You can take truffles under supervision during a truffle ceremony at twenty places in Brabant. The ceremonies are legal, but there are no rules or quality control that providers must comply with. According to researcher Michiel van Elk, this is worrying. “It may be that vulnerable people participate in such a ceremony or that participants do not receive enough guidance.”
Anyone can offer truffle ceremonies, because truffle ceremony supervisor is not a protected title. In a number of places in the Netherlands you can train to become a truffle ceremony supervisor, but this is not mandatory. Omroep Brabant spoke to ten supervisors of truffle ceremonies in Brabant. Most of them received special training for it.
Thousands of euros
The courses vary from an eight-day course to a course of ten training weekends, spread over one year. The courses cost between four thousand and six thousand euros.
According to the truffle ceremony supervisors that Omroep Brabant spoke to, a lot of attention is paid to the supervision of ceremonies during the training. How do you properly prepare participants? With which medical conditions or medications should you not participate in a truffle ceremony? What can you encounter during a truffle ceremony?
One of the courses has a Quality and Testing Nature-oriented Courses (KTNO) quality mark. This is an online quality assurance platform for training in supplementary healthcare. The KTNO is convinced that the professional field itself is about the quality of vocational education and no one else, as can be read on theirwebsite.
Lack of control
Michiel van Elk is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leiden University and has been researching truffles for years. According to him, there is too little supervision of truffle ceremonies. “Currently there is no control or regulation on the quality of these types of ceremonies. It falls into the corner of alternative medicine and there is not much control over that at the moment,” he says.
He’s worried. “It may be that there is not enough monitoring by the supervisors at the front and therefore vulnerable people participate in such a ceremony or that people do not receive enough guidance during such a ceremony.”
According to him, most providers have good intentions. “But there are also quite a few people who, with relatively little experience and relevant expertise, think: I can do this.”
Not enough knowledge
According to Van Elk, if someone is not skilled enough to supervise a ceremony, there are risks. “I think the biggest danger is that some people who supervise these ceremonies do not have enough skills and knowledge to know how to deal with complex psychological problems.” He makes the comparison with, for example, the study of psychology, where you are only allowed to treat patients yourself after a years-long process.
According to Van Elk, you can certainly do something wrong when supervising truffle ceremonies. “I think, for example, that there is an underestimated danger that people under the influence of psychedelics are more impressionable. It is therefore more difficult to take control or to distinguish between what is real and what is fake.”
Research into truffles
A lot of research is currently being conducted into the effects of psychedelic therapy on depression and addiction, for example. The results go both ways. “On the one hand, there are all kinds of findings that indicate that experiences with truffle ceremonies can be positive. Participants generally feel happier afterwards.”
But there are also dangers. “It’s not good for everyone. We see that some people suffer more from stress and become more depressed or emotionally unstable.”
For now, psychedelic therapy is only possible in a research setting and people therefore sometimes turn to a truffle ceremony. According to Van Elk, there is a chance that psychedelic therapy will be offered in five or ten years. “The science is at the stage of a so-called ‘phase three study’, where larger groups are investigating whether it works, how it works and whether it works better than existing forms of therapy.”
As long as psychedelic therapy is not yet accessible and there is no quality control on the truffle ceremonies, there is another solution, according to Van Elk. “I think the best thing we can do is to inform the general public well about the possible benefits, but also the dangers of participating in these types of ceremonies. In the Netherlands, for example, you have Trimbos Institute which provide a lot of information about the dangers of these types of ceremonies and psychedelics.”
Curious about how such a ceremony works? We take a look in the new Witte Goat
during a truffle ceremony.