Maria Mangini, Ph.D., FNP
Family Nurse Practitioner; Historian of Psychedelic Therapy; Researcher
Nurse practitioner and historian who conducted one of the first scholarly surveys of LSD psychotherapy practitioners from the first wave — preserving oral history before it was lost and providing the research field with a map of what was learned before prohibition.
Biography
Maria Mangini is a family nurse practitioner and researcher who has made major contributions to both the oral history of psychedelic therapy and the professional training of the current generation of practitioners. Her 1998 dissertation research, conducted at the California Institute of Integral Studies, systematically interviewed survivors of the first wave of LSD psychotherapy — practitioners who had worked with patients in the 1950s and 1960s before prohibition — preserving their clinical knowledge, methods, and reflections before they could no longer be accessed.
This oral history research is not merely archival: the clinical insights of first-wave practitioners like Stanislav Grof, Bill Richards, and their colleagues contain knowledge about how to facilitate psychedelic sessions safely and effectively that was not otherwise documented in publishable form. Mangini's interviews made this knowledge accessible to the current research renaissance at a time when transmission through direct apprenticeship was no longer possible for most practitioners.
Mangini has been involved in psychedelic therapist training at CIIS, where she has contributed her combination of clinical nursing expertise and historical knowledge to preparing the next generation of practitioners. Her background as a nurse practitioner gives her particular insight into the somatic and physiological dimensions of psychedelic sessions that physicians and psychologists sometimes underweight.
She has published on the history of psychedelic therapy and on the clinical and ethical considerations for contemporary practice, and has been a consistent voice for learning from the first wave rather than reinventing without reference to what came before.
Organizations
Why They Matter to the LearnShrooms Community
Mangini's oral history of first-wave psychedelic therapists preserved clinical knowledge that would otherwise have been permanently lost — knowledge that has directly informed the training protocols used in current clinical trials and the facilitator training programs emerging in Oregon and other jurisdictions. The current research renaissance stands on her recovery work.
Legal Context
For the legal landscape where Maria Mangini, Ph.D., FNP operates, see psilocybin laws in California.