Dhru Purohit Show - A Psychiatrist Reveals the Truth About Psychedelic Therapy: Benefits, Risks & Who Would Benefit and Who Should Avoid It with Dr. Will Van Derveer

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Sunlighten, Puori, One Skin, and LMNT. Mental health care is at a turning point, with more people questioning whether symptom management alone leads to lasting healing. At the same time, emerging research is exploring how psychedelic-assisted therapies may help address deeper root causes tied to emotional well-being. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Will Van Derveer to discuss the transformative potential and risks of psychedelic medicine, sharing powerful stories of healing, the importance of proper guidance, and the current landscape of research and regulation. He also discusses how the current mental health care system is in crisis and how some patients don’t feel relief from pharmaceuticals, as they may not address the root cause of their condition. Dr. Van Derveer also shares the ideal candidates for psychedelic medicine and the importance of finding the right guide and combining it with therapy.  Will Van Derveer is a psychiatrist focused on addressing the root causes of mental health challenges, not just medicating symptoms. With nearly 25 years of experience, he co-founded the Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI), which has trained over 10,000 licensed professionals in integrative psychiatry and psychedelic-assisted therapy. Dr. Van Derveer is the coauthor of Psychedelic Therapy, and co-host of the Higher Practice Podcast. *This episode includes a discussion about suicide and mental health. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available. Reach out to a trusted friend, family member, mental health professional, or call/text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, for immediate help. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Van Derveer dive into:  (0:00) The Promise of Psychedelic Medicine (05:34) Potential Risks to Consider  (09:12) Failures of Traditional Mental Health Care (12:55) The Trauma That Changed Dr. Van Derveer’s Life (26:27) Choosing the Right Guide  (33:16) Exploring Unresolved Trauma (43:14) What Conventional Care is Missing (55:14) Understanding Psychedelics: Amplifying the Mind (57:50) Exploring Ketamine: Benefits and Risks (1:01:33) MDMA: The Connection Hormone and Trauma Therapy (1:04:58) Psilocybin: A Swiss Army Knife for Mental Health (1:07:29) Psychedelics for Personal Growth and Exploration (1:11:11) Couples Therapy: Breaking Barriers (1:14:56) Ibogaine: Potential and Risks (1:18:46) Political Battle Over Psychedelic Research (1:21:09) Big Pharma, Profits, and the Fight Over Access (1:30:26) Final Thoughts and Where to Learn More Also mentioned in this episode: Psychedelic Therapy: A Revolutionary Approach to Restoring Your Mental Health and Reclaiming Your Life LSD Psychotherapy Somatic Experiencing International For more on Dr. Derveer, follow him on Instagram, Threads, YouTube, LinkedIn, or visit his Websites: Integrative Psychiatry Institute and Will Van Derveer MD. This episode is brought to you by Sunlighten, Puori, One Skin, and LMNT. Right now, Sunlighten is offering exclusive savings for my community. You can save up to $2,100 plus free shipping when you go to sunlighten.com and use the code DHRU when you fill out the Get Pricing form.  Quality protein matters. Get 32% off Puori Grass-Fed Whey Protein and a free shaker when you start a subscription at puori.com/DHRU and use code DHRU at checkout.  Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use the coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Check out LMNT’s new refreshing iced tea lemonade flavor. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free 8-count sample pack with any purchase. Head over to drinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Will Vandavir. We're here today to talk about both the incredible promise and the real danger of psychedelic medicine. This is for anybody who's ever considered psychedelic medicine for themselves or someone they love. And I'd love to start off with the promise, the hope aspect. Give me an idea or a story of something surprising, a surprising shift that you've seen happen with someone who came in with possibly no hope

and was failed by the system of traditional mental health. I had a really profound experience with a patient of mine who I talk about in the book. I refer to her as Jane, which is not her real name. But she was deeply, deeply disturbed, had been, in the mental health care system for several decades when I met her. She had had more than 10 suicide attempts by the time I met her. And we worked very hard on trying to get some relief for her. We tried a lot of different things.

We did every kind of talk therapy, somatic therapies, medication therapies, supplements, vitamins, diet changes. I mean, everything in my integrative medicine toolbook and also pharmaceutical toolbook. And over the years of treatment, she continued to get worse. I didn't have any sense that there was any progress happening. And one day she came to me and said, I want to apply for this MDMA assist therapy clinical trial.

She said, you're a part of this study, right? I said, yes, I am a part of the study. And she underwent screening, and it was determined that her symptoms were actually too severe for her to participate in the trial, which, as you can imagine, was devastating for her. She was at the end of her rope. And there was a moment in our treatment,

which, again, I talk about in the book, where I got a call from the Boulder Sheriff here in Boulder, Colorado, telling me that she had been found down in her home, her body was actually tripped over by a house guest in the middle of the night who was going to the bathroom after taking enough Valium to anesthetize a medium-sized horse. So this was a serious suicide attempt that happened just a few months after I met her. And it's, gosh, it's hard to condense many years of treatment into a punchline here. But the point of the story is that she came to me and said,

look, I feel like MDMA therapy is what I need to do. I'm not going to be allowed in the trial. I need to go find someone to work with in the underground. And I said, well, I don't know how to recommend that to you. I don't know how to provide a safe recommendation for you. But I understand. And I'll do what I can do to try to support you through the process. So she underwent 10 MDMA sessions over the course of a year.

which was more than triple what she would have been able to have in the study. So in clinical research, MDMA therapy is given three times in a controlled environment. So it's not something you can just say to one participant, oh, actually, let's give you more because we're going to, you need more. So let's give you more. It's not part of the protocol. So in retrospect, I think it was accurate that she probably wouldn't have been a great fit for the study because it took her 10 sessions to break through enough to be able to, come home to herself enough and see enough compassion for herself and all the things that

she'd been through and the abuse that she survived to be able to gradually walk away from mental health care altogether. And I've had the privilege to stay in connection with her over the years since that happened and she still remains well. So that's an extreme example of the hope and the promise of this work is that you can have a person who spends several decades in the depths of despair and trauma and unresolved depression and suicide attempts. And that person over the course of a few months can turn the ship around and move on with their lives. It's not common to see people with that deep of an impact of mental health care failing them to come out on the other side and be essentially well. So powerful that not only you were able to help her,

but able to share this in your new book, which is fantastic, by the way. And one of the reasons that we were so excited to have you on is because you're not just an individual that has years and years of experience on this landscape of psychedelic medicine, in addition to traditional psychiatry. you are also willing to call balls and strikes on the movement and talk about what works and what doesn't. And to have a flip side to that story, and we're going to be unpacking both of these throughout the podcast. Part of what you want to highlight in this book

is that there's also real danger to, I don't want to say psychedelic medicine, because psychedelic medicine is when you do it right. Let's say it's just psychedelics. There's a real danger when psychedelics are approached without reverence. So to have another story that might be there, I was wondering if you might be able to share something

with our audience that happens when people don't approach this work and this medicine with honor. Gosh, there's so many examples that I can think of. I've spent quite a few years treating people who came out of experiences with psychedelics that surprised them, and to put it mildly. One person comes to mind who was at a music festival and took mushrooms with some friends. And the problem with doing that is, well, first of all, you might have a great time.

