Episode 013: MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD
I am honored to introduce Shake it Off listeners to Dr. Raymond Turpin because this discussion builds awareness about a groundbreaking treatment (MDMA-Assisted Therapy) for treatment-resistant Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a condition that traditionally some people live with for a lifetime and are not able to successfully treat.
Ray is the Clinical and Executive Director of Pearl Psychedelic Institute in Waynesville, North Carolina. He is a clinical psychologist and psychedelic therapist. The Pearl Psychedelic Institute is currently the only clinic providing MDMA-Assisted Therapy in the Southeast (USA). In this episode, Ray covers the latest research on the effectiveness of psychedelic therapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, depression, and other mental health conditions.
Kendra and I talked with Ray about how he started working in psychedelic therapy, how MDMA impacts the brain when it is used to treat PTSD, and what the protocol and experience are like if you were to access MDMA-Assisted therapy for PTSD.
You won’t want to miss out on this episode, Ray has decades of experience in trauma therapy and gives us a unique insider’s perspective on what is known about the effectiveness of this type of therapy. He also covers the incredible services they provide at Pearl Psychedlic Institute.
You can find all the podcast episodes at https://www.drlaurenhodge.com/podcast/
We created this podcast to give you the tools, strategies, and stories to handle the unexpected BS that life throws your way. We plant ourselves firmly at the gates of truth-telling and discuss optimizing and prioritizing your physical and mental health.
If you like what you hear, please leave a 5-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcast and tell us what part you liked most.
*This is not medical advice. Please get in touch with your doctor or healthcare practitioner before making any changes to your healthcare plan.*
Listen to the Episode
Listen to the Podcast on Spotify >>
Read The Transcript
Kendra Till
Welcome to shake it off a podcast that gives you the tools, strategies and stories to optimize and prioritize your physical and mental health. Welcome back to shake it off podcast today Lauren and I speak with Dr. Raymond Turpin, who is the clinical and executive director of pearl psychedelic Institute in Waynesville, North Carolina. Bremen is a clinical psychologist and psychedelic therapist, pro psychedelic Institute is one of the 10 clinics in the US that are approved to offer MDMA therapy for treatment-resistant PTSD through the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies expanded access program. The Institute is a nonprofit that aims to provide psychedelic assisted therapy to mainstream practice through research, treatment and training, while reducing the barriers to patient access.
Lauren Hodge
We are really excited to have you Raymond on the podcast because the institute is currently one of the only providers of MDMA therapy in the southeast of the US, and we are both really fascinated with the research that’s coming out that shows the effectiveness of psychedelics on treatment resistant PTSD, depression and other mental health conditions. So thank you so much for joining us. Take us through how you started to work with MDMA therapy and your story and experience with it.
Dr. Raymond Turpin
My story was psychedelic started in the mid 80s, I was a sophomore at the University of Georgia, and I was an advertising major actually, and I’d kind of been convinced that what I needed to do was to try to use my creativity and make as much money as possible. That’s kind of what I thought I wanted to do. I had an initial experience after reading some Timothy Leary much to my parents consternation, I had my first psilocybin experience in October of ‘84, and basically what it did was, it was quite profound, and it more or less projected me into a future where I saw myself probably about my age now, at the top of my game in the advertising world, and felt this just profound kind of existential emptiness is the only thing I can explain, and there was almost a voice in my head going, what are you doing, you’re going to try to convince people to buy all this stuff, is that really what you want to do with your life. So that kind of woke me up, and I realized that this knowledge wasn’t in the mushrooms I’d taken, that this actually allowed me to access a part of myself that had either been socialized out.
