Imagine, two or three decades from now, that all your hopes about psychadelic-assisted therapy materialise — it works at scale, and it becomes about as neglected and unhelpfully politicised as hip surgery and antibiotics.
What do you picture? How did these remarkableearlystudies scale to a system which fully lives up to their promise and reaches milions of people? And just how ubiquitous (in your more imaginative moments) do you see these treatments becoming?
Scaling psychedelic therapy is an enormous challenge—it’s so different from either the current models of pharmaceutical therapy—a pill a day forever—or talking psychotherapy—a weekly session more or less forever or until the insurance runs out—that it will take some genuine innovation to fit this square beg into these round holes. Yes, psychedelic therapy takes intensive preparation and integrations but only over a short period and with a small number of sessions. It actually cures many problems, so shouldn’t need to be repeated constantly . But when people say it’s potentially revolutionary, they’re thinking of these existing models. It needs to be said, however, that these existing models don’t work very well for many, if not most, patients. If psychedelic therapy is proven to be superior, corporations and national health agencies (and potentially some public benefit corps like MAPS’) will figure out the necessary new models. The success of the research is the key.
I discussed scaling in another response. In terms of how ubiquitous MIGHT it be, I think it has the potential to be a major portion of mental health treatment. We have to follow the data though.
Imagine, two or three decades from now, that all your hopes about psychadelic-assisted therapy materialise — it works at scale, and it becomes about as neglected and unhelpfully politicised as hip surgery and antibiotics.
What do you picture? How did these remarkable early studies scale to a system which fully lives up to their promise and reaches milions of people? And just how ubiquitous (in your more imaginative moments) do you see these treatments becoming?
Scaling psychedelic therapy is an enormous challenge—it’s so different from either the current models of pharmaceutical therapy—a pill a day forever—or talking psychotherapy—a weekly session more or less forever or until the insurance runs out—that it will take some genuine innovation to fit this square beg into these round holes. Yes, psychedelic therapy takes intensive preparation and integrations but only over a short period and with a small number of sessions. It actually cures many problems, so shouldn’t need to be repeated constantly . But when people say it’s potentially revolutionary, they’re thinking of these existing models. It needs to be said, however, that these existing models don’t work very well for many, if not most, patients. If psychedelic therapy is proven to be superior, corporations and national health agencies (and potentially some public benefit corps like MAPS’) will figure out the necessary new models. The success of the research is the key.
I discussed scaling in another response. In terms of how ubiquitous MIGHT it be, I think it has the potential to be a major portion of mental health treatment. We have to follow the data though.