By Courtney Hutchison

On September 27-29, members of the SoundMind team joined MAPS and the Pittsburgh Psychedelic Society for the Sleeping Octopus Assembly on Psychedelics (SOAP), an annual conference exploring the role of psychedelics in science, medicine, policy, and culture.

The event, hosted at a historic mansion in Pittsburgh, PA, featured presentations, panels, and “tentacle” breakout sessions with experts and advocates working to advance psychedelic science, including SoundMind’s own Dr. Hannah McLane, and Dr. Michelle Joy! Below we share some of our favorite takeaways from the weekend. 

The event opened with an overview and update on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy (MDMA-PT) from Shannon Clare Carlin, Associate Director of Training and Supervision of MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. Shannon shared her extensive experience providing MDMA-PT to patients in MAPS clinical trials, and spoke to the deep impact of this treatment -- both on patients and on the therapists. 

She likened healing from trauma to the healing of a cut: “We can clean the wound, but your own body has to grow skin and restitch tissues -- in therapy we can give people the resources, time, and space they need to heal, but ultimately they are the ones doing the healing.” She noted that MDMA-PT manifests this processshows us this even more palpably, as MDMA serves as an “excavator”, bringing up things that need healing, while the treatment space and the therapists co-facilitation provides the safety and container for patients to process what comes up. 

“The realization that they are doing [the healing] is the heart of empowerment, and helps [patients] feel that they can sustain their recovery,” Shannon said. 

Next, Hannah and Michelle presented on ethical concerns in medicine, highlighting the often unexamined ethical dilemmas of providing healthcare and deciding how to allocate scarce healthcare resources. With the help of animated shorts featuring three bioethics thought experiments, created by Nate Totushek [can we link to them yet?], Hannah and Michelle had audience members grapple with how they would make the tough calls on who gets life-saving treatment when resources are limited. 

Given that resources are almost always limited, especially in settings that treat under-served and marginalized communities, these ethical considerations are central to how we think about equitable access to psychedelic-assisted therapies. As Michelle and Hannah pointed out in their presentation, the traditional biomedical model of approving new treatments has always been to make sure they work in a “general” population (which has usually been code for white, often male, patient populations), and figure out how treatment effect marginalized communities later. 

“We know historically that this never happens, so the question becomes: How do we build it in from the start -- that’s what SoundMind is trying to do,” Michelle said. 

Rick Doblin, Founder and Executive Director of the MAPS (and psychedelic science celebrity) presented later in the day, charting a course for MAPS’ plans to shepherd MDMA-PT through FDA approval, expand access beyond the United States, and continue its research into therapeutic applications of MDMA, psilocybin, and other psychedelics. He provided updates on expanded access protocol, which is expected to be approved in the next several weeks -- a move that gets SoundMind another step closer to being able to provide MDMA-PT (for more info on expanded access, see our blog post).

Now that MDMA-PT for PTSD has shown such strong efficacy, Rick shared highlights from research across the country, and the globe, that is investigating the use of MDMA in the treatment of a number of mental health challenges, as well as new models for applying it for PTSD, including: 

• For treatment of alcoholism [University of Bristol, UK]

• For treating eating disorders [Denver, CO, Vancouver, Canada]

• In couples counseling where one partner has PTSD; 

• In combination with prolonged exposure, an existing treatment for PTSD [Jerusalem, Israel]

• As part of a group therapy/peer support model for PTSD [San Francisco, CA]

Though these other applications of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy are in the early stages of research, we are excited to see how this treatment may be applied to a range of concerns further down the road.  

The discussions and conversations we started at SOAP will continue and evolve as we work toward opening our doors at SoundMind, and we are excited to share these updates and more with our community at our December 14 Project Update and Discussion at Studio 34. For more info and tickets, see here.