So I became intensely interested in what happened to me and started to go to the UGA library back in the day when you actually had to go pull volumes off the shelf, and was just astounded at how much research had been already done, particularly with LSD, in the United States and Canada, and in England, in the 50s and 60s, and it was just also surprised at how all of this research, which even though there were lots of criticisms about it, it did end up producing some pretty amazing results. And very encouraging results, let’s just say certainly results that encourage further research. Then the idea that the government stepped in and just squashed all this research. And basically, it was forgotten. For a hobby, I would ask people that went to med school or grad school, “Hey, did you guys ever recover psychedelics in your training?” they’re like, “it got mentioned, but we never really talked about it.” So I started just researching all of the old research, I would go pull these journal articles off the shelves and make copies of them and keep them in a little file., and I was just collecting all this. So I made the decision back then around ’84/’85, that I wanted to switch my major to clinical psychology, and that I really wanted to spend my life trying to understand these compounds and how they could be used, not only for healing mental health issues but also for growth and personal development, because there was quite a bit of that going on in the 60s as well. So that’s kind of what got me going on it and then I just quietly told myself, I’m gonna try to get a good clinical psychology education, get licensed, and in the meantime, continue to do this research and to continue to educate myself about these things in the hopes that one day, I would potentially be able to legally use these compounds to help treat mental illness, which is hopefully we’re on the verge of maybe being legally able to do that now.
Lauren Hodge
Wow.
Kendra Till
And could you explain why MDMA therapy is important and also perhaps what mental health conditions MDMA effectively treats when used along with therapy?
Dr. Raymond Turpin
I’ve been a psychologist for a long time, been in mental health for a long time since the late 80s. About 15 years ago, it just struck me that almost everything I’d ever treated, the etiology of it goes back to some sort of poorly integrated traumatic experience, whether it was PTSD or depression or an anxiety disorder or in kids oppositional defiance, usually traced it back to some type of poorly integrated traumatic experience. So, I began to realize that if we’re going to really get anywhere with treating mental illness, that we’re going to lead to learn how to effectively treat trauma. And so that’s kind of where my focus began, was treating trauma and working on particularly complex trauma. I’ve worked with kids and teenagers and families for many years, and really just saw how intergenerational trauma just gets passed down and just affects generation after generation, and then fuels all these very different mental health and functional issues. So I figured we needed something that was going to effectively treat trauma number one, and there was actually MDMA which is a very old compound that was first discovered in 1914 when it was first synthesized by Merck Pharmaceuticals.
Then it kind of disappeared, the army played around with it a little bit, and in ‘53 when they were trying to do some looking into see if it could be used. They did some animal tests that were unremarkable, and so they moved on. So it was essentially a forgotten compound until 1976, when chemist Sasha Shogun resynthesized it in his lab, tested it on himself, and realized once he got the psychoactive effects that this could really be a nice tool for mental health. Brockman, one of his old friends who was a therapist on the verge of retirement, Leozef, and gave him MDMA, he realized, this could be great for therapy, and went out and spent the rest of his career training therapists how to use psychedelics safely, and also treating patients and all kinds of modalities: groups, individuals, couples. So for a window there between about 1977 and 1985, MDMA was legal, it wasn’t regulated, and so therapists were using it in their practice, but by the time the DEA stepped in and made it a schedule one, there were around 4000 therapists using it in their private practices and doctors using it as adjunct to their mental health practices. So we had a pretty sizable amount of knowledge about how this compound could be used. And it showed up even back then, that it was going to be an extraordinarily potentially effective treatment for trauma and PTSD. But they also saw that it can have incredible uses for any types of intergenerational problems like couples therapy, marriage counseling, things like that. They also were able to successfully treat some depression cases and anxiety, so it looked like it had lots of utility potentially. But definitely it looked like getting is going to be a potentially very effective substance to help people with their traumatic experiences and working through that.
The reason I think that MDMA therapy is so important is because that we have this body of knowledge from the late 70s, and early 80s, and then ever since the formal research got started again, with Charles Grob and his phase one FDA research with MDMA, it started to move into treating PTSD and they wanted to treat treatment-resistant PTSD, they wanted to have some of the toughest cases that was not responding to conventional treatments. So the phase two and phase three research, which phase three is just now concluding, which is the final phase of research before MDMA can be put before the FDA for potential approval. All of these treatments had been really targeting some of the most refractory difficult to treat PTSD cases that were out there. The results from phase two and three, which is where they were treating this PTSD what they showed was, when it’s used in the context of a specialized therapy protocol. It’s not just given the drug, but if you use it carefully in the context of a protocol, then what they found was that people that went through this protocol, in which they received three MDMA treatments roughly, what they found was after they were done with treatment, about 68% of these PTSD folks no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis, and about 88% of the participants felt like they had had at least some significant symptom remission, whereas some of those folks even said, “gosh, if I could get one more session, or one or two more sessions, it might do it” but because of the strict structure of the clinical research, they weren’t allowed to get any more. So it seems to be that we’ve got to find something that treats trauma, and I’m talking about intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, sexual and physical abuse for kids. We’re talking veterans come back traumatized with PTSD, and then their families have to cope and deal with it. So if we could find something to interrupt this transmission of trauma, then I think we could potentially be on the verge of a huge leap in psychiatry and psychology treatment for this. So that’s why I think it could possibly provide a key for helping us get in there and interrupt this transgenerational generational transmission of mental illness.
