vol. 3 issue 22
Greetings,
Earlier this year, I recorded a provocative interview with Scott Aaronson, MD, clinical research director at Baltimore’s Sheppard Pratt Institute, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious psychiatric research facilities, and soon to be a site for psilocybin research thanks to a hefty investment by Compass Pathways, a UK-based mental health company, that is funding the construction of a Centre of Excellence at Sheppard Pratt’s Towson, Maryland campus.
Dr. Aaronson will leverage his institute’s resources to help its new corporate partner “model the ‘clinic of the future’, showcasing the best thinking in science, therapy, technology, and design,” according to a Compass statement.
Meanwhile, in London, research is already underway to assess the utility of Compass’s proprietary psychedelic therapy, COMP360, which combines psilocybin with psychological support from specially trained therapists. More on that in a moment.
This is just one of a few such investigations, including ones being conducted at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and at New York University’s Langone School of Medicine.
If Compass and other such biotech companies are seriously committed to evolving how mental health is delivered in this country – and globally, too – a serious reckoning must first occur. That is, we need to find ways to commit to evidence-based research without diminishing or worse – disregarding – the question of the human soul and spirit in our medicine first, and in our health policies second.
The administration of psychedelics to help people with depression might finally be the way we blow up the old, broken, hierarchical, “science is for rich people, the rest of you can just suffer”, approach not just to mental health care, but all care, as touched upon in this interview. The pandemic, with its questions of how to equitably distribute the vaccines has helped train our focus on this dilemma. The time could be now for psychedelics to help us deconstruct this punitive byproduct of materialistic hierarchy, and solve it once and for all.
The most obvious question surrounding this, then, is whether a therapeutic molecule found in nature should even be part of a proprietary scheme. I do not get into that here since plenty of others, including the stentorian podcaster and investor, Tim Ferris, have been advancing that question. Ferris and Compass investor Christian Angermayer had a high-profile tweet-off about this question earlier this year. The discussion spilled over onto LinkedIn, and also to VICE where reporter Shayla Love conducts an admirable investigation into, among many ways, how patent law could imperil access to these drugs.
