Esenia Cassidy

Esenia Cassidy is a PhD Student at the Ohio State University’s College of Social Work. Esenia is a mental health academic and practitioner with a background in social justice, education, and media. Esenia’s research interests focus on the intersections of psychedelics, attachment, gender, trauma, and harm reduction. At OSU, Esenia is an active member of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education and works on the projects that involve gender identity and its relation to psychedelic use, passions for substance use, and challenging psychedelic experiences, among other topics. Esenia’s interdisciplinary approach is rooted in commitment to addressing complex societal issues through diverse innovative research and clinical practice.

Esenia is a co-founder of The Psychedelic Humanities Lab at The New School for Social Research and a project lead at the SexTech Lab (NSSR) and the Granqvist Attachment & Psychedelics Lab (Stockholm University). Esenia earned a Master’s degree in Psychology with a Concentration in Substance Abuse Counseling from The New School for Social Research.

Esenia’s scholarly contributions include Psychedelics, Attachment and Enculturation Dynamics: Prospect and Challenges, Childhood Trauma, Challenging Experiences, and Posttraumatic Growth in Ayahuasca Use (Cassidy et al., 2023), Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Integration: A Transtheoretical Model for Clinical Practice (Gorman et al., 2021).