New Program Offers Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy That Benefits Frontliners and Others in High-Pressure Occupations
Field Trip Psychedelics Inc., a company doing work in psychedelics and psychedelic-enhanced psychotherapy, announced the launch of Field Trip Basecamp, a long-term program focused on serving individuals suffering from debilitating mental health issues as a result of high-pressure occupations. The immediate focus of the new program will be on “frontliners,” including combat veterans, first responders, emergency room doctors, and other professionals who are regularly exposed to traumatic experiences while on the job.
Veterans and first responders experience disproportionately high levels of trauma and stressor-related mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and substance abuse and dependency.
“Trauma has a way of robbing life of meaning. Home doesn’t feel like home and work doesn’t seem important. Veterans have long dealt with the lasting effects of PTSD and, throughout the COVID-19 crisis, more and more of our frontline healthcare workers are suffering similar effects,” said Ronan Levy, Executive Chairman of Field Trip.
He continued: “The long-lasting trauma frontliners face is often treated with pharmaceuticals that fail to address the underlying cause of mental illness. We believe psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can be the solution to reconnect frontliners with themselves and provide a new lease on life.”
Field Trip Basecamp will be available at the Field Trip clinic located in Toronto and in clinics opening in New York and Los Angeles this summer. The program offers a personalized, behaviour-focused approach with the goal of “return, reset and relaunch,” allowing frontliners to reconnect with their families, rediscover their sense of purpose, and re-engage with life on their terms. Utilizing the dissociative psychedelic ketamine, participants will receive a unique form of enhanced psychotherapy that helps break old and harmful thought patterns, and maximizes the window of neuroplasticity created through the ketamine treatments.
Field Trip’s team of physicians, psychotherapists, and psychologists will support the patients with the help of Adam Wright, Director of Field Trip Basecamp, and the Basecamp staff. They are also partnering with veteran service organizations, first responder associations, and charities to reach potential participants and assist with treatment and travel costs.
“As a former Navy SEAL, I have watched teammates suffer from PTSD, depression, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. I have seen how existing pharmaceuticals like SSRI’s can affect the minds of high-performance individuals,” said Wright.
He continued: “Unfortunately, these medications can take at least six weeks to kick in, have terrible side effects and the treatment response is often highly variable. With Field Trip Basecamp, our treatment protocol is far more integrated, leveraging the psychedelic and neuroplasticity-enhancing effects of ketamine to support the custom-developed psychotherapy protocols that our team of psychiatrists, physicians, psychologists and psychotherapists have developed specifically for people in high-intensity professions.”
Field Trip will collect program data that will allow them to critically analyze results. Committed to evidence-based treatment, they plan to use the results in presentations and for internal programming. In future, they may engage in a formal clinical study, in which case they would seek research ethics approval to proceed.
While the initial program will utilize ketamine, as more psychedelic substances gain regulatory approval, Field Trip will incorporate them into their therapy so long as they are proven safe and effective.
Adults 18+ who are interested in learning more or being screened to participate in the Basecamp program can find information at fieldtripbasecamp.com.