SoundMind opens a psychedelic clinic in West Philly as momentum builds for treatment of depression, PTSD with mind-altering drugs
Philadelphia InquirerSep 05, 2021
Sep. 5—Hannah McLane has made a big bet on a psychedelic future for mental health care.
Last month, the
The services at SoundMind, a nonprofit in the 4600 block of
More than 300 people have already put their names on SoundMind's wait list for treatments, some of which will involve eight-hour therapy sessions in which therapists stay with patients and address issues with them after they ingest drugs.
"People are just really excited," said McLane, 40, who wants
For now, the only legal form of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy uses ketamine, which is not a traditional psychedelic, but has mind-altering properties that have been found to relieve depression. As a party drug, ketamine is known as Special
McLane went to medical school at
Further off, advocates anticipate approval of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to help patients with treatment-resistant depression.
Investors are pouring millions into start-ups trying to create versions of naturally occurring psilocybin that can get the patent protection needed to make them profitable for investors. One company recently estimated that the market for psychedelics could be worth
Psychedelic momentum
The current push to bring psychedelics, some of which have ancient histories among indigenous populations, into mainstream medicine started about 15 years ago with research at
One concern McLane has heard is: "What happens if people just want to get high?" To that she says with a laugh, "it's really easy to get high in a way that doesn't involve eight hours of talking about your trauma."
At the same time, favorable research published in top medical journals is accompanied by enthusiasm for the drugs as a means to transform individuals and society.
"They have immense potential to be agents of change in America," said
In addition to what he called psychedelic "true believers," Appelbaum named medical professionals excited about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, investors seeking a potentially huge market, and advocates of the decriminalization of drugs because of the disproportionate impact the drug war has had on Black people.
Appelbaum and
Ketamine clinics
While MDMA and psilocybin are still not approved by the FDA, companies including
Both are publicly traded and expanding rapidly. Field Trip has five centers and says it has eight more underway in
The company charges as much as
Asked during a conference call how it picks locations for Field Trip clinics, a company official said that because insurance usually does not pay for the treatments, the company looks for markets with enough people who can pay themselves.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy costs
The treatment is expensive because the therapist is with the patient the entire time. If MDMA is approved for PTSD, two therapists will be present during the eight-hour session.
MDMA helps people with PTSD, backers say, because it allows people to tunnel into their traumatic memories, accept them, and then learn to live with them. The idea is that if "you can go back and feel those emotions you are able to move past it," McLane said.
McLane is developing a sliding scale for people who can't afford the full price and is trying to raise
SoundMind has at least one local competitor opening soon.
Statistics on ketamine-assisted psychotherapy clinics are hard to come by.
That growth is in anticipation of these new psychedelic therapies beyond ketamine, Huang said.
Drug development
It was big news in psychedelic circles last spring when results of phase three trials for MDMA in combination with therapy to treat PTSD showed that 67% of the patients were cured compared with 32% of the participants who received a placebo in combination with therapy.
"It's hard to overemphasize the enthusiasm about some of the positive findings thus far," said Smith, the Penn psychiatrist. "I myself am quite hopeful about MDMA and quite optimistic that with a little bit more time psilocybin will be proven to be pretty robust in its response."
Commercial research on psilocybin focuses not just on its effectiveness as a treatment for depression, but also on how to make it more efficient.
The English company's cofounder and president,
In addition, Compass has reduced the number of therapists present during a treatment from two to one. "We believe that is a scalable model," Wilde said.
Some researchers are even working on ways to take the high out of psychedelic drugs while retaining their healing benefits.
The gold standard in clinical trials is that neither the patients nor the medical experts evaluating the patients know who received the placebo and who received the drug being tested. That's virtually impossible in this field because it's hard to disguise a psychedelic trip.
Another criticism of the research, according to Appelbaum, the Columbia professor, is that the positive results are based on a small number of carefully selected participants.
McLane knows that some experts are not sold on the research, but she thinks it's important to recognize that psychedelics combine mind and body in a way that doesn't usually happen in Western medicine.
"It has to be therapy and it also has to be this medicine, and we have just never done that before," she said. "It makes sense that the numbers are actually different and that it actually heals people in a different way because it accounts for their full body and mind healing together."
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