[soft bright music]
- [Narrator] Here at Self we're all paying attention
to the buzz around psychedelics,
which are being celebrated as a promising treatment
for several mental health conditions
like depression, PTSD, anxiety
and even addiction.
We wanted to know how do psychedelics actually work
and what does the future look like
when it comes to making these medicines
accessible to all?
[upbeat music]
- Psychedelics have a lot of promise,
and a lot of potential.
A psychedelic experience can really help support someone
in really engaging the core challenge
or the core issue, especially those
with mental health challenges.
Going to the root of the problem is often the most efficient
and effective way to heal.
I'm Joseph McCowan, a licensed clinical psychologist
and psychedelic therapist.
[soft music]
I find the term hallucinogenic to be challenging
because the state that I have
of myself as a queer brown man
in America and being fully accepting of myself,
that is not a hallucination.
The collective bad trip
that we are all on is homophobia,
is racism, is misogyny,
is the systems and the places
that we live in that reinforce those.
I'm Dr. Jeeshan Chowdhury,
and I am the CEO and Founder of Journey Colab.
I never thought I'd be running a psychological drug company
for two main reasons.
One I'm a product of the eighties.
And even in Canada, where I grew up,
the DARE program and the propaganda was strong.
And so I grew up seeing the egg being fried on a frying pan
and thinking that these substances would fry my brain.
[dramatic music]
- [Announcer] This is drugs.
[egg sizzling]
This is your brain on drugs.
Any questions?
- I'm also from a traditional Muslim family
where even today we don't have alcohol in our home.
And so I didn't grow up with any relationship
to these substances or what I call now medicines.
So I was one of these really nerdy kids growing up.
I wrote my first peer-reviewed paper at the age of 16,
got into a med school early at the age of 19.
And so my job as a first year medical student was
to pull the chart off the wall,
go into the room, take what we call a history
of a patient, which is, you know,
basically, just an interview and rinse and repeat.
This one day I pulled the chart off the wall
and I just stopped.
And back in those days
the mental health questionnaire where these pink pages
at the back of the chart.
I flipped to the back and I for the first time,
answered those questions honestly, to myself.
And by the time I got to the end of the forms
that was the first time I realized
that I was living these two very parallel lives
where on the outside life looked great,
but on the inside,
it always just felt like it's hard
to describe depression and anxiety,
but it always just felt like I was drowning
in my mental health.
I tried the best things we had available.
I cycled through different antidepressants.
I tried all sorts of therapists, coaches, workshops
and it was never like these things didn't work.
It always just felt like someone threw me a life preserver
and I could keep my head above water.
It got to a place in my life where I'd be walking
around the streets of San Francisco.
And I would think to myself, hey,
maybe it would be better
if one of these Uber drivers just hit me.
I wish I could tell you that I came
to psychedelics because I was enlightened or
because I was ahead of the curve, but I was quite frankly
just desperate for something that would work.
[dramatic music]
Fortunately, because I live in San Francisco
I was able to meet a real therapist,
so an LMFT, someone who had done additional training
in psychedelic medicine.
And back then I didn't know
that this was gonna be that important
but they had spent time with indigenous communities
about how they've used these medicines
for thousands of years.
Because even though they may seem new to us
they are in absolutely no way new to humanity.
And we have had a long relationship with them.
- They've been used by native
and indigenous cultures across the globe for a millennia.
We do know that there was a lot of tradition and ceremony
and structure and ways in which folks used these medicines
in community for a healing connection, you know,
rights of passage, togetherness.
In essence, this is just
like a rediscovery of what many indigenous communities
and cultures already knew.
- My name is Rachel Yehuda, and I'm the Director
for the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy
and Trauma Research,
at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
One of the most common reasons that people seek therapy is
for the feeling that they're part
of a cultural history that they haven't fully
been able to process.
So one of our thoughts has been to see
whether psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
can help people process some of their early memories
of when they began to understand who they were
in the world in relation to their unique history.
'Cause a lot of people do walk around holding a lot
of feelings that are not just based
on their own experiences,
but are based on experiences of a larger family
and a larger culture and a larger community.
- The way I like to describe my first experience
with psychedelic therapy was like these muddy waters
that I'd been drowning in my whole life.
They cleared up for a moment
and I could see the weights that were holding me down.