Lauren Hodge
Certainly. So you mentioned that like three sessions are required, is that three sessions with the MDMA? And are there more sessions required around that for the full therapeutic kind of package?
Dr. Raymond Turpin
Yes, generally we have 12 non-drug talk sessions that are about 90 minutes long. Generally, when the patient gets started in the protocol, they have basically three prep sessions that are about 90 minutes, where we just meet and get to know the patient. It’s about building rapport, building trust, getting familiar with the patient’s trauma history, and also familiarizing them with the effects of MDMA, what it’s going to probably feel like, how do you work with it when the MDMA brings up a difficult traumatic memory, how do you use your breath, how do you stay with and work with the memory, so there’s a lot of prep that goes into it. Then they have their first dosing session, which is generally six to eight hours long, there’s two therapists in there. We have two teams, a male and a female in each team, and we’re in there with the patient for six to eight hours for their dosing session. And then they have three more sessions of 90-minute non-drug, and these are called integration sessions, and this is where we’re trying to make sense of what came up in the MDMA session, and how did they take what they learned in that session, and maybe bring it into their everyday life and prepare for session two dosing session. So it’s three prep sessions, a dosing session, three integration preps, dosing session two, three more non-drug 90-minute integration prep sessions, and then you have your final third dosing session.
Then at the end, we have three more 90-minute integration sessions before the protocols end. So it’s really 12 sessions of 90-minute non-drug therapy, and then in the middle of that about a month apart are these six to eight hour MDMA assisted therapy sessions.
Lauren Hodge
So there’s a significant amount of work that goes into the process for both the person and the therapist. I was kind of thinking about this, noticing that you do work in integration, and there isn’t a lot of awareness and attention given to the need for the entire kind of therapy package, including the preparation and integration. I think a lot of people expect that you just take the medicine, you trip and you’re done. Like the trips, the only part when really, it’s a small part of the entire process, or the experience for long-term change. I wonder, for example, I think about how, during the psychedelic experience and for a period of time afterwards, you are in this incredibly expanded state, and if that is followed, oftentimes by it’s a contracted state, or maybe the environment isn’t supportive, or maybe your peers or your spouse, or your job is resistant to the change that you feel like you need to make, or the information that comes to you during that session.
Maybe even you’re experiencing extreme financial stress, but whatever it is, the environment isn’t set up to support that expanded state and for you to act on that expanded state, then you can see your potential and your future possibilities while in that expanded state, but you can’t actually make the changes or act on those changes that you need to make if the environment isn’t supportive. So if you don’t have all of this information that you’re providing around the importance of the process. So I just wonder how do you set up a client to have the most potential for change and to foster long-term results from the experience?
Dr. Raymond Turpin
It’s the integration piece, if just taking psychedelics made you wiser, kinder, more expanded, then our society would be a whole lot better off right now. So what we find is that just like you said, I look at psychedelics a lot of times, they’re like a disrupter. They go in and they break up patterns, they allow you to step outside of your normal way of seeing things. And like you said, you see possibilities, you’re able to see options, you’re able to see things with fresh eyes sometimes and in different ways. So what we’ve learned is that it is so important to spend the time following these experiences because these types of experiences are not very well accepted in our culture.
We don’t have any social blueprints out there for people that if you go out and have a powerful psychedelic experience, we already have things in our system in our society that are set up to help you integrate and make sense of it, those don’t really exist very much. We’re moving in that direction, but you’ve got to be able to take what you experienced, what you saw, what you felt, what you learned, things that you might have glimpsed, possibilities, and potentialities. Then the real work is after the session where you figure out how are you going to make sense of these things, and then how are you going to bring them into your everyday life in a way where they’re relevant and that they are supportive and encouraging of the changes that you want to make. And to me, that’s the real work. One of the issues I have with ketamine clinics popping up all over the place is that you have some that do a really good job that recognizes what’s going on and that you have an opportunity to make some real changes, and they put the time in for the prep.
There’s someone in there supporting the patient during the ketamine and then you have the integration work afterward. But there’s a lot of them that are just you just come in, you get hooked up to the ketamine and then you’re kicked out the door after a while and there’s no follow-up, there’s no support during the session. These are the ones that I feel like they’re just relying on the ketamine to do the work, and the first thing I tell the patient that’s coming in that’s interested in doing our ketamine-assisted therapy program is don’t expect the ketamine to do the work for you. You’ve got to work with the ketamine between sessions if you’re going to make this work. So the integration is I think the thing that we probably learned all through the 60s where we had a lot of people experimenting, they weren’t very well prepared, they weren’t using it in situations that were very conducive to the psychedelic experience, and then like I said, because there was no social or societal or cultural blueprint for how to make sense of these experiences, people were just often left to their own devices to try to figure out what was that? Was it just some weird thing where I left a lot of music sounded good, or were there things that I learned that I need to carry forth into my life. And so I think that’s probably the biggest difference between psychedelic-assisted therapy and research these days than what was going on in the 50s and 60s is that we have recognized that if we don’t take that time to really work with the integration process, and to help these people bring these insights into their everyday life, then we’re not maximizing the potential of these medicines.
Lauren Hodge
Yeah, certainly 100%. I’m just curious about a couple of things there that I’m thinking about, how long does that MDMA trip experience last for a client? Thinking back to what the model looks like and what it feels like for a client whenever they’re going through that. I don’t know if you can talk us through what that would look like, especially for someone when they’re trying to identify whether this is working or those types of things.
Dr. Raymond Turpin
Well, for expanded access, and the protocol that was used for the phase two and the phase three MDMA-assisted therapy protocols, what happened was after all the preparation work, basically, the patient would come in usually in the morning, and they would be given their initial dose of MDMA, which typically was somewhere between 80 and 120 milligrams. Then what happened was about an hour and a half after that first ingestion, maybe two hours later, then they’re offered a booster dose, which is typically half of what the initial dose was. So let’s say someone got 100 milligrams at 10 o’clock in the morning, then around 1130 to 12, they’re gonna get a 50-milligram boost, they’re asked if they want it, they have the right to refuse it, but most people take the booster dose. The idea is not that this booster dose is going to make the person higher, but what happens is that when MDMA is fully active in the brain, several things are happening, which I can go into later if you guys are interested, but for the sake of brevity for this answer. What happens was MDMA tends to put the brain and the patient in what is considered to be an optimal window of tolerance, meaning that as their trauma material is coming up, certain things are happening in the brain to where they’re able to sit with those memories, and they’re able to do the processing that they need to do.
One of the problems conventional PTSD treatment has is that when people start to encounter their PTSD or their trauma memories, very oftentimes they go into fight or flight or freeze mode, and they can’t engage with the therapy and sometimes they flee therapy and they never go back. But MDMA does some things in the brain that allows the person to be able to tolerate these memories and there are other things going on that really are encouraging the processing of this material like it should have been at the time of the trauma if you weren’t in survival mode. So what happens is by taking that booster dose, it keeps that top of that optimal window of tolerance open longer, so that the person can stay in this optimal therapeutic space and do the most possible work. So I would say probably when you take that first dose of MDMA, most people are going to feel the effects within about 20 to 60 minutes, and then the booster dose will, like I said, leave that window open longer. And I would say, typically, people feel those effects for anywhere from five to eight hours, six to eight hours is what we expect to use when we have a patient in there for one of their dosing sessions. After six to eight hours, I would say most of the real processing is over at that point, people are tired, and people are ready to just kind of get some rest and take a break. So it’s still a long day for the therapist, you can’t sit there and check your emails or on your phones or any of that you got to be fully present, providing the safety in this container, and to be really ready to provide support should it be necessary if the patient’s having a hard time or asking for support.
Lauren Hodge
That is incredible. I actually have PTSD, I was diagnosed with PTSD when I was 19, and I experienced those symptoms all the way up until I was in my early 30s. I actually first tried ketamine therapy at a clinic, and they didn’t, as you mentioned, have the appropriate integration therapy, they didn’t have any, there was no integration. It was also about where I was at in life, at that time, I was actually living in Australia, but I went to a clinic here in the US, and I needed to get back to Australia for work, and I wasn’t able to do the follow-up and all of that. So therefore, the effects lasted for about three weeks, and then things went back to how they were before with my PTSD symptoms and being triggered and sleepless and all of that.
And then I had psilocybin, I went to the synthesis Institute in the Netherlands, and I took a sabbatical and moved to Berlin, so I did a weekend retreat, but they did all the preparation online beforehand, and the integration afterward, and that was the first time that I really experienced those healing effects. Now, I didn’t go through the process of processing it with somebody, there was no talk therapy involved in that, it was a group setting. But the symptoms that I was experiencing, and the ruminating thoughts, and all of that completely dissipated. So I can definitely relate to what you’re saying around like how that works in a way. But it sounds like MDMA might work a bit differently than psilocybin. I actually have no idea. Does it impact the default network like psilocybin, or what happens there?
Dr. Raymond Turpin
No, it’s different. And one of the things about psychedelic-assisted therapy, which is such a paradigm-changing idea is that psychedelic-assisted therapy practitioners believe that we all carry the wisdom that we need to heal ourselves, there’s this thing we call the inner healing intelligence, but when you think about things like homeostasis, the idea that the body is wired to kind of have this optimal temperature, heart rate, respiratory respiration rate, the idea that the brain would be wired for psychological balance, to me isn’t all that much of a stretch.
And if we could just get our egos and get ourselves out of the way the brain knows how to balance ourselves and rebalance. I think that’s what it’s trying to do at night when we’re dreaming, for example. So when we’re doing psychedelic-assisted therapy, there’s very often not that much of a need for a therapist to be an active guide, and to be in there manipulating the session, you just basically stand back and you provide the support, the containment, the sense of safety, and you let the person work with the compound internally and let them do their own healing and the healing can look a million different ways. So that’s one of the big differences between psychedelic-assisted therapy and some of the old medicines that we’ve used in psychiatry.
Lauren Hodge
Thanks for clarifying that because I didn’t actually know whether or not MDMA therapy included talk therapy or not, but my experience has been with the other types of psychedelic therapy that there wasn’t. So, that’s good to know.
Dr. Raymond Turpin
I would say with MDMA, there seems to be a little more talking than you see with psilocybin like with psilocybin so these people just really kind of go in for hours and very little interaction. MDMA, you’ll see people will sit up and take off their headphones and eye shades and they’ll want to start talking about what just happened and what they just experienced. So that’s also part of the healing process, putting words to your experience. So there is a good bit of interaction between therapists and patients, usually during MDMA-assisted therapy, but it’s not directed by the therapist, we’re just there. But oftentimes, people want to get up and talk about their experience, and so that’s one of the things we do is we’re there to listen and talk about their experiences. But when you’re treating trauma with psilocybin, psilocybin is what they call one of the classic psychedelics like LSD, mescaline, DMT, and they all work very similarly in the brain. And one of those mechanisms that makes it so effective for things like depression, PTSD, basically, most of the things that they treat, is they do take that default mode network, and it basically shuts down, which allows all these other areas of the brain that don’t normally communicate, to come online and that’s why you see things in novel ways.
