Gather Well Psychedelics is pleased to have engaged two strong independent ethicists who have acted as professional consultants on a robust ethics initiative project and to help us develop our ethics casebook program. We are excited to bring this work to life in all facets of the organization. We are eternally grateful for the expertise and professionalism of Lori and Brian and for their support in helping us envision a clear path for putting our values into practice.
Lori’s earliest work in bioethics was as a skeptical community member; she was asked by Harvard Medical School to evaluate policies from the lens of her grassroots work as a rape crisis counselor.
Lori now is Co-Director of the Adult Ethics Committee at Yale-New Haven Hospital; Associate Director, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics (ICB), Yale University, and Director of the Summer Institute in Bioethics at Yale’s ICB. She is the Founder & Chair of the Community Bioethics Forum co-sponsored by the ICB and Yale School of Medicine, and is also on faculty in the Bioethics Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Lori has deep experience in organizational and clinical ethics, trauma-informed care, systems administration, issues around sex/gender/power, and setting up/leading ethics committees.
One of the earliest pioneers of the “community ethics” paradigm, Lori has amplified the voices and values of community members within scores of institutional and public health policies across the US on a wide range of subjects, including end-of-life, infant abandonment, consent for intimate exams, and so forth. She is also one of the earliest voices to bring trauma-informed care to ethics consultations and ethical policy design.
Lori has over 20 years of experience on ethics committees at Harvard and Yale and has helped to design and establish ethics committees at prominent locations across the US, promoting inclusion, transparency, and racial equity. She sits on several international ethics boards and lectures globally on policy and ethics topics. Her scholarship is cited in the New York Times and the New England Journal of Medicine and her work appears in prominent academic journals and popular media from the Hastings Center Report to The Huffington Post.
Brian is a Senior Research Fellow in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Brian is co-author of the book Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020), which is the first book-length philosophical treatment of the social and clinical ethics of psychedelic-assisted couples therapy. The book was favorably reviewed in The Atlantic, New Scientist, The Guardian and other leading venues. Brian has also published widely on the ethics of bodily integrity, sexual autonomy, and consent, having previously served on the Sexual Harassment Grievance Board of Yale University.
Brian will be working closely with Gather Well and will also be consulting with Lori Bruce on specific action points throughout the process particularly around standing up an ethics committee within Gather Well.
