Yale University

Mushrooms, for article on psilocybin public opinion

Nearly 9 in 10 Americans now think using psilocybin is ‘morally positive,’ in dramatic shift in public opinion

By / / Good News For Humankind

Supervised psilocybin therapy just got a remarkable vote of confidence: in a new peer-reviewed survey of 795 U.S. adults, 91% of liberals and 86% of conservatives called its use for psychiatric treatment morally acceptable. That’s the kind of bipartisan agreement you almost never see anymore. Researchers from Oxford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Granada also found that strong majorities approved of psilocybin to enhance well-being in healthy people, not just to treat illness. The authors suggest compassion-based values help explain the consensus across political lines. As more states move toward legal, supervised psilocybin services, this quiet agreement among Americans hints at a broader, more humane shift in how societies might soon approach mental health.

Commencement cap held in the air, for article on Yale Prison Education Initiative

Yale, University of New Haven partnership celebrates first degrees awarded to inmates

By / / Good News For Humankind

Yale Prison Education Initiative just celebrated its first-ever commencement, with seven students receiving associate degrees inside a Connecticut prison in June 2023. Four of them had been taking classes since the program’s very first cohort in 2018, when only 12 students were enrolled — meaning these graduates literally helped build the program they were graduating from. The ceremony at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution included caps, gowns, families, and Governor Ned Lamont, who responded to each graduate’s speech by name and later called it the most moving graduation he’d ever attended. One graduate is now pursuing his bachelor’s degree and planning a career as a defense attorney. It’s a quiet but powerful reminder that educational equity, done right, looks like rigorous partnership — not charity.