And that's real. That's possible. But there's also a very real possibility, especially if you have not done a lot of healing work to address whatever trauma you may be carrying inside your psychology, that you're going to have an explosive kind of nightmarish reemergence. of traumatic material, which could come in the form of sensation like panic. So it could be physical sensation. It could be images or memories. It could be a sense of paranoia. And if you don't have, first of all, a protected set in setting to be taking that in, that medicine in, then you're going to be exposed to whatever is around you. Sometimes people, in this particular

example I'm thinking of will reach out to law enforcement and ask for help and you might be acting a little strange when you tap the shoulder of the police officer at the festival and that could lead to a takedown with handcuffs and legal consequences and so forth and so on so there can be massive trauma that occurs from the simple missing ingredient of having a safe container and a person who's there to help you with what might show up for you. And these kinds of experiences can happen to people who are very experienced with psychedelics. Yeah, I'm so glad that you talked about that because as more and more individuals are becoming aware of both the potential of psychedelics but also the danger,

there's more interest in wanting to explore these medicines and drugs in some stages or examples. And if people don't have a guide or a proper understanding of the best way to approach this, they could either be very flippant and say, hey, these all have no use. And in fact, they're just going to lead you down a negative road. or we all probably there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast have met the one person that did psychedelics or does psychedelics every single weekend swears that you know it's led them to this higher state of consciousness

but it's not necessarily the type of person that we would want to emulate or be like or or you know hang out with on a regular basis so it's important to talk about this as the entire part of the experience and make sure that we don't get so distracted that we don't dive deeper into exploring these tools to really support those who need them the most. And actually a key part, and one of the big ideas that you start the book off with, is that we have to understand that these medicines exist in the context of a landscape where mental health care, while it's often filled with many people who are doing its best,

as a system, it's lost its way. Can we chat about that in the context of this conversation? Let's just start with psychiatry, which is my chosen field and where I've hung out for 30 years. We rely mostly on medication to treat the conditions that psychedelics can treat from a very different perspective. So we can just talk about the different frameworks and what the limitations are of conventional care. So first of all, globally, we have roughly three. 350 million people dealing with depression. Kind of hard for us to wrap our head around that as far as that number is such a big number.

One third of those people are going to end up with what we call treatment resistant depression. And what the technical definition of that from a research standpoint is, two adequate trials of medications or psychotherapy of adequate dose and duration. So that's a pretty discouraging figure right there, where people who earnestly, in good faith, seek services, try to get well and are still going to be left empty-handed after two legitimate trials of medication or therapy. In the early 2000s, there was a huge study called the Star D trial that basically it was the first and biggest and only study that was NIH-sponsored. it was not distorted by pharmaceutical funding sources. So it was an entirely a publicly funded study. More than 4,000 people participated.

And what they did is they put people in a naturalistic sequence of treatment. So step one, everybody got an SSRI, and they measured how much benefit they got. It was about 35% of people got a treatment response. Then the next step was you could add, X, Y, or Z, you could switch to a different antidepressant, and they measured the outcome rates. And they went through four steps. And by the end of this study, by the fourth step, only about 12% chance of benefit from the fourth

antidepressant trial. So the sad and discouraging and, you know, frankly, for me, frightening truth about the carousel of medication changes is that the more times you have a problem. failure the less likely you are to get benefit. It's incredibly discouraging, right? And we're just talking about depression. Now there's other conditions that are also a train out of control. We've got anxiety disorders, especially in teenagers, post-COVID.

Massive isolation from COVID, right? And the impact of that on mental health for teenagers has been really insanely scary. Suicide rates and young people much higher post-COVID. we're losing the battle in conventional care, which is one of the reasons why people are looking at psychedelic therapy as an alternative because things have gotten so bad. In your origin story in the opening of the book, you talk about how you yourself, as a clinician,

had one of these very, very tough moments where two of your patients died by suicide within days of each other. We'll unpack your full story here on the podcast, but just tell us that, since we're talking about, the idea where even many clinicians, not only do patients feel that the system is failing them, but the clinicians who want to deliver great care to people, they themselves are in the same camp often, and many of them, like yourself, had experienced great loss, which opened them up to other possibilities that are there. Can you talk about that moment in your story? Let's talk

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and who I had referred for escalated care that I believed that they needed to save their lives and they didn't get the care that they needed. And I was devastated both on a personal basis of the grief and the loss and all of the feelings that come up for any practitioner who cares about the quality of their work, you know, questioning things I could have said and done,

all of that grief stuff going on. But I was also really furious about the system and what was broken about the system. So I did what I have often done at the hardest moments in my career as I reached out to Gabormote, who I've been fortunate to be friends with now for many years.

And within a couple of minutes, in standard Gabramonte style, he said, you know, you're in no position to make any big decisions. I was talking about quitting psychiatry again for, I don't know, third or fourth time. And he said, you need to go find out what that pain is about and what's underneath it. And I thought to myself, that's really good advice. So I hung up the phone. I decided at

that time, this is many years ago, I was curious about psychedelic therapy, but I had not gotten involved in it. And I was reading this book about how psychedelic therapy can help you connect to very early traumatic memories. I found a guide who would work with me. I held the medicine in my hand before the session started and said, show me the full extent of my helplessness, my hopelessness, and my dependency. And you got to watch out what you ask for with a psychedelic journey. Because, boy, it was intense. It was really intense to go through that. And I got in touch with this deep sense of abandonment. feeling of being left somewhere.

And the guide was saying to me, it wasn't okay for them to leave you this way. And even in the depth of this psychedelic mind state, I was able to have enough consciousness to say to myself, wait a second, this didn't happen to me. This isn't a part of my story. I wasn't abandoned. But it was a compelling enough experience

that the next morning after the session, I called my mother and said, is there anything you left out about our story of my birth? And she said, well, actually, there is a piece. It happened. I was dealing with a medical emergency right after the birth. We came home from the hospital together.

And she was rushed back to the hospital, and in those days you stayed in the hospital for a week after a surgery. When my father came in the car to pick her up from the hospital, I wasn't in the car. And she said, where's the baby? You know, I was six or seven. days old. And he said, well, I told someone in the student housing that if they heard a baby crying,

maybe they could go check on him. And so this incredible, visceral knowledge that existed in me that was not a part of my narrative memory, not a part of my biography, was recorded in my body and showed up in this session, in this state. And what was so powerful about that was it, first of all, it helped me understand why I took it so personally that these two people had taken their lives. But even broader than that, in my own journey of healing, it helped me to see how the root of my social anxiety and my panic about abandonment

had shaped my relationships, my marriage, and how I showed up as a parent in so many different places in my life. That was a huge, ultimately it was a huge gift to be able to see a pathway out of this jail that I had lived in for most of my life with very significant social anxiety. These experiences that we've all had, and maybe the person listening today, wasn't left in the hospital to be by himself, but we've all had experiences as kids where we try to make sense of the world.

