A U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) official says the federal government needs to “gear up” to provide psychedelic medicines to veterans and ensure that therapists are equipped to facilitate the novel therapy.
As VA continues to support research into psychedelic medicine, Rachel Yehuda, director of mental health at VA’s James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center, spoke on CBS Mornings on Friday about the therapeutic potential of substances such as psilocybin and MDMA for veterans.
“There’s still a lot more research that needs to be done, and we have to gear up in a way that makes it safe to be able to provide these therapies,” she said. “We have to make sure therapists know how to use these medications—and also who should and shouldn’t be treated with them.”
The widespread piecemeal approach to mental health treatment for conditions such as depression, anxiety and trauma is simply a means of dampening “symptoms,” rather than identifying possible cures, she said. Psychedelics represