How are we treating these conditions currently?

Carina: Depending on the indication, our market offers several prescribed therapies for major depressive disorders with antidepressants like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) or tricyclic antidepressants,mdma therapy antipsychotics for bipolar disorders or substance abuse disorders that usually coincide with bipolar.

Psychotherapy is always encouraged to complement any prescribed drug. However, this is not always the case. Many people self-manage their symptoms with strategies that only exacerbate their condition, such as addictions to alcohol or other drugs of abuse.

Are conventional treatments effective?

Carina: Unfortunately, the conventional therapies I mentioned above only relieve a subset of the population. There is a new term called: “treatment-resistant depression,” to describe patients that do not benefit from the available therapies on the market.

There are also deleterious short-term and long-term side effects of these drugs that potentially outweigh the benefits of taking them.

For example, it takes 6-8 weeks for the patient to “feel,” the beneficial effect and with that comes weight gain, low sex drive, tiredness, trouble sleeping, dry mouth, and a whole slurry of other undesirable side effects.





There is also this feeling of being “numb,” to the world so that normal lived experiences may become less upsetting yet also less exciting.

Patients may have to start taking additional drugs to caveat the side effects of the antidepressants or antipsychotics and this becomes less desirable to them because each new drug hosts another set of side effects that impinge on daily life.

Carina: Psychedelic medicine development efforts began to accelerate in the mid-1990’s when new generations of behavioral health researchers began an in-depth re-examination and rediscovery of potential uses these substances have by utilizing contemporary methods and procedures.

With the advent of Spravato, a psychedelic treatment for depression, researchers who were already dabbling in the space felt more comfortable getting their work out into the public. Ketamine, which used to be considered a “taboo,” drug and only used as an anesthetic has shown great promise in treating depression in a therapeutic setting.

But researchers have also been exploring mdma therapy the use of psychedelic treatments like LSD or MDMA for many years. It isn’t new this concept that they have therapeutic potential. We are just slow to getting the evidence out there.