The Philadelphia Inquirer Writes about SoundMind

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about SoundMind and interviewed our founder Dr. Hannah McLane.

Some highlights from the interview are below. Check out the full piece here

The services at SoundMind, a nonprofit in the 4600 block of Spruce Street, will not be plain vanilla therapy, but psychotherapy enhanced by psychedelic drugs that advocates say can help patients access and process memories and feelings that are buried in the mind but can still wreck one’s daily life.

More than 300 people have already put their names on SoundMind’s wait list for treatments, some of which will involve eight-hour therapy sessions in which therapists stay with patients and address issues with them after they ingest drugs.

“People are just really excited,” said McLane, 40, who wants Philadelphia to be a leader in the field of psychedelic medicine, especially in figuring out how to make the new treatments accessible to patients who can’t pay.

MDMA helps people with PTSD, backers say, because it allows people to tunnel into their traumatic memories, accept them, and then learn to live with them. The idea is that if “you can go back and feel those emotions you are able to move past it,” McLane said.

McLane is developing a sliding scale for people who can’t afford the full price and is trying to raise $150,000 from donors by Oct. 1 to subsidize care for low-income people.

McLane knows that some experts are not sold on the research, but she thinks it’s important to recognize that psychedelics combine mind and body in a way that doesn’t usually happen in Western medicine.

“It has to be therapy and it also has to be this medicine, and we have just never done that before,” she said. “It makes sense that the numbers are actually different and that it actually heals people in a different way because it accounts for their full body and mind healing together.”