The Future of Psychology in Five Trends: The Basis of Pentabelt

How did I come up with the whole idea of Pentabelt™? Well, there are five major trends I predict will happen in the field of psychology, or at least psychotherapy. Let’s go over them and see where it gets us.

            First: In the field of psychotherapy, there will be a shift towards resilience rather than just treatment. Mental health issues and mood disorders will be so common place that a shift will have to occur. Rather than just waiting for the inevitable mood disorder to show up in teenagers and adults, the emphasis will be on learning skills to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

In essence, the field of psychology will develop an adult initiation ritual. Essentially, “things are gonna be tough, here’s how to prepare for it.”

            Second: They’ll be a growing acknowledgement that mood disorders are mostly exogenous in nature. That is, mostly due to outside stress, traumas, and an overall lack of meaning & connection. So in addition to the resilience training, a focus of this adult initiation ritual will be resolving trauma and forging connections with the tribe, with the community.

Basically, you can’t therapy out of a terrible job and awful relationships. Part of the training will be on how to avoid those, as much as possible.  

Third: Psychedelics will completely take over the field of psychology in the next 10 years or so and will become an integral part of this adult initiation ritual. Psychedelic therapy itself will split with a growing emphasis on MDMA. If we define a substance like psilocybin as psychedelic, meaning mind manifesting, MDMA could be considered “schenedelic” or connection manifesting. Most people may only take a psychedelic a few times if that. MDMA, on the other hand, may be used a few times a year, at least once it gains FDA approval. The purpose of the ongoing use of these substances will be to continue growth and facilitate bonding with the tribe, the community, or the family. The number of times an individual can safely take such a substance in a given time frame will be the critical question of our time. We already see that with a lower dose of sublingual Ketamine a similar affect appears. Not only may these substances directly help through processing trauma but an indirect help as well, through building bonds with a significant other, with others in the community. 

Forth: There will be a growing reliance on large language models as a therapeutic tool. I grew up in a special time where the kids in high school started to use the internet while the adults, the teachers, were blissfully unaware. They would give us a list of vocabulary words with the expectation it would take us an hour to look up the words in a dictionary. We would use the new dictionary CD and we would finish it all in a few minutes. There was a huge generational gap, and I think we’re seeing the same thing with large language models.

The older generation would probably never dream having a chatbot therapy session. But my sense in talking with the next generation is that that idea doesn’t seem so far-fetched. This new generation pretty much lives online. If in-person therapy becomes too expensive, too inaccessible, more and more individuals will turn to large language models as therapy and, perhaps as a guide to being a healthy, happy adult. 

Fifth: The result of all of these trends will be a clinical psychologist having really three roles. The first, the traditional role. Helping someone with a serious psychological condition, such as schizophrenia, bi-polar, or those who just shouldn’t take psychedelic medication. The second role will be to facilitate this “adult initiation ritual.” Introduce the young adult to these substances, creating a safe space to process what comes up. The third role will then be to serve as a counterbalance to the power of the tribe and the large language models. So if there are abuses or the community is becoming toxic, the clinician can help protect the client as needed. And if the large language models provides the wrong or inaccurate message, the clinician can likewise intervene to protect the client.

So, based upon all of that, I’ve created what could be considered an adult initiation ritual. Creating five stages, integrating psychedelic and schenedelic processes. Each one will have a large language model as a guide. In the Pentabelt program, each stage is represented by a belt, hence Penta and Belt. But before we go into that, let’s explore a little bit more about psychedelic therapy. Up next, the intentions that are used to shape healing and growth during a psychedelic therapy session.

On to Section 6