And this is what it actually felt like,
in that visionary psychedelic state
of consciousness I could, for the first time
see how my parents going
through a civil war in Bangladesh and then coming
to a new country, just how that whole arc of
intergenerational trauma affected our entire family.
Before, it was just like this concept that I had heard
about in medical school or read about in journals
but I actually saw it and felt it for the first time
and what I'm so grateful for psychedelic medicines
and therapies is that it lets us get
beyond that surface level into what really lies underneath,
and what's really driving our mental health.
You know, often many refer
to it as peeling back the layers
or a deconditioning process toward getting
to that core.
And once there that's really
where powerful work can be done.
And so that started for me a two-year journey talking
to almost 300 people in the psychedelic space
from therapists to medicine elders,
to scientists and researchers.
I just kept coming back
to that more people need to be able to have access
to this and they need to have access to it a safe way.
And so decided to found Journey.
And what we do is important
in terms of translating the known potential of psychedelics,
both from Western science, as well
as traditional knowledge to the treatment of addiction.
[upbeat jazzy music]
- Interestingly, psychedelics were looked
at back in the 1950s and sixties, you know,
LSD was looked at with regards to reducing alcoholism.
Psilocybin was looked at for smoking cessation,
but more recently there's been an emergence
of both of those being considered again.
And so with those two,
you really have folks who are embracing
and going back and doing reviews of the research
from decades ago.
With ibogaine you're seeing a lot
of promise with regards to opiate addiction,
and we know that's a huge problem right now.
- So at Journey, we are creating a synthetic version
of mescaline which is a natural occurring psychedelic found
in the peyote cactus found in the huachuma cactus.
We're creating a synthetic version of that.
Because we are in consultation
with indigenous communities who have told us
that one, these plants are endangered,
and two, that they want their rights to their sacraments
and to their religious freedom to be protected for that.
And taking mescaline through the FDA,
through clinical trials
in a combination of therapy
and community for the treatment of alcohol-use disorder.
Psychedelics are not a silver bullet.
They do not work alone, but they are a very powerful tool.
What psychedelics seem
to do is open up this window of change
in the human brain.
You can almost think about someone suffering
from mental health or from an addiction,
having a very rigid brain,
where patterns of behavior patterns
of thought are essentially have been locked in.
And this is very much the case in addiction.
- Some of the main ones being looked at
and studied right now are psilocybin, MDMA,
ketamine and there's some renewed interest in LSD,
although many of those studies have yet to begin.
They all work differently
and might activate like different areas
of the brain as well as work with different receptors.
But even outside of the chemical elements
there's often a process
in which one is connecting just more deeply
with themselves in the present moment.
It helps create shifts in ways of perceiving
and being in that moment, which then can unfold
into ways of relating with others, self, in the world.
- There's this almond size part
of the brain called the amygdala
that psychedelics, particularly like mescaline,
work on to reduce the fear response
so that these traumas that we have faced,
it's easier for us to then process
and release rather than being stuck in traumatic loops.
- [Joseph] MDMA shows a lot of promise
when we're looking at trauma
it's the furthest along in phase three, looking at PTSD
- MDMA promotes a feeling
of self-compassion and introspection.
And it also promotes a kind
of interpersonal trust with the therapist.
MDMA also reduces fear of traumatic memories.
So all of these things together put the patient
in an ideal state, I would say,
for processing their traumatic memory.
They don't necessarily feel they need
to retreat from the memory,
and they also don't have this whole chorus
of self-blame and shame and guilt that often comes
with talking about traumatic material.
It really provides an environment
for somebody to begin to process a traumatic memory.
- People have done psychedelics in different settings,
but psychedelic therapy
in a clinical setting is a very different experience.
It's less like going to the beach
and more like climbing a mountain
that you're not sure you're gonna be able to get up to.
You know, there will be some very steep climbs.
There might be some scary cliffs.
At some point you're gonna wanna turn back
and you won't be able to,
and there may be even a storm,
but once you get to the top,
the view is worth it
to be able to see yourself, your psyche,
how you fit into this world is absolutely life-changing.
The way we like to think
about psychedelics for mental health
is more like surgery for the mind,
where just like in surgery,
you have a highly trained operator or operating team.
It's in the equivalent of a set and setting,
that's highly regulated, like an operating room.
There is a risk.
