In January 2026, journalist and breast cancer survivor Erica Rex will release a memoir that refuses to celebrate the psychedelic renaissance without interrogating its shadows. Seeing What Is There: My Search for Sanity in the Psychedelic Era, distributed by Simon & Schuster, arrives at a moment when psilocybin and MDMA are moving toward FDA approval, investment is flooding psychedelic startups, and millions are looking to these substances as potential cures for depression, PTSD, and addiction.
But Rex, one of the first patients in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin trials, insists this is not another utopian tale of magic mushrooms and healing retreats. Instead, she offers what early reviewers are calling one of the most unflinching accounts of the modern psychedelic movement to date.
When asked what made her decide to write the book, Rex points to a devastating moment: “I realized I had to write this book when I learned my younger sister, Andrea, was dying of colon cancer, in 2004. She died in 2005.”
As a child of no more than five, Rex had experienced a premonition that either she or her sister would die young. When that premonition came true more than forty years later, Rex says she fell apart. The sisters had been separated for 17 years because of their parents’ methodical destruction of Rex’s relationships with her siblings. “Writing about what happened was my way of trying to put her death in context,” Rex explains. “I felt that I failed her. I couldn’t remake the story, but I could try to make some sense of what had happened, and perhaps provide insight so that others could awaken — if they so choose — to these patterns in their own families — and of course the society! — before it is too late.”
Rex’s answer is unequivocal: “Absolutely. My parents’ toxicity and the toxicity of the intergenerational secret they staked their lives on hiding caused my sister’s death. Everything they touched died. She was, however, the wrong child. I was supposed to be the one who died, but I escaped. I’ve paid for my life mentally and physically ever since.”
Rex’s credentials as a science journalist are formidable — she has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, The Independent, and others, and is a National Magazine Award winner for fiction. But her authority on trauma comes from a more harrowing source: she is the daughter of two psychiatrists, and her mother trained under Harvard psychologist Dr. Henry A. Murray, whose experiments helped shape Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
As a child, Rex endured violent psychiatric “treatments” that left her with Complex PTSD. She describes herself as the family scapegoat, explaining that her siblings were not as severely or violently abused and weren’t scapegoated. “I was the target which meant they were spared in many ways. They had a built-in fall guy. I was the family problem.” Her siblings, she says, did what authoritarian personalities do: “They allied and identified themselves with the abusers. They engaged in victim blaming.”
“What is it about telling the truth everyone hates so much?” Rex asks, then answers: “The truth teller — the maverick sees patterns and detects undercurrents. She or he has creative ways of moving through the world which upset assumptions and norms. We are dangerous to the status quo. Left to tell our stories, paint our pictures, make our music, lead social movements, we’re kryptonite to familial and societal cults.”
On premonitions and clairvoyance, Rex is matter-of-fact: “Like it or not, these qualities exist, and some people are cursed with them. This is not a ‘gift.’ I don’t choose the times, places or people about whom these insights occur. Mostly, they are about family members or close friends, but not always. The insights arrive fully formed, like facts. They can’t be ignored. They are very different from other mental processes, like thoughts or fantasies.”
In 2012, as a breast cancer patient grappling with depression, Rex entered Johns Hopkins’ clinical trial and received psilocybin-assisted therapy. She later chronicled that experience for Scientific American Mind in her widely read essay “Calming a Turbulent Mind.” But in Seeing What Is There, she situates that pivotal moment within a much larger struggle.
The book argues that healing requires more than pharmacology. Molecules like psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT can trigger powerful states, but without community, ethical support, and economic safety, they risk becoming just another arm of the psychopharmaceutical industry.
Joe Moore, Co-Founder and CEO of Psychedelics Today, writes: “This important memoir critiques psychiatry and the psychedelic movement, exploring trauma, healing, and the ethical challenges of contemporary psychiatry. Through her journey with psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT, Erica Rex reveals the promise of transformation while advocating for a future where true healing includes social support, equity, and community. Students of psychedelics and psychiatry would do well to read this book.”
Asked how she would change the way depression and PTSD are diagnosed and treated, Rex draws a sharp distinction: “Depression is one thing — it has several possible causes, and in some cases can be treated either pharmaceutically or through interpersonal therapeutic interventions. PTSD will not be curable until the trauma-inducing institutions, cultural norms and value systems that nurture it are vanquished.”
She argues that most social structures and institutions in the US now cultivate malignant narcissism, along with a nihilistic, transactional worldview. “The western economic system is based entirely on money and the ability to accumulate wealth through any means,” she writes. “Nothing that makes us human is valued: the pursuit of learning, appreciation of aesthetics, mastery of an art form, wisdom, compassion or seeing the intrinsic value in the natural world.”
When asked about her focus on malignant narcissism, Rex is blunt: “I have never met anyone — or heard of anyone — who suffers from schizophrenia who has, or could destroy people, societies or entire ecosystems. Same with bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Those who live with these disorders harm themselves and if they harm others, it tends to be unintentional. Malignant narcissism is a world-destroying virus.”
On whether everyone should do psychedelics at least once, Rex emphasizes nuance: “I’ve tried to emphasise that the beneficial use of psychedelics is context-specific. Even in recreational use, the quality of the experience is entirely dependent on context, whom you’re with, what challenges you’re facing and your own capacity to engage with and be self-reflective about the experience.”
The book also recovers forgotten history, detailing how psilocybin first came to the Western world through research at the French Museum of Natural History, with the first clinical trials conducted in the late 1950s at the main mental hospital in Paris.
With approximately 13 million Americans suffering from Complex PTSD and 1.6 billion children worldwide regularly facing violence at home, Rex’s work addresses struggles that are both widespread and urgent. Stephen Mills, author of Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood, calls it “an extraordinary, beautifully written account of one woman’s lifelong journey out of unimaginable childhood trauma… Hers is a singular and prophetic voice, summoning the healing power of community in a culture that has pathologized human suffering.”
Seeing What Is There will be available in trade paperback for $17.99 and as an ebook for $12.99 through major retailers and fine bookstores everywhere.