And in us trying to make sense to the world, we develop these patterns and stories, and sometimes we don't even know why they're there. until we start doing a little bit of digging, like you asking your mom about the birth story that's there. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard from other friends, similar stories that when approached with reverence and beauty and other things like that, when they've gone down the pathway of exploring psychedelic medicine

with a guide that's a right fit for them, they've come to similar conclusions that they've been able to step out of their one perspective of seeing the world. and in getting a larger perspective or being open to things or their heart opening by being on particular types of medicines,

they all of a sudden have a new understanding or at least some more questions that they can explore to see why did their story unfold the way that it did. I was sharing with you, this is related and semi-unrelated is that when I was reading that part in the book about your abandonment story,

I've had my own psychedelic experiences and journeys, I've shared my listeners that a few years ago, we found the right guide for us, and my parents were very interested after listening to a few podcast episodes on this podcast about psychedelic medicine. And not for anything that they felt that was wrong, but that they thought that there was this opportunity

to go a little bit deeper in their spiritual journey, which a lot of people are interested in psychedelics for that reason as well, too. So we found a guide, and we set up a beautiful retreat for my wife, my mom, my dad, a couple of my best friends came with me as well too, and we did it as a group. Now, this group that all went there together,

we have done a lot of work together as a group, which is one of your themes, whether people are exploring this as a couple, or whether they're exploring this as an individual, the importance of making sure you have the right support in the ecosystem, not just with the guide, but the container that's around this. And so while our guide told us that,

he generally does not recommend that people have their first psychedelic experience together as a group because a lot of stuff can come up for people and it can be kind of distracting that he felt that there was this connection that we had. Long story short, when I was reading your introduction in the book where you were talking about your journey, a few months ago after the birth of our child, he ended up back in the hospital because he ended up getting an infection. and I had this dream-stated experience where I was speaking to, you know, I had this very vivid dream of me talking to my son and him being very worried and feeling like he was being abandoned.

He came home, he was with us, and now all of a sudden he's being taken away. And reading your story made me think of the importance of just even having a little bit of awareness that somebody could keep this story that's there, that it would be, as my son continues to get older, besides just surrounding him with, like, love and care, the importance of making sure I'd sort of check in to see, you know, is that something that he might carry on to? If he doesn't have the right, I don't know if the right word is reassure man or other stuff, but I had some very aha moments in reading that part of your story of, wow, this could even applied to my son and some of the things that he's gone through.

Well, the first thing that comes to my mind, Drew, is what a privilege it is for him to have a father like you who's asking these questions, right? Who's wondering, who's self-aware enough to be asking, how could I support this little guy and make sure that whatever he had to go through doesn't leave some kind of lasting impact on him that limits him, you know, in some way. to be that thoughtful as a father, I think is a unique, not unique, but it's a rare gift. I mean, they're not that many fathers out there in my view who are so mindful of what the impacts can be of experiences like that. And, you know, medical experiences for little kids are impactful, right?

They just are. It doesn't mean that they leave a lasting traumatic impression. right but many many physicians are people who had experiences with medicine as children in the patient position and have this profound connection and respect and value on healing because they experience something like that personally you know so i'm not here to say that that all medical experiences are negative, right? There can be positive impacts of those as well. But I think what you're speaking to

is also bringing up for me the important message of how important it is for us to be open-minded about the different kinds of experience, the impact that different experiences can have that might not be fully appreciated for us in the observer role. that, you know, the person going through that experience is having an experience

we might not fully understand. I want to come back to your story of you sharing about your psychedelic experience. I know my audience will be interested in this. You get into the book. But how did you choose at that time of being both a clinician,

medical doctor, but now being a first-time explorer on your own journey of going down the pathway of exploring psychological medicine, how did you choose your guide and how did you choose the medicine that you were about to embark on at that time? And of course, you know, these aren't recommendations for anybody here. This is just you clarifying how you approach that in the past. And a big part of what

you're talking about in the book today is also, too, how can people who are curious approach the same question for themselves, depending on, you know, the goals or the things that they're thinking about working on? But let's start. start first with your story. How did you choose the medicine and how did you choose the guide? I spent most of my late 20s and early 30s deep in a Tibetan Buddhist community and learning to meditate and spending hours a day meditating. It was incredibly profound. I developed a relationship with myself that I'd never had before. Alongside of that, I knew already that there were some difficult things that I went through as a kid.

I knew that my sister had nearly died in an accident when I was 12, and I was one of the first people on the scene. I knew that my father's alcohol addiction and his wild and crazy behavior and eventual federal prison sentence that happened when I was a kid impacted me. So I was in therapy talking about those things and thinking that I pretty much had a handle on it. That most of the thing, I believe that most of my traumas were, you know, from say age 10 up, I wasn't aware that there were these earlier things. And this is a common theme that we can talk about later.

But the point is that I was working through my issues in talk therapy. I was meditating. I thought I had pretty good resources in terms of mental health. exercising, sleeping, well, good nutrition, so on. And then a friend of mine in my Buddhist community invited me to an ayahuasca ceremony. And it completely opened, there was the first experience I'd ever had with a psychedelic.

It completely opened my mind to a different level of connection with myself, with the plant world, with the planet, with the universe, it cracked me open in my marriage. I mean, it did a lot of really helpful things for me. And my Buddhist teacher was not psyched about the ayahuasca work. And I got kicked out of the Buddhist community because the message that I was getting from my Buddhist teacher

is, you know, you've got to trust your own experience, you've got to learn from that, follow the thread. And so that's what I was doing. And that led me deeper into the ayahuasca world. So that the next stage in my development was a huge dive into South America and ceremony and ayahuasca and really felt like I was healing a lot of myself in that way. I wasn't telling anyone about that. I wasn't sharing anything about that.

It was very private. And I was leaving the country to go do those retreats and so on. Then these two suicides happened and I had this huge emotional response that I called Galaporo And it was at that time that I was learning about psychedelic therapy from a book. I was reading Stan Groff's book that's called LSD psychotherapy. So he was talking about how having facilitated some 5,000 LSD psychotherapy sessions, he was mapping out what a person can access in the earliest part of their childhood with LSD psychotherapy.

So I thought, well, that's really interesting because I know I've done a lot of work and, you know, dozens and dozens of ayahuasca ceremonies and I've healed a lot. But I haven't really looked at the earliest experiences as far as I know. Like I said, I'd never worked with an individual guide who was working with me. And I think this is important to highlight for the audience that ceremonies in the traditional ayahuasca formats, you will have a person, a shaman or a leader who runs the ceremony. ceremony. But you're pretty much in your own experience and you're responsible for your own experience. You're not having someone working with you one-on-one typically. That's kind of a more modern, Western kind of psychological framework. So I decided that I wanted to try that. And I wanted to go into the one-on-one and see what was different about it. And that's when this huge key was

unlocked in my mind is by having a setting where I had a person who was tracking where I was going and who was able to see the signs that I had regressed to the first week of my life. And, you know, a 40-year-old body, you know, I'm kind of like, wow, I'm an infant. That's very crazy. Very crazy experience. It was scary because I thought, wow, I've broken my mind. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't don't know if I'm going to come back from this. It was that, it was that deep. As far as picking a guide, I think, you know, it's really important to choose, and we talk about this in the book, but word of mouth referrals are critical. You definitely don't want to do like a Google search for someone to work with with a psychedelic because training really matters, you know, and one of

the big challenges that we're facing now as we look at mainstreaming psychedelic healing is how do we scale up training in a way where you don't have a person needing to do what's done in Peru where you're an apprentice for 10 years or you know you have a thousand ayahuascus ceremonies or something before you can go be a guide in that format how do we get people to a level where they're not going to commit ethical violations or or harm people even with positive intention, you can harm people easily in a psychedelic session. How do we get people there in a few months of training? One of the biggest ideas in the book is this idea that trauma is the hidden key

behind so much of what people are going through when it comes to our modern-day mental health epidemic. So your argument is that a significant portion of what gets diagnosed is depression, anxiety, ADHD, even things like bipolar. disorder is actually unresolved trauma underneath that diagnosis. It's a big claim for those that may not be familiar with this idea or your work. So walk us through that. And I think of this as being very important for these two sides of the conversation that we're having today. One side of the potential psychedelic medicine for very specific diagnoses or things that people are doing that are just for lack of better term, wrong or off,

that they want to get to the root of. And this other side, which is also people who may not feel that they have that, not that everybody hasn't gone through some version of trauma, but that are curious because they see psychedelics as an opportunity to go deeper on their spiritual journey. So let's talk about this trauma piece and how unresolved trauma is underneath

