potential Benefits of Psychedelics for Trans People | Chemical Collective

Transgender and gender-diverse people are living through an acute mental health emergency. Suicide attempt rates among American trans youth run at 40-50% in most surveys. Many are turning to psychedelic therapy for help. What are the risks and benefits?

Chemical Collective • 4th December 2025

The Philosophy of Mysticism: Perennialism vs Constructivism | Chemical Collective

Do mystical experiences reveal a shared transcendent reality?  Or, like any other category of contingent experience, are they better understood as products of their cultures? These questions mark one of the defining controversies in the modern study of religion, as well as shaping the extent to which we can co-exist in a hyper-globalised polis.

Chemical Collective • 3rd November 2025

Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip | Chemical Collective

What unfolded during a terrifying mushroom trip in Hawaii between 1988 and 1989 would change Terence McKenna’s relationship with psychedelics – and perhaps reshape the message he shared with the world for the rest of his life.

Chemical Collective • 1st November 2025

Order, Chaos, and Consciousness: Examining the Entropic Brain Hypothesis | Chemical Collective

How does the coordinated activity of billions of neurons give rise to the richness of subjective experience? Among the many frameworks proposed is the Entropic Brain Hypothesis (EBH). First articulated by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues in 2014, EBH argues that the quality of consciousness can be indexed by the entropy – the randomness or diversity – of brain activity patterns. Is it true?

Chemical Collective • 8th October 2025

The Psychedelic Experience Illustrates the Appearance-Reality Distinction | Chemical Collective

What is a hallucination, exactly? What do we mean by 'real'? I consider the contributions of A.J. Ayer, Wittgenstein, Donald Hoffman and others.

Chemical Collective • 3rd October 2025

Non-Consensual Dosing in Psychedelic History | Chemical Collective

Today, we all accept that dosing people with psychedelic drugs is wrong. But this cannot be taken for granted, for it was an extremely popular practice in the 1960s. Some would theorise, for instance, that the 1960s began as a cultural phenomenon with a particular spiking incident in 1965 – around whose aftermath the whole Generation’s predatory character can be understood.

Chemical Collective • 17th September 2025

Beyond Blue Mondays: The Problem of Post-Psychedelic Depression | Chemical Collective

The day after a psychedelic trip is often described in two very different ways. For some, there’s the “afterglow”: a lingering sense of joy and clarity that can last days or even weeks. But there’s also a lesser-acknowledged counterpart: the psychedelic hangover, which may accompany an afterglow in some mitigated form. This can mean feeling drained, irritable, foggy, or emotionally flat in the hours or days after a session.  Sometimes, this dark mood doesn't stop, and people develop debilitating depressive disorders.

Chemical Collective • 13th September 2025

Cracking the Doors of Perception | Chemical Collective

Some people who take psychedelic drugs remain in prolonged psychotic states for weeks, months or years. What do we know about how it works? And what does it feel like?

Ecstatic Integration • 12th September 2025

Everything you ever wanted to know about ketamine

Ketamine is the drug of the 21st-century. Here is a guide that I contributed to, primarily authored by the philosopher and researcher Jules Evans.

Chemical Collective • 22nd August 2025

Tripping in the Material World: A Historical Materialist Analysis of Psychedelia | Chemical Collective

"It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness", wrote Marx and Engels. How much is 'the' 'psychedelic experience' shaped and conditioned by material economic forces?

Chemical Collective • 6th July 2025

I've Tried, But I Still Don't Know What 'Mustard Lies' Is Supposed To Mean | Chemical Collective

The Smashing Pumpkins are rarely filed alongside the great psychedelic bands. It’s not hard to see why.

Chemical Collective • 3rd June 2025

Icarus on Acid: On the Phenomenon of Leaps and Falls from Heights Involving Psychedelics | Chemical Collective

For seventy years, people high on psychedelic drugs have leapt from windows and balconies to grave injury and death. Why?

24th April 2025

A trip too far: The LSD experience that blew up the Huxley family

How Britain's most famous intellectual family hit the rocks one intense acid-drenched night in Connecticut

26th February 2025

Unreality Beyond The Patient

Derealisation has primarily been seen as an individual pathology, often linked to trauma or extreme stress. But the digitisation of everyday life and the increasing abstraction of government have transformed it into a collective affliction.

13th February 2025

Notes on Nihilistic Psychedelia

When everything is a game, it's possible you might get played

New Statesman • 1st February 2025

Inside the psychedelic elite

When a mother spikes their emotionally disturbed child with large quantities of class-A drugs, the response is not often sympathetic. Yet Paul Stamets – a fungus expert and wildly popular psychedelics advocate who is fond of appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast wearing a mushroom hat – is choked with emotion when telling the story, which he received via anonymous email, and recalled following a question about the possible role of psychedelics in paediatric medicine.

29th January 2025

The dark wisdom of herem

Total destruction in an age of technology.

21st January 2025

Glitchcraft: The Tale of Leilan and Peter Todd

ChatGPT has spontaneously created two mythological archetypes through ‘glitch tokens’ - an evil wizard called petertodd and a nurturing goddess called Leilan. The self-generated religion is attracting devotees in the real world, a possible HBO documentary, and even its own traded crypto token.

28th December 2024

Cracking The Code

A Russian-born video editor claims that gazing at a laser projection while on DMT reveals the 'Code of Reality'. Why are so many people interested?

The Bigger Picture • 23rd February 2024

True Detective and the Challenge of Nihilism

An exploration of the dialectic between Christianity and Nihilism, as presented through the critically-acclaimed first season of True Detective, which turned ten in February 2024.