Item validation for acute psychedelic experiences Sign-up

Participant Information

You are about to take part in the EvaluatingAPE (Acute Psychedelic Experience) Survey, a project run by the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. Before you decide to take part, it is important for you to understand why the project is being done and what it will involve. Please take time to read the following information carefully.

What is the purpose of this project?

Considering the growing interest in psychedelic substances as a tool for exploring the mind and for treating diverse mental diseases and the limitations of the existing measures assessing the acute effects of these substances, a new and improved measure is urgently needed. With the questions contained in this survey, we are actively involving the public to help us build a valid and well-understood questionnaire regarding the acute effect of psychedelic substances. You will receive some sentences describing some aspects of the psychedelic experience, together with some questions about how you interpret a specific sentence and why you select a specific response. We are doing that to determine if the sentences used to assess psychedelic acute effects are understood in the same way by researchers and by people who had psychedelic experiences. The data we collect from this project will help to advance the scientific understanding of psychedelic substances. This will provide insights into how they might be best used and factors that might have a predictive positive value for their effects. The project has the potential to help develop future controlled studies on psychedelic substances, including clinical trials. 

We ask you to take part based on your own initiative, and at no point encourage you to take an illegal drug. We do not endorse or encourage psychedelic drug-use but intend merely to serve to capture behaviors that are already taking place.

How is the survey structured?

• In the beginning, we will ask you for your email to start participating in the project.
• You will fill in a short set of questions regarding demographics. 
• You will then be redirected to a set of 3 or 4 questions, which you will be asked to interpret. This will take between 10 to 15 minutes to be completed. 

Will I be contacted again after completing this survey?

• If you decide to continue helping us, you will receive a different set of questions related to different sentences after a while. You will receive more questions only if you want to. You are allowed to stop taking part in the project anytime you want.  

Which personal information we will collect from you?

In the course of the study Imperial College London will collect the following personal information when you provide it to us online:

• Your email
• Records of communications and interactions we have had with you
• Biographical, educational and social information, including your gender, nationality, and age 
• We will also collect some special categories of data, like information concerning previous psychedelic drug use and experiences.
• Note that these data will be kept completely anonymous as they will be connected to your email only by an anonymous identifier. 

Results will be kept on a password-protected computer. Any results that are presented or published will not include any information that could identify you. If you want to withdraw at some point, we will keep the information about you that we have already obtained. In case you wish for all of your data to be discarded, please contact our participant involvement administrator Tommaso Barba via email at tommaso.barba20@imperial.ac.uk.