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D-H-R-U at 1. one skin.co slash Drew. That's 15% off at 1.0-0-N-E-S-K-I-N-C-C-I-N-C-C-O-S-D-H-R-U. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support the show and tell them we sent you. There's something nostalgic about iced tea and lemonade in the summer. But most of the bottled versions today are packed with sugar and leave you feeling worse an hour later. That's why I've been loving elements new lemonade ice tea. I've been using Element for years at this point. Long recording days, workouts, travel because I realize that a lot of what I think is low energy is actually dehydration or low electrolytes. Your body doesn't run on caffeine. It runs on processes that depend on electrolytes like sodium, potassium, and magnesium. That's what Element has always done incredibly well, supporting hydration, helping with focus and helping keep your energy more stable throughout the day. And now with this new Lemonade Ice Tea, you're getting the same electrolyte formula plus real black tea extract not isolated caffeine so the energy feels

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manifest the nervous system dysregulation that is the effect of trauma without remembering or having any specific event that we could attribute to that. So many people have layers of experiences that they've had throughout their childhood. was very common, where they've had either what we call big T traumas, like, you know, car accidents or assaults or, you know, falls from ladders or things like that. Or they've been bullied at school. These are, these are, you know, more clear, distinct kind of events. But many people have had chronic senses of misattunement, of not being understood, of not being listened to, of feeling invisible. or unimportant in their families, not being, having maybe a different learning style at school

and getting a diagnosis or being shamed by teachers for that. And so there are these incredible stories that you come across when you do this work where someone who is going about life, you know, mining their own business, and they have five mile an hour fender bender, in a parking lot somewhere. There's no physical trauma,

there's no, you know, airbags going off, nothing serious. And boom, they're in a full-blown trauma response. What's going on there? You know, the event is not significant enough to trigger that trauma response. But the pump has been primed for people. And so you can have these experiences

where something that seems like a hang nail can trigger off the explosive memory, you know, like for me having two people suicide a couple of days apart, created this explosive experience that I was able to utilize by going into psychedelic therapy and working through it. There are people who get stuck in different phases of the sequence that a body wants to go through and needs to go through in order to return back to regulation. For example, some people are stuck in more of a parasympathetic nervous system response, more of a freeze response, more of a collapse response. This can look like not wanting to be around other people. It can

look like not caring about food, not caring about your appearance, losing track of your desire for professional expression or not investing in relationships. And this looks like depression. That's what we would probably call it, right? We call this depression. But these patterns of expression can be just a manifestation of the person being in a particular aspect of the threat response. Another example is someone who's having a lot of panic attacks or tremendous anxiety or insomnia. The nervous system, the sympathetic fight or flight part of the nervous system is switched on and it's stuck on. And so this person can't go to sleep.

because their nervous system is scanning the environment for threat constantly. So you're in a different part of the dysregulation cycle from having the experience of encountering a threat and then trying to get back to regulation. So one of the beautiful thinkers in this field and contributors is Peter Levine who came up with an approach called somatic experiencing where Peter observed that from the point of impact of an experience, let's say a loud noise in your environment, like a gunshot or something,

you know, the human is going to, first of all, look around. They're going to maybe have an automatic response where they crouch and they duck for cover. And then slowly but surely they're going to sort of like turn around and walk away and figure out that, okay, my environment's secure. I'm okay now. And what happens often with trauma is that a person's nervous system gets stopped. It gets cut off in a particular moment where now that's their baseline reality as opposed to having this regulated reality. And I think that often gets misdiagnosed as in the case of the person who's getting their environment for threat, that could be ADHD, right? I can't stay focused on the task in front of me because I need to scan my environment to see if I'm safe.

And so every time I pay attention to the task in front of me, I'm taking a risk that I'm going to get something happening to me over my shoulder. So children who are diagnosed with ADHD often have this kind of environment that they live in where it's not a safe environment for them to focus and pay attention. To put a little bow tie on this big idea that you talk under the book, take it one step further and help us understand that, for my understanding, this isn't something that traditional mental health care necessarily would agree with. And what are they missing out on and how are they failing patients because they don't have that as part of their framework? The big problem in conventional care, aside from the fact that the tools don't work so well for too many people, that's a big

problem. But the other, there's a more fundamental problem here, which is that the way we diagnose conditions, right? So we diagnose conditions entirely based on the symptom. So we have a list of nine symptoms. If the person has five out of nine symptoms in the DSM-5, then they have the condition. There's no attention to the root cause. So when you ask a question, like, what are the people missing out on?

They're missing out on resolving the root cause so that the condition goes away when you treat the root cause. As opposed to medicating the leaves on the tree, you want to cut the tree off at the tree. route in order to resolve the thing. So the person can graduate from mental health care and move on with their lives, which is what I think the goal should be for mental health care is to get people out of the system as quickly as you can. So as a psychiatrist who's deep in this space, have you seen people who have, with reverence, gone down the path of psychedelic therapy and have

seen that in combination with potentially other things because you're a huge fan of getting to the root, which could be that in addition to somebody's trauma, they might have a diet that's incredibly inflammatory for them and it's putting a lot of stress in their brain and their body. So with psychedelic therapy and sometimes in combination with other things, that people have seen that their depression, anxiety, ADHD, and bipolar disorder, that as a result of getting to the root, those things have essentially no longer part of, you know, their diagnosis anymore. Oh, absolutely.

100%. And it's not to say that I'm anti-medication. I think medications can be great as a short-term tool to try to help someone get their legs under them so they can tackle these behavior changes that are so hard to tackle. When someone comes in and they're deeply depressed, suicidal, telling them to put on their sneakers

and go get 10,000 steps is not gonna be something that lands. It's like you gotta help that person get out of the trap that they're in so that they can now go do those things. And that's what the real opportunity. opportunity as with psychedelic therapy, in my view, with these deep, dark places that are, you can help them. I like to use the metaphor of, this is a tow truck that's going to get your life out of a ditch, but you don't want to ride around on the back of the tow truck for the rest of your life. So we've got to identify these lifestyle medicine targets and changes that a person is going to

need to tackle. We like to do that in the preparatory sessions so that the person knows that we're going to be going after that in integration after the catalytic session. That's the dosing session. Can you share your sort of ideal arc that if somebody's exploring psychedelic medicine and they find a guide, a group, somebody in the underground, because largely for most places in the United States, that's where people are going to have to turn to, although it's opening up in certain states. what's the arc of the experience look like

to get the most out of the medicine? In what I would call the harm reduction conversation, you know, how do you prevent harm? How do you reduce the risk of bad outcomes? Having a therapist that you're working with who is open-minded, who you can let them know that you're going to go do what you're going to do,

and hopefully you get a good referral to someone that you feel like you can trust because your friend, maybe a very close friend, had a really positive experience with this individual or this guide. Bearing in mind that you're going to need to really look at optimizing your life in order to have the experience of wellness that we can only have when all the things we need to take care of

in our lives are dialed. And I'm talking about the biopsychosocial spiritual beings that we are. We're not going to feel well with a bad diet. We're not going to feel well if our sleep is disrupted. We're not going to feel well if our partnership at home is deeply insecure. Or there's constant conflict or you're not having your emotional needs met by your partner. You're not going to be able to be a couch potato and feel good about your life if you're not getting enough exercise.

