Happy 5th Birthday, Fireside!
Five Years
of Light
What began as a phone number became a
movement built on connection, community,
co-creation, and care.
This report is best viewed on a desktop computer. But we welcome all visitors!
What began as a phone number became a
movement built on connection, community,
co-creation, and care.
We are honored to share five years of impact with you.
Truly, beloved community, our impact is your impact.
To our callers & clients, you trusted us with your most vulnerable moments.
To our volunteers, you honored us by dedicating a year of your lives.
To our staff, you created the safest and most enriching containers.
To our partners, you informed your communities about our services.
To our donors, you believed in our vision. You breathed life into our work.
To you all, we bow and offer our deepest gratitude.
We are honored to share with you 5 years of impact.
Truly, beloved community, our impact is your impact.
To our callers & clients,
you trusted us with your most vulnerable moments.
To our volunteers,
you honored us by dedicating a year of your lives.
To our staff,
you created the safest and most enriching containers.
To our partners,
you informed your communities about our services.
To our donors, you believed in our vision.
You breathed life into our work.
To you all, we bow and offer our deepest gratitude.
In Partnership,
Joshua White
Founder | Executive Director
Click any section to jump there
What started as a phone line has grown into an interconnected network of care — because you helped us dream bigger.
We offer every person in the United States
free, confidential support
during & after trips,
by phone, text message, and mobile app,
every day, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
We are the safety net for the psychedelic field.
Our monthly call volume has increased tenfold since our launch in April 2021
Every conversation is a person with a story.. A story.
Every caller took a leap of faith.
We invite you to witness their experiences, in their own words.
3,500 people. Think about that.
Imagine being loaded into the back of an ambulance,
or going into an emergency room on psychedelics.
Imagine, instead, reaching out to Fireside Project
and hearing a kind, gentle soul answer the phone,
and hold space until you feel safe and grounded,
so you can stay in the comfort of your home.
ER visits and ambulance rides aren’t just
traumatizing.
They’re expensive.
Even if they never call, just knowing we exist helps people feel safer and less alone.
~15 million impressions across 14 channels
Want to do a deep dive into our data?
Head to Appendix A.
That’s more than two jumbo jets of volunteers.2 full jumbo jets.
Over halfMost have been from marginalized communities.
Many have gone on to careers
in the psychedelic field.
Our volunteers dedicate a year
of their lives in psychedelic service.
Here’s what ten of them have to say about it:
Each volunteer works four hours per week for a full year.
Including feedback, emotional support, and education.
Our supervisors create the container for our volunteers.
This includes feedback, emotional support,
and education.
Our supervisors create the container
for our volunteers.
Our coaches provide long-term, scheduled support by video to people preparing for and integrating psychedelic experiences.
Many of our clients have been meeting regularly with their coach since the launch of our program in October 2024.
Each coach is a paid employee who completes a 30-step, 300-hour certification process that includes a full year of volunteering on the support line.
Our coaches receive bi-weekly group supervision from our Coaching Director, Dr. Jacob Ham — Associate Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai. To date, coaches have received 110 hours of supervision.
Our coaches receive regular group supervision from our Director of Coaching, Dr. Jacob Ham — Associate Clinical Professor in Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Child Trauma and Resilience at Mount Sinai.
We have an ongoing pilot study exploring the effectiveness of our coaching program for ketamine patients with depression.
Most training programs rely on lectures, readings, and static role-plays that don’t reflect the emotional intensity and unpredictability of real-world psychedelic experiences. This training gap threatens client safety, practitioner confidence, and the field’s credibility.
Pilots use flight simulators.
Now, psychedelic practitioners can, too.
Practice the moments that matter before they're real.
Lucy is an interactive, voice-based simulation tool
that helps practitioners strengthen their therapeutic skills
through realistic, emotionally intelligent roleplay.
Already the largest corpus of anonymized psychedelic support interactions in existence, this dataset grows by 1,000 conversations every month — continuously deepening Lucy’s advantage as the field’s only training tool grounded in real-world data.
Fireside is collaborating with Dr. Yehuda’s lab to build an educational course based on her team’s MDMA manual — IMAP (Integrative MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy) — with Lucy integrated into each module.
First training: May 3–8, 2026Partnering to train New Mexico facilitators in supporting group psilocybin experiences, with Lucy providing simulation-based practice.
First training: May 20–22, 2026Built by a team of scientists with expertise in machine learning, vocal biomarkers, psychology, and neuroscience. Advisors include researchers who have been affiliated with UCSF, Mount Sinai, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Usona Institute.
Try a 15-minute prototype session where Lucy plays the role of a person experiencing anxiety during a high-dose mushroom experience.
Request a DemoBecause of the tens of thousands of conversations we’ve had on our Psychedelic Support Line, we are uniquely positioned to learn about how psychedelics are actually being used — across every context, substance, background, and lived experience.
We have the largest and richest dataset of psychedelic conversations in history. And it grows every day.
Published in Psychedelic Medicine, this study explored whether the Fireside support line helps reduce harm during psychedelic experiences — drawing from our post-call surveys and volunteer call logs.
The Fireside Database is the first systematic dataset on real-world psychedelic support, comprising 25,419 peer support interactions conducted by 220 trained volunteers between 2021 and 2026 — integrated with volunteer-coded metadata and 2,777 caller satisfaction surveys. This resource enables groundbreaking research into psychedelic epidemiology, evidence-based training, and what actually makes psychedelic psychological support effective.
This study explores whether patients receiving ketamine treatment for depression at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Ketamine Clinic are interested in receiving psychedelic coaching as a form of emotional support to help them process their ketamine experiences.
This pilot study explores whether psychedelic coaching can prolong and enhance the antidepressant effects of ketamine in patients with Treatment-Resistant Depression receiving care at MGH’s Ketamine Clinic for Depression. Twenty patients will each receive 12 weeks of coaching from Fireside-Certified coaches.
We support Emory University’s research into challenging psychedelic experiences by informing all callers about the study through our post-call survey — helping expand the evidence base around safe psychedelic use.
Here are some of the stars who light our way, inspire us to keep going, and support us in ways too numerous to count.
Five years of showing up, every single day.
Our hearts overflow with gratitude for our donors, many of whom have been supporting us as far back as 2020, before the line even launched. Thank you for believing in us, our work, and our mission.
We'll remain resolute in our commitment to community, co-creation, compassionate care, and innovation.
Click a ring to see what the next five years hold
We invite you to join our ecosystem of care
SMS conversations run significantly longer — people feel more comfortable opening up over text.
From this statistic, we deduce that our marketing efforts are working well within the psychedelic community, and that we need to re-double our efforts to reach first-time users before they try psychedelics.
Psilocybin accounts for the majority — but distress rates tell a more nuanced story.
A surprising finding: cannabis has the highest distress rate — higher than psilocybin.
Across all substances, emergency escalation is rare. Our support line helps keep it that way.
Anxiety and overwhelm dominate — together accounting for over 8,000 interactions.
Reflective listening, validation, and normalization are the most common tools.
Many callers use psychedelics specifically to address mental health conditions.
Sent to all callers the day after their conversation.
Over 200 voices. Every one a leap of faith.
From a phone line to a movement — the world took notice.
Fireside's Founder and Executive Director, Joshua White