Standard
The standard
A shared standard for psychedelic practice,
co-designed by experts across research, harm reduction, practitioners from clinical, non-clinical and indigenous lineages. It describes the competencies, ethics and boundaries the field agrees on, and it grows as the field matures.
What it covers
A safety core, and the competencies built on it
The standard has two parts, and they work differently by design.
The safety core.
The requirements every practitioner should meet, whatever their role, training or tradition. Among others: consent, power and boundaries · knowing the limits of your scope · confidentiality. Each must be met in its own right. A strength in one does not make up for a gap in another.
The competencies.
What good practice looks like in the role you actually hold, described as what a practitioner does, not how they seem. Among others: how you meet a client in distress · how you hold pace and silence · working with meaning · preparation and integration.
How it’s made
Agreed by the field, not written for it
The standard was created with the people who do this work and the people who study it: researchers, clinicians, harm reduction experts and practitioners from across the board. It has been through several rounds of review, and the clearest sign the process works is that different reviewers kept finding the same gaps, independently of each other.
Three principles came out of that review and now hold across the whole standard.
Non-clinical practice is its own discipline.
It draws on its own sources and describes practice in its own terms, sharing a safety core with clinical work.
What you learned matters more than where.
A certificate names a programme; it may not say what you came away with. Some of the most experienced practitioners in this field learned through a teacher, a community, or years of apprenticeship, with no certificate at the end. The standard is built to read all of it.
The standard is never finished.
What it covers is settled. What sits inside it grows as the field develops, and every revision goes through the same review that built it.
Built with the field
Co-designed with experts across research, harm reduction, and indigenous, and practitioners from clinical, non-clinical and indigenous lineages.
Verification · Coming
A weekend workshop and a decade of practice look identical from the outside.
On paper, everyone looks the same. Anyone can call themselves a psychedelic practitioner, and with no shared standard, the ones who take it seriously are hard to tell apart from the ones who don’t. For clients, and for the field itself.
Verification changes that. In the coming months, practitioners will be able to get verified against the standard.
How it will work.
Verification is done by experienced assessors. If you don’t pass the first time, you get clear feedback and can try again. It is open to everyone, whether you are a member or not.
What verification will give you:
Verified badge for your website and profiles · Entry in the public register · Listing in the directory of verified providers
Proof that holds up.
Not a certificate saying you attended something, but rather evidence that experienced assessors watched you work and found your practice sound.
Feedback you cannot get anywhere else.
Two assessors observe a full session and score it against published criteria. Most practitioners never get this once in a career, let alone from outside their own training lineage.
Clients who find you.
Verified practitioners are listed in a directory and referred to people looking for support. A badge for your site and an entry in the public register that anyone can check.
Verification is not a guarantee
Verification will reduce risk, not remove it. A verified practitioner will have shown that they meet the standard at the time of assessment, against defined criteria. PsyStandard does not claim that verification predicts outcomes, that verified practitioners cannot cause harm, or that any practitioner’s work is legal in any particular jurisdiction.