Sunlight, fresh air. You recently had a guest on talking about being outside and how important that is, right? So there's a lot of things that we need to feel well. If you're aware that there are things like that that are part of your life that are challenges for you, then going into the session with a clear intention of trying to understand, why do you have this difficult

relationship with alcohol? Or why can't you leave this, shaming, brutal boss that you work for. You know, why are you stuck in this relationship pattern? So applying your attention and focusing your intention onto the areas in your life where you feel like you need help is a very powerful way to try to get the most out of it. The next thing I would say is don't make any sudden decisions.

You know, so oftentimes people will go and they'll have a psychedelic experience that feels really profound and it probably is profound. But one of the things that they walk away with is, gosh, I got to leave. My family are all jerks. I got to get rid of these people. I got to get out of here. And if you don't unpack that with a trained therapist or at least a coach or someone you trust, a good friend, you could get very polarized in your thinking after a psychedelic experience.

This is one of the pitfalls, one of the risks psychologically is that you get very convicted in yourself about a new thing that is also not grounded. So don't believe everything you think is a great attitude to take into these experiences. One of the big ideas inside of the book is also this idea that we have to understand that psychedelics, psychedelic substances amplify the contents of the mind. Yes. And so whatever's going on, that's going to be amplified. Other psychiatric medications, they suppress things inside of the body, right?

They suppress something. And then these do the opposites. And I think that, you know, why is that important for the audience to know? Like, why is that such a huge core distinction that's important for people who are thinking about going down the path of exploring psychedelics? The answer that comes to mind is one of my dearest friends, closest personal friends I've been in friendship with for 30 years, went through a patch where he needed to take an SSRI, who was very depressed, and he tried a lot of different things.

And he went on the medicine. And this is a very sensitive, very plugged-in, connected person. And he started talking to, I was not his psychiatrist, I'm his friend, not his doctor, but he was saying things to me like, man, I feel really stable, but I feel kind of dull. And, you know, he committed to staying on this medicine for a year, which is typically a good idea.

If you're very depressed, you want to take that approach. But by the end of the year, and he started tapering off the medicine, I spent time with him recently, and he was crying about something that he really cared about. It was like crying about something that was really profound. for him. And he said, God, it feels great to be able to feel things again. Like I can feel again. And so that I think really illustrates what you're talking about is that there's a hidden cost and sometimes it's worth the cost. That's for real and sometimes it's worth it for a period of time.

But there's a cost to having your emotions suppressed. There's a cost to having that dulling in your life of feeling less of the acuity. of the pain, because pain is still what drives humans to grow and change. Right? I was sitting with this really interesting Hindu teacher many years ago, and someone came to the mic in the Q&A and said, how come people have to suffer so much to grow? And he said, we're working really hard on changing that,

but that's still how it works here. So I think we just have to acknowledge that, you know, we need to be really careful about taking away people's pain to such an extent that we prevent them from having the motivation and the desire to go improve their life. That's such a powerful reminder. When I read that section of the book about psychedelics amplifying the contents of the mind, it also made me think that if you are entering into a psychedelic, experience without the right support and a lot of unresolved trauma. I had a close friend that when I first moved to L.A. in 2012 really wanted to have, she was a huge fan of the work of Wayne Dyer, really wanted to have a psychedelic experience. She's coming from the U.K.

It was a little bit harder to sort of go down that path over there. And I didn't know too much about her story at the time, but I helped arrange it, not knowing anything really about the space, not even having done psychedelics myself, but just finding a couple people because she was curious, hey, I have a friend that's curious, she wants to come here, she wants to do some,

you know, psilocybin. And she had just an incredibly difficult and traumatizing experience on the medicine. And I later found out afterwards, and this is the fact of, you know, we weren't working with a guide,

we were just a group of friends. I wasn't even the one that was giving out, you know. I don't even think I did anything at the time. She had lost her mom, and there was so much, even though it was like five years ago, there was so much unresolved trauma that was there because she was in the medical field, and she really blamed herself

for being the reason that her mom ultimately didn't heal. I think if she was working with a guide, they would have told her, hey, there might be some other things that we work on first here, And it's not that psychedelics can't be part of the toolbox, but actually you haven't really talked to anybody about this in a way that could help you investigate further. Sure, you've talked about it with friends or other stuff,

but somebody really drill in about where is this coming from that you blame yourself? And is it even true? Because we've all heard these stories of things maybe going sideways for some people, and yet other people having said this magical experience that's there. And so much of it is how you enter into it and whether or not psychedelics is the right fit for you at that time

for what your goals and intentions are. That's my layperson way of making sense of that experience. Tell me what I got right, what I got wrong, or what else I should be thinking about. I totally agree with you. I think, you know, the question came up for me right away when I was involved in MDMA. clinical research and the average number of years of people that people had experienced PTSD

of that group of people we did that study on was 29.4 years. So nearly 30 years of symptoms of PTSD before they went into a protocol where two-thirds of them no longer had PTSD afterward. And I, so the first thought is, do they need to wait that long? I mean, are we going to really tell people that, you know, X number of trials or X number of years or decades before you get access to this treatment, that's insane, right? But on the other hand, with what you're talking about is super important too, which is that a person who's dealing with acute grief or loss or they've had a trauma that they know about that happened recently, there are tools that have fewer risks than psychedelics

like EMDR or I mentioned earlier somatic experiencing or IFS work, Dick Schwartz's work, beautiful, powerful work without psychedelics that can easily take care of most of the material that needs to be taken care of in many cases. So when we're looking at the use of a psychedelic therapy modality, we do need to take account of all of these things in addition to the medical,

the individual medical situation that that person is dealing with as well. But I agree with you. I think that jumping straight into a psychedelic treatment without exploring things, how can we get a result without going to the very strong medicine over here that comes with risks

is a mistake. I think we need to look at it. Yeah, and even she might have found a guide who said, hey, actually, Sola Simon is not right for you right now because it's going to bring up a lot of fear. Let's actually explore MDMA. That's a better fit for you. And let's do it over multiple sessions.

You don't need to have this big heroic experience. You're coming to California. You want to have this, you know, this sort of this big journey that you're hyping up. Maybe it's these slow and steady experiences over time that allow you to actually do the work. This is actually a great opportunity. If you wouldn't mind, I'd love to just walk through some of the big psychedelics that are out there

and talk about, you know, what is the potential for them? Who are they for? Who are they not for? Why should somebody be thinking about them? I think a lot of people are still confused about that now. So let's walk through first, the big three. Let's start off with ketamine.