That’s why you see, do you have different ideas and see things with fresh eyes, it’s like your brains coming online, and this default mode network, that was the seed of so much rumination and depression, and that all just kind of goes away for a while and allows you to see things as they are a little bit differently than you’ve been accustomed to. MDMA is different, basically what happens is with PTSD, when your five senses are absorbing information, and you’re not stressed, and you’re not being threatened in any way. Basically, the information processing system is where it comes into the thalamus, which is this egg-shaped structure in the middle of the brain. It’s like the cook in the kitchen organizing information, it checks to see if there’s any danger in the environment, that’s the amygdala, the smoke alarms that fire when there’s danger that starts the fight or flight or freeze reaction. And then basically, if there’s no danger, the information goes up to this part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, where it checks to see where we have encountered something like this before it checks your past experiences, language is assigned to it. But the memory is organized as to what is happening to you, and where have we experienced something like this before, and then it goes back down to the thalamus and the hippocampus, and then eventually, it gets stored up in a long term, like a long term memory. But with PTSD and trauma, what happens is this information is coming from the five senses to the thalamus, but then there’s some threat in the environment that it’s picking up, probably maybe life-threatening. And so what happens is once that threat is picked up, the amygdala fire, and then the brain switches into a very primitive mode of processing because you’re going into survival mode, you’re in fight or flight. And so what happens is that the whole prefrontal cortex part of the brain just goes offline. And so there’s no language getting assigned to your experience, there is no context, there are no reference points for what is happening to you.
So all this experience, this traumatic experience that’s happening to you gets basically jammed into the wrong area of the brain and a very fractured, highly emotionally charged bits of information. And because it’s improperly stored, this is what causes a lot of the problems with PTSD, the intrusive memories and nightmares, the flashbacks. It’s basically all this fragmented, highly charged information that is improperly stored in the brain, and that’s what makes PTSD so difficult to treat. I had a Vietnam vet at one of our movie nights a while back, he had PTSD for over 40 years, and he was still suffering. He said for the first 20 years, he was just so angry, and for the last 20 years, he’s just really sad. So what MDMA does, which is why in my book, I think psilocybin is a very effective treatment for many things. I think MDMA is so well true to treat suited to treat PTSD because what happens is, as the MDMA becomes active in the brain, what happens is that amygdala, the fight or flight structures, they go down 95%, they get shut down, so that fight or flight or freeze reaction is almost turned off.
The other thing that happens is it hyper-activates the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain where you need to do that higher-order thinking that processing where language is assigned. And so what happens is in MDMA therapy, when the MDMA becomes active in the brain when the amygdala goes down, and the fight or flight is shut off, it allows trauma memories to rise up and to come into consciousness because typically, we’re always fighting to keep those out of consciousness. So when the amygdala goes down, the trauma memories can come back up, and people can live them and go back through them without the fight or flight or the freeze kicking in. The other thing that happens is that these memories are allowed to go up to the prefrontal cortex where they’re sorted in a given context and language and a narrative is established about what happened to the person.
It’s exactly what should have happened at the time of the trauma if they weren’t so freaked out about dying or getting hurt. And so what it does as it goes on, it finally processes these memories like they should have been processed and then they end up going up and eventually being stored up in the frontal lobes like a normal memory. It doesn’t create any amnesia, you don’t forget, it’s still a terrible thing that happened to you. But because this information has now been put together in a cohesive narrative, and stored in the part of the brain where it always should have been, it’s no longer interrupted. It’s no longer intruding on consciousness, it doesn’t have the power to disrupt people’s lives as it once did. So that’s why MDMA is so well suited for treating PTSD.
Lauren Hodge
Interesting. Are people eligible for this expanded access program? Do you have to meet certain eligibility criteria?
Dr. Raymond Turpin
Yes, I’m not allowed to discuss them in detail, but there are a large number of exclusion and inclusion criteria that the FDA and maps had to agree upon in order for the FDA to approve expanded access. They’re pretty extensive, and to be honest, we have been recruiting for our first MDMA patient, we’ve been recruiting to recruit since about March, and we’re just now I think about to get our first guy because we’ve had so many screen fails for various reasons, some of them because of the criteria, others have been for other reasons. But basically, in order to qualify, you need to have what’s considered treatment-resistant PTSD. I will say the definition of treatment-resistant is pretty lax, basically, you just need to demonstrate that you’ve had some attempts at either therapy and or medications.
There are medical issues that we need to get screened out for. One of the things we do know is that with MDMA it does increase blood pressure, and it does increase heart rate. So if people have cardiovascular issues, strokes, and things like that, they’ll get screened failed. Then they also because, we’re trying to find that pool of treatment-resistant PTSD folks, we also are trying to screen out folks that have bipolar, anybody that has any kind of psychotic disorder screened out. So there are actually a lot of criteria in order for somebody to make it all the way through the screening process. But right now, I would say if anybody out there has PTSD that they’ve been trying to get help for, and it hasn’t been effective, I would encourage him to at least possibly holler at us and give us their information so that we can have them in our database. And we can at least maybe hook them up when the time’s right, because hopefully there’s going to be clinics all over maybe in a few years, and then we’d like to be able to help these people find treatment.