You are putting yourself into a vulnerable situation
just like in surgery.
The patient or person will prepare with a therapist.
Then during the actual, what we call dosing session
or journey, they are in a safe place,
they're with that psychedelic operating teams.
And then afterwards, just like after you're done
from a surgery, there's post-acute care
to make sure you're safe to get home.
And then there's rehab afterwards
and just like the right surgery for the right patient,
we see incredible effects with psychedelic medicine
that people who have had debilitating disease can get a lot
of their functional life back
and their lives are changed
or different from what they were before.
- What all of the therapies have in common is, you know,
really careful preparation, support
during the experience as well
as integration following the experience and all
of that combines towards a very powerful healing process.
- These medicines work, as they always have,
with therapy, with community, with the supports around them.
And that's an exciting opportunity
for us to create what we call this healing economy
where it's not just about making or taking a pill.
It's about local centers with local operators
that look like the people that they're trying to serve
and that the value that's created is shared amongst them.
And I think that's a vibrant healing economy
of jobs you can't outsource
and jobs you can't automate,
where we're spending our time
and energy on healing each other,
but we're giving ourselves better tools
to be able to do that.
[soft music]
- Psychedelics have a long rich history,
and part of that history is the legacy
of harms and mass incarceration.
The war on drugs and colonization landed heavily,
if not, mostly on people of color.
So it makes sense
that there remains a disconnect and an avoidance.
There's still a lot
of resistance toward considering these medicines,
especially in the context
that they're being used right now.
Individuals from marginalized communities
experience higher rates of trauma and depression,
but are the least likely to engage with these treatments.
And the therapy spaces are often spaces where folks
of color haven't really been able to be vulnerable.
Entering a space, especially a psychedelic space,
in surrendering to an experience
it's a giant leap to take
for people who haven't been able
to let their guard down for centuries.
There's a lot of work to be done towards, you know,
helping support folks who aren't currently
accessing these treatments in accessing them.
These are often those who need healing the most.
- These medicines are our natural right,
are our human right,
and they have been taken away from us.
And it's only because of communities
of color and particularly indigenous communities
who held on and fought back to keep these,
that we are aware of this,
and all of the signs that comes from this modern science
around psychedelics comes from those communities.
So you cannot tell the story of psychedelics,
if you do not talk about the story of brown
and black people,
and if you don't talk about the story of women as well.
This was largely a tradition and technology kept
and stewarded by women.
And it's part of the society that we have
the patriarchy and the misogyny
that this was taken away from us.
We need to bring it back in a way
that is inclusive of these groups.
- We really have to make sure
that we're including a diverse representative group
of people, both as research participants
and as people that are doing the research
because otherwise this will not be a therapy
that will necessarily generalize to all
of the people that can benefit from it.
[soft bright music]
- When I was young, you know,
my dad who's from the south,
he would take us camping.
But you know,
we were often always the only black people camping.
And when I was like 10 or so, you know,
I asked my dad, I was like, why is that the case?
Like, why are we always the only black people camping here?
And he shared, you know, where my family's from
in the south black people don't go camping.
They just don't go to the woods.
You would end up harmed or, you know, harassed or lynched.
The tree represents something very dangerous.
For many people safety is in staying where you are.
My dad mentioned how difficult it was for him.
He engaged those spaces with a lot of fear,
but also recognized
that they were powerfully healing spaces as well.
And so sometimes what we perceive as harmful is often
what can be healing
and the same is true when it comes to psychedelics.
You know, there's freedom in that exploration.
- For some people
the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy closes the loop
on something, and then they're done.
And for other people,
it opens up a process and they're by no means done.
And so we're going to have
to be able to figure out as we go,
who's really done and who we wanna keep talking to.
And that's gonna be the challenge in the future,
when we integrate these psychedelic tools
into our clinical practices.
- The work that needs to be done,
it's the work of all of us
from any position that we hold.
The psychedelics are powerful medicines,
but we're also each other's medicine.
It's not about just embracing psychedelics
and their potential for healing,
but also embracing equity, our connectedness.
The healing of all of us
is really the only pathway towards healing.
- It is our right as human beings to have access
to these natural-occurring products
and these natural-occurring medicines.
And by bringing them back, particularly
in a way that is more inclusive and reciprocal,
we can all live in a much better world
than we live in now.
[soft upbeat music]