What is its potential? And especially in this day and age where people are seeing, if you live in Los Angeles, New York, or the places, you're seeing ketamine clinics on a lot of corners that are there. What is its strengths and what is its limitations that people should be thinking about? Who is it for? Who is it potentially not for?

Well, let's talk about the hope with ketamine first. Ketamine is very powerful as an antidepressant and the short-term time frame. So the way the data shakes out, and this has been shown in multiple studies, is about 70% of people who have IV ketamine will have at least a 50% reduction in their depression symptoms within a few hours, typically.

The drawback is that it's really hard to maintain the benefits of ketamine. Now, ketamine also has this really interesting, very specific, anti-suicidal thinking effect that's different from any of the other psychedelics. my own kind of integrative medicine theory, completely unproven, but I think there's good evidence to support it, is that the pro-inflammatory environment that you talked about earlier with depression, which usually is traceable to some kind of diet change that needs to happen,

is linked to a direction in the pathway of metabolism of triptophan, that shunts tryptophan away from the production of serotonin and shunts it toward a pro-inflammatory metabolite called quinolinic acid which is excitotoxic at NMDA at glutamate receptors in the brain and it's very interesting to see that these quinolinic acid levels in the brain are highly elevated in people who attempt suicide why does ketamine resolve suicidal thinking very quickly for a lot of people I think it's kicking the quinolentic acid off of these NMDA receptors.

That's a whole other rabbit hole. But it's an interesting connection between the gut-brain connection and psychedelics. So for ketamine, the big pros, immediate antidepressant effect for many people, and you could treat suicidality in an emergency rim with a ketamine infusion and prevent that person from having to get hospitalized. So that's a big advantage. The drawbacks are significant with ketamine. For one thing, the fleeting benefits.

And then what are you going to do? Now the person is committed to maybe they're getting maintenance ketamine. Maybe their tolerances going up over time. Maybe they end up in a Matthew Perry kind of situation where they're looking for ketamine outside of the clinic, right? Or dying by overdose of ketamine in a hot tub or something. So it comes with real risks of addiction. It's the one psychedelic drug, and some of the chemists would say, you know, it's not technically a psychedelic.

It's a dissociative drug based on its structure. But it's the one that people can get into trouble with in terms of ketamine use disorder. That's a real thing. That's pretty much the ketamine picture. Let's go to the next one on a list. Let's talk about MDMA, which you have hugely deep understanding on for being involved with the trials that you've been involved. with, who is it for? Who is it not for? What's the potential? MDMA has its own unique chemistry to it. And one of the things that it does is spikes a hormone in the brain called oxytocin,

which is the social connection hormone. It's the same hormone that the mother and the baby both get flooded with during breastfeeding. So it's this, I'm safe, I'm connected, I'm understood, the world is a good place to be in kind of hormone, which is incredibly supportive to, as a milieu, to look into your trauma. Very helpful. It also increases serotonin, dopamine, or penephrine. It's related to methamphetamine in terms of the structure of it.

And so it has some of the same side effects as amphetamines. Sweating, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, people who are prone to arrhythmia's maybe more at risk of having that experience. So in general, for a reasonably healthy person, MDMA is a very safe medically thing to do. It does have some drug interactions that you have to pay attention to. But most of the time, it would be my go-to first choice for working with trauma is MDMA. Fill us in on the landscape right now, just a little tangent. in the United States, are there places that people can go legally to explore MDMA with a clinician or somebody?

Or is it all still in the space of the underground? For now, we're still in the underground with MDMA, unfortunately. The phase three work was completed in 2024. The application was made to the FDA. They were denied in August of 24. There is some talk that they will reapply with the data. There's some political baggage around MDMA, but the efficacy and the safety data in Phase 3

is plenty good enough, in my humble opinion, to see it get approved based just on the data. So the FDA wanted a few things tracked in the trial that were not tracked, that incidentally, the FDA did not ask for from the beginning of phase three, but at the end of phase three, said, you didn't do this. So these are things like looking at how many people went on from the protocol to then seek out and use underground MDMA

after the study. So concern about, you know, are people getting high with MDMA and misusing it after getting resolution from their PTSD? I haven't seen that be a problem with people who go through a protocol to his. PTSD. But obviously the DEA has got its concerns about any misuse of any substance. So right now it's still on Schedule 1 and so is psilocybin. Catamine is of the big three is the only one that's currently widely available for people.

Let's go over the next one, which you mentioned psilocybin. Give us the same breakdown. Sillocybin is interesting because first of all I expect that we will likely see an approval by the end of the year. So on the federal level, very exciting. Silocybin is currently available in Oregon and Colorado and soon to be in New Mexico and there's a few other states that are working on state measures. It's interesting to have something be legal on a state level and then be illegal on the federal level. It creates all kinds of problems. So people like me are eager to see a federal approval so we can move on from the complexity and confusion of, you know, the patchwork across the country of like, oh, you can do it here, but not here. And accessibility

is really problematic with cost, people traveling to Colorado, Oregon, and so on. As a tool, psilocybin is more of a Swiss Army knife. So you can treat depression with it. You can treat tobacco addiction with it. You can treat OCD, certain headaches. There's studying eating disorders with psilocybin therapy, end-of-life anxiety, existential distress, all kinds of different indications or targets can be worked with with psilocybin. Of the three, psilocybin is the most likely to cause after effects that, you know, in the conventional term is persistent perceptual disorder, HPPD. This is something that is loosely termed flashbacks.

It's kind of strange to me that when you read clinical trials across the board, you have about 10% of people who will complain about this condition, which resolves with supportive therapy over six months, typically. I say it's strange because being in the world that I'm in and all the people that I know who have experienced psilocybin, And I know maybe one or two people out of many thousands of people I've talked to who have used psilocybin who have had that experience. So I don't know why the clinical trials report such high rates of that. But psilocybin was famously reported by a pharmacologist in the UK named David Nod as being way safer than riding horses, just based on epidemiological data.

You know, for the person who's listening today and thinking like, I don't have. something that I feel like is, quote, quote, wrong, that I'm, everybody has problems, everybody has things, everybody has trauma, everybody has that stuff. I don't have something specific that I'm looking to work on, but I'm actually really curious because I've heard that people have had from these surveys. I mentioned to you before, we've had some experts on this podcast that have come and talked about some of the surveys that are out there that show that psychedelic experience, especially with something like psilocybin, was one of the most profound experiences that somebody's had in their

life. So they hear things like that and they want to go down the pathway to maybe help them deepen their relationship to self, explore their own personal philosophy, explore the sense of consciousness, their spiritual journey. What would you want to tell them about thinking about how to go down that path and what to explore and what not to explore? Well, I think psilocybin is a great tool for that kind of exploration. I would say that about any of of the any of the psychedelics, you can have deep openings of connection to yourself and to spirit to the planet, to the planet kingdom, so on. I still think that being in a safe environment that is not going to be jarring or scary or unpredictable or overwhelming is a good idea,

you know, especially in the beginning. But like I said earlier, I know people who are very experienced with psychedelics who think that they've kind of explored the inner territory pretty well. And then they go camping with by themselves and take some psilocybin and all of a sudden they are suicidal in their tent and scared to death out in the middle of nowhere. So I'm not trying to scare people,

but I just, because it does amplify things that are inside you that you don't know are there, it can be good to have good people around who you can trust. It could just be a good friend. The best way I would describe it for personal growth is that if you think about like the landscape of like a fairy tale where there's like a castle and then there's meadows and there's a scary fire swamp with rodents of unusual size and thinking about the Princess Bride metaphor, right? Most people live inside the castle 24-7, speaking metaphorically. You stay home.