Lauren Hodge
Great. Where did they find you?
Dr. Raymond Turpin
Yeah, if you go to our website, it’s pearlpsychedelicinstitute.org, And if you go to our website, there’s the page for how to get considered for the study for the program.
Kendra Till
Now I’m curious Raymond, so what’s next for the institute then? In terms of where you’re at with the research, etc, where are you guys at? What do you see for the future?
Dr. Raymond Turpin
Well, right now, we are focused on getting the MDMA-assisted therapy going, we have an exciting project going with Duke University, they have a center for Psychedelic Studies that they opened up. And so MAPS has approved where they’re going to come in and work with us, and they’re going to take a look and work it with our MDMA patients. And what they want to do is they want to take EEG readings of our patients’ brains before treatment, and then in the middle of treatment, maybe after one or two MDMA sessions, and then they want to do another EEG reading at the end of treatment. So this is going to be fascinating, because by looking at the EEG before treatment, there may be the possibility of delineating what subtypes of PTSD people are coming with. And then we can also take a look at it in the middle, in between treatments, and then at the end so that they can see, what happens when people get their PTSD is essentially well treated. What changes in the brain? What kind of things do we see differently in the EEGS? And are there particular types of PTSD that don’t respond to MDMA? And which kind can possibly do?
There’s a dissociative subtype of PTSD, which is historically very, very difficult to treat, because when people start to get up close to that traumatic material, they dissociate, they go away, and it’s not something they choose to do. It’s an automatic primitive defense system that they’ve used for years. And it makes it very difficult to treat these people with conventional methods. And so there was some question about whether these folks would respond as well as non-dissociative PTSD folks to MDMA. And there was a study that was published out of phase three, it was published in May of 2021, I believe, and they looked at, I think, 90 patients, and around 30% of those patients that had a positive response to the MDMA-assisted therapy had the dissociative subtype. So it does seem to work with the dissociative subtype as well. So we’ve got this exciting project going with Duke that we’re looking forward to partnering with. And we really want to kind of partner with them and help them, they really want to do a lot of research, and they really want to find some community places out there around North Carolina that could actually help them conduct the research. So we’re hoping to have a nice fruitful relationship with the folks at Duke. So we’re going to focus on the expanded access. We are ramping up our ketamine-assisted psychotherapy program here in Waynesville, we’ve been doing it for a few years, so we feel like we kind of know what we’re doing.
So now we want to bring it to parole because one of the drawbacks of ketamine-assisted therapy is it’s quite expensive usually. So we’re looking at some group models and with our nonprofit, we’re going to look at some funding models and ways to really try to open up access for people so that they can come to get this treatment if they want to try it. So we’re going to focus on the ketamine-assisted therapy program, and we also are rolling out in January, our psychedelic integration services, and these can be online. People can come to Waynesville and see me or we can meet online. But these are for people that have had psychedelic experiences, also other deep experiences, maybe of the unconscious that they don’t understand. But the idea is if you’ve had a psychedelic experience, and you got in contact with some information, or you’re having trouble understanding what it meant, psychedelic integration is about helping folks make sense of those experiences. And what do those images mean? How do you bring them into your life? How do you incorporate them so that they’re relevant? And how do you maybe use them for growth? So that’s something we want to do, and probably preparation. We don’t want to look like we’re encouraging people, but we know people are out there. As this is starting to grow, people are wanting to experiment, and so we do want to also make it so that if there is somebody out there thinking about experimenting, we would love to be able to at least show them how to use it safely and responsibly so that they can hopefully have a good experience, and just more than anything, do it in a safe way.
Lauren Hodge
All right, certainly. Well, I think in North Carolina, and in the southeast, we’re really lucky that your institute is there. And for anybody that is curious, if you meet the inclusion criteria, please go on to the Pearl Institute Psychedelic Institute website, we’re going to put those links in our show notes so that you can find the information that you need in order to attempt to apply for that.
