Petr Winkler

Track: Psychedelics – Science, Spirituality and Therapeutic Potential

Bohemia: from psychedelic experiments to transpersonal thinking and back

This presentation will take you on a journey from the very roots of psychedelic medical experiments in Bohemia (also known as Czech Republic) to the transpersonal thinking that these experiments triggered. The presentation is based on a) a systematic review of scientific papers published in the former Czechoslovakia during the era of legal experimentation with LSD, b) interviews with mental health professionals who experimented on themselves with LSD during that time, c) a personal reflection on the current development in the field in Bohemia. Self-experiments have had a prominent role in the Czech psychedelic research. These experiments have led to all sorts of transpersonal thinking and interests, the most known of them described by Stanislav Grof. However, the current psychedelic research in the Czech Republic is rather biologically oriented and transpersonally oriented practices remain largely hidden to science and academia.

Bio

PhDr. Petr Winkler (6 April 2025)

Petr Winkler is the head of the Department of Social Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, Czech Republic (NIMH CZ). After graduating in Social Policy and Social Work at the Charles University in Prague, he became one of the Bakala Foundation scholars and went to the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, to pursue his PhD in mental health economics. Petr’s main expertise is in mental health care systems, psychiatric epidemiology, and health economics, and he is also interested in suicidology, stigma and discrimination, and socio-cultural aspects of psychedelic movement in psychiatry. In the past few years he has been involved in the development and implementation of the mental health care reform strategy in the Czech Republic; currently, he is leading nation-wide projects on destigmatization, early interventions in psychoses, and system for evidence-based mental health care development. Petr was awarded European Psychiatric Association research prize for the best paper published in 2016 in the category Psychiatric epidemiology, social psychiatry and psychotherapeutic interventions in mental disorders. He is also an author of the review of 25 years’ development of mental health care for people with severe mental illnesses in the region of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe published recently in The Lancet Psychiatry.