You stay inside of your familiar thoughts, your familiar patterns, your familiar behaviors. And when you take a psychedelic, you go outside of the castle and you start to find out that there's a whole inner world that you haven't explored before. A world where you might try on a different identity from the one that you didn't even know that you were so attached. to inside the castle that you live in. And then you can move around and you can go and you can have very scary experiences and very beautiful experiences and you can feel connected with divinity or God or whatever the word you may have for that. It can be incredibly profound to get outside of your little rat nest of your mind.

Even if you're a healthy person, you've got a certain way of doing things that's very familiar and habitual. So when you take a psychedelic in general, you go outside of that. and you see a bigger possibility. And this is why a lot of creators like to use psychedelics in order to open up creativity in those pathways. Because it can feel like you're on a hamster wheel in ordinary consciousness,

going through the same thought patterns over and over again day after day. What about couples therapy? What are you been seeing with couples therapy and using psychedelics as an opportunity to, in some cases, leapfrog years of what traditional couples counseling might be able to do. Yeah, I really like working with ketamine with couples, actually. I've had a lot of experience with that.

The reason I like that is that, you know, in general, when you show up for therapy, whether it's couple's therapy or individual therapy, I'm talking about talk therapy, not psychedelic therapy, you're showing a lot of therapy. up wearing the same armor or the same defensive structure unconsciously that you walk around all day, every day with, right? And so you're not aware that you're preventing the therapist from knowing the parts of you that the therapist needs to know to be able to help you unlock and get out of that suit of armor so you can have more flexibility in your life and more joy and or possibility.

So when I work with couples with ketamine, one of the things that we like to do, which is so fascinating, is we like to have one member of the couple undergo a ketamine experience lying in the lap of the other member of the couple. And so when you are emerging from the ketamine, you're opening your eyes with these fresh eyes

that are not for a few minutes. anyway. They're not, you're not wearing the lenses of seeing your partner and yourself in this habitual way. And it's almost like the fresh eyes of an infant looking up at mom for the first time. And then you start to feel the habitual ideas, thought patterns, judgments, fears coming online. And so you have this amazing opportunity to have the contrast of the fresh vision, and then the colored vision right in a moment. And so then you can open up that distinction. It's similar to what I've seen with MDMA

and working with trauma is that people will say, now I see the possibility. And now I need to go build the life that is that possibility. Yeah, it's almost like now I've dropped all the, just even if you get a temporary goal, of all the resentment that you've built up, but this and this story and that story, it's like, wow, this is the reason

that I fell in love with this person. Exactly, exactly. You strip off the, I know exactly what you're about to say. That's powerful. I'd love to see more of that that's out here. I have a friend of mine, Shira, who's based in Los Angeles, who does some incredible work with couples

and in this landscape and just hearing stories from her. I'm like, man, how many marriages could be saved if people could find the right support? Not that you always have to bring psychedelics in, but on the flip side, just, I know so many couples that have years and years of couples counseling, there's usually somebody that it doesn't work for,

so then the couple quits, and then they're on the train, off the counseling, off the train that's there, and yet if you could have these breakthroughs, these stories, that you hear about, that would be incredible for people. Yeah, there's even been research on MDMA therapy for couples, and I think there's massive potential in that for folks. Can you talk about Ibogaine?

And for those that are not familiar, they're hearing about it in the news right now. What's up with that and what is it? What's its potential? Great question. So Ibrahimine is a chemical that comes from a plant in West Africa that's called Iboga. It's a shrub.

And there are tribes in West Africa, the Buiti, for example, that use this as a ritual of transformation. And you consume the bark of the bush. It produces a kind of dreamlike state that lasts anywhere from 12 hours to, I've known people who said that their journey took 72 hours to get done with. So it's a very deep and very long experience. What's exciting about Ibogaine and why it's in the news right now is that it has this anecdotal, I'd say it's anecdotal because there have not been really any controlled trials on Abbegain yet, but they're coming.

And the anecdotal evidence is that people going either to West Africa or going to Mexico or going to the Bahamas or going to a place where they can have an iboga or ibogane experience where it's not illegal. Again, this is one of the drugs that's on Schedule I in the US currently, but it has this remarkable ability to shut down not just acute craving or acute withdrawal from opiates and alcohol and cocaine,

but it seems to also be able to reset the person back to the level of tolerance for that substance that they had before they got addicted to the substance. So it has this incredibly, I hesitate to even say miraculous because we need to study it. But you know, when you hear these firsthand accounts from people who go through an experience like that

and they lay heroin addiction down forever with almost no craving afterward. It's quite remarkable to hear these stories. Now, the biggest drawback or danger with Ibegain, there's there have been a little bit over 20 deaths that have been reported from people undergoing Ibegain treatment. And it has this ability to induce arrhythmia or irregular heartbeats that can be faced. So the cardiotoxicity is the big problem that needs to be solved in terms of clinical research and how is that done. There was one group out of Stanford that added intravenous magnesium to stabilize the cardiotoxicity of Ibogaine. And they did show there was some beneficial impact in terms of reducing that negative effect using magnesium to do that.

So there's just a ton of research that needs to be done. And what recently happened with the executive order in the Oval Office and Joe Rogan and President Trump and a bunch of other people in the Oval Office talking about Ibegain is allocating funding for Ibegain research. So just because Ibegain has had a big splash in the news doesn't mean that it's that we fully understood, that the research is anywhere near as far along as it's. it is for psilocybin or MDMA or ketamine. We need a lot more understanding. Anything else that you can add about the current political landscape around getting these medicines out there, studied, the different factions that are either pro or con? Because it seems like we're in a very interesting time of opportunity, but there's also a little bit of chaos that's there. Is that accurate? Is that inaccurate?

Absolutely. I think it's even understated. I think there's a tremendous amount of chaos and uncertainty in the space. We have this very strange moment where we have very bullish leadership in the form of RFK Jr. at HHS and Marty McAory, who just left the FDA like yesterday, who both were huge proponents of psychedelic therapy. You have a president who seems like he's pretty,

pretty good with it for the most part, signing this executive order that fast-tracked certain things. So the political regulatory landscape is very favorable, but it's also very unstable. And so there's a bit of a threading the needle kind of vibe going on right now in the space in terms of trying to get things approved and moved through a process that is rigorous enough

to make sure that it's not going to backfire, right? that would be a tragedy. If something got short-cutted through the FDA or fast-tracked in a way where all of a sudden, after approval, you have a bunch of deaths or something like, nobody wants that. But at the same time, we have outrageous amounts of people

killing them, you know, taking their own lives every single day in this country. So we have a huge crisis on our hands. So it's a very strange moment. I do hope, and I feel optimistic that we're going to see psilocybin approved federally by the end of the year with compass pathways leading the charge. And then right behind them is a nonprofit called USONA Institute that has a psilocybin product that probably will get approved in the first quarter of next year. And there are 300 psychedelic compounds in various phases of FDA research. So it's a beautiful blossoming of research happening.

right now. Is the idea that for these medicines to be available, that big pharma will have to get involved and sort of put their ability to turn this into something that can be patentable so that they're willing to invest the dollars to actually look into the research, and then that's the only where we're going to get this? Like, what's the vision of how this becomes available to clinicians to use as a tool? Great question. So the big push in the last 25 years has been to medicalize

these tools, right? So the idea is that we can't get X, Y, or Z off of Schedule 1 unless it becomes a FDA-approved medicine in this country. That's been the approach.

