The global mental health crisis represents one of the grand challenges of our time. Rates of already-common conditions such as depression and anxiety rose by more than 25% in the first year of the COVID pandemic, adding to the nearly one billion people who were already living with a mental disorder. Depression is ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the single largest contributor to global disability while anxiety ranks sixth. Lost productivity from depression and anxiety has been estimated to cost the global economy US $1 trillion per year and is forecast to reach $16 trillion by 2030. The global mental health crisis has engendered a mindful search for alternative treatments to the current pharmaceutical-centered approach, which has been unable to provide sustained relief for many who suffer despite the vast increase in the use of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs in recent decades. Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) has emerged as a leading option, and the psychedelic drug market is projected to generate $7.2 billion by 2029. For the past two years, we have run successful interdisciplinary symposia exploring the potential of PAT to refresh dominant organizational assumptions and foster new paradigms in the delivery of mental healthcare. Building on these efforts, we propose a new symposium for AoM 2025 to support the expansion of management scholarship on this critically important topic while leveraging AoM 2025’s European location. Europe offers a fertile landscape for organizational scholars to explore the complexities of PAT, informed by distinct regulatory, cultural, and socio-political contexts. Countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany have long played pivotal roles in advancing PAT through clinical trials, regulatory innovation, and public-private partnerships. The symposium will explore how European leaders in policy, advocacy, research, and media view the ecosystem of psychedelic-assisted therapy, and how these insights inform possibilities for organization scholars to engage generatively with this burgeoning field. The panelists – Henrik Jungaberle of the MIND Foundation (Germany), Tadeusz Hawrot of the Psychedelic Access and Research European Alliance, Josh Hardman of Psychedelic Alpha (UK), and Anne Philippi of the New Health Club (Germany) – will illuminate the interplay of scientific, organizational, and institutional influences in the emergence of an ethical and legal PAT industry from its underground roots.
