Evelyn Eddy Shoop MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC: Lived Experience, Qualitative Data, and the Future of Psychedelic Care

Psilocybin clinical trial participant Evelyn Eddy Shoop connects her lived experience to the need for more humane, data-informed psychedelic care. Shoop traces her path into psychiatric nursing through Division I sports injuries, OCD, and intensive outpatient treatment, then describes finding a psilocybin trial while preparing for ketamine therapy. She received placebo first, then open label psilocybin, and emphasizes that benefits emerged slowly over months with integration support. She argues that qualitative data and patient stories are essential because numbers alone miss the depth of psychedelic journeys and the time it takes for meaning to unfold. She also critiques trial and inpatient environments that can feel punitive rather than healing, discusses limits of double blind placebo designs when participants become desperate for active treatment, and calls for better education and more precise language around psychedelic risks and psychosis. In later discussion, Shoop highlights harm reduction and system-level failures, including being treated as “just another psych patient,” and urges required psychedelic education in psychiatric training and honest, nonjudgmental conversations about substance use.