And there are benefits and drawbacks to that approach versus another approach could be let's see if we can shift policy to federally legalize these plants or chemicals with guardrails around making sure that children can't access them and making sure that this safety problem is addressed and so on. One of the biggest problems with the medicalization route is that FDA is very used to looking at chemicals to approve or not approve based on what their risks and benefits are. And so you have this reductionistic research model where you're looking at the chemical and you're trying to isolate the effects of the chemicals so you can look at the drawbacks.

And you're also creating a database of individuals who are participants in these clinical trials who are as homogeneous as possible. So you don't have a tremendous amount of diversity in the clinical trials in terms of not just their presentations, their problems, but also their backgrounds, right? Racial ethnic variabilities, sexual orientation, different kinds of where do they come from, you know, what are their origins? So we have an FDA kind of funnel or kind of needle that we have to thread where the whole game is let's look at the chemical and see what the chemical can do. But in psychedelic therapy, what we've been talking about today is there's this much bigger opportunity than just the chemical effects of the molecule. there's a spiritual opportunity, there's the relational opportunity,

there's the healing the trauma opportunity that happens in the relationship with the guide or the therapist. And FDA is not in the business of regulating therapy. So one of the big missteps, if you will, or problems with the approval of MDMA in 2024 was that it was presented to FDA as this is a psychotherapy that is, assisted by MDMA. And the FDA was like, what is that? I don't know what that is. I don't know how to deal with that.

And so other pharmaceutical companies observed that and took none of that. It was like, wait, we got to take a different approach with FDA. And so, of course, there are factions on both sides, of that argument, one faction is saying, how dare you try to strip out psychotherapy from psychedelic treatment? That's not okay. And then you have people who, and I would put myself in this other category of let's be pragmatic here. If we're going to go the medicalization route, then we should try to get things through the FDA, make sure they're safe. But let's be practical.

Let's get things approved. We got people out here dying every day. We need things. We need help. Let's not get hung up on the details, right? We know that therapy will happen in the room. We know that the relationship matters between the guide and the client. But let's let the FDA do their work and not confuse them. By trying to present something to them they don't know what to do with.

Those are some of the flavors of what's going on right now. And then, of course, with Iboga, for example, you also have, how are we going to be mindful of the indigenous traditions and people who carried this sacred medicine for millennia in a plant that might not be easy for us to grow outside of West Africa how are we going to pay homage and be respectful to these traditions that have worked so hard to keep this medicine and this tradition alive for so long and not just go in and as we often have with Western culture and commodify and extract.

All important themes and questions to be thinking about and exploring. And I'm thankful that there's people like you that are committed their life's work to discussing these, weighing the pros and cons. But you mentioned something important, which is that as scary as this topic can seem if somebody isn't that familiar or is just getting more familiar and is looking for who are the voices to trust or what are the books or the guides that are out there that can help educate me in a way that isn't trying to, you know, push a vision or push an idea or an ideology on me?

Your book is a great one. We have a link in the show notes, by the way, for the audience is listening. You can find it on Amazon and bookstores. It's called psychedelic therapy, a revolutionary approach to restoring your mental health and reclaiming your life. So for those individuals who are feeling like,

okay, this, I'm hearing about this story, about somebody who was doing fine on psychedelic, and then took it on camping and could have been suicidal. Like as much as there are these examples that are out there, which are, you know, the exception, but a real danger to be thinking about, you've shared something really important for everybody to remember is that people are dying every day from addiction.

People are dying every day from suicide. People are dying every day from the complications that come with all the manifestations of PTSD that we were talking about before, severe depression, this, that. It's taking a toll on our economy. It's taking a toll on families. It's taking a toll on young people.

And if we don't go further down this area, which can seem like a wild, wild west, can seem like the early days of, you know, exploring a new territory, a new state, if we don't go down that pathway, we don't have the courage to go and explore it, we're going to be leaving generations high and dry. moving forward from here.

Anything else you want to say about that topic? Yeah, thanks, Drew. I think you nailed it. It's, you know, drastic measures are merited in a crisis. And when you start realizing how far are behind we are, it starts to make more sense to take steps that, you know, maybe at one point in the past might have felt like the risk outweighed the benefit.

If you're paying attention, then you can see how dire the situation has become and how much more sense it makes for us to take the risk of having a really, potentially really uncomfortable experience, because these experiences can be uncomfortable in the service of a deeper wellness that often is only accessible by going through a difficult experience. And you know, we're also up against

cultural themes here where discomfort and adversity are generally, you know, considered to be negatives and comfort and convenience are considered to be positives. But, you know, one of the things we're learning about in resilience research is that adversity produces resiliency in the right dose, in the right measure. So that's another way of thinking about these opportunities is that you're you're taking what we call a hormesis or hormetic stress in order to, it's like taking a bit of poison in order to become a stronger person. You take too much of the poison, it could really hurt you, right? So we've lost track of the fact that we need a strong balance of support and challenge

in our lives in order to thrive and become the people that were capable of becoming. So this is one way to do that. That's well said. Will, this has been fantastic, and this is a topic that I know a lot of my audience really cares about, but they've been looking for who can kind of guide them on the journey, and I think that you do a fantastic job in your book. Again, we have a link in the show knows for the audience. It's called Psychedelic Therapy, a revolutionary approach to restoring your mental health and reclaiming your life.

You've also been putting out a lot of content on this topic more recently. Where do people go to follow you to get your snippets and little bites and shorts on this information. Where would you want to send the lights? Thanks, Drew. I mean, you can you can certainly go look for me on my website. We train psychedelic therapists and doctors, and that's psychiatry institute.com. If you want to see my content, my videos, and so on, then probably Instagram is the best place, which is just will.vanderver.m.m.D., at, I guess the ad is at the beginning on Instagram. So, yeah, we can, sure we can put that in the show notes, too. was on your website, I think, a couple weeks ago

when we were preparing from the podcast, and I think I saw that you're no longer accepting new patients. Do you have a directory, or do you have directories for people who are listening? Even if they're not ready to go down the topic of psychedelics, you have a whole network of integrative psychiatrists. You train people. Where should people be going if they're looking for somebody,

for them, or their family members? Right. So in the past few years, we've trained about 10,000 people. We have around 3,000 graduates of our psychedelic therapy training. You can go straight to that psychiatry institute.com and right in the drop-down menu at the top, there's a label that's called provider. And you can just go in there and click that. You can put in your zip code, and you'll probably have somebody pop up because we've trained people in all the states and more than 60 countries. So there's a lot of support out there. Amazing. And that website one more time, we'll put in the show notes, but if you

could mention it one more time, the website that they go to? Yeah, it's psychiatry institute.com. Great. Fantastic. Dr. Will Van Devere, thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing this incredible knowledge with our audience. Thanks, Drew. Really appreciate it. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been

working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. And it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com.

That's D-H-R-U-P-U-H-I-T-com and click on the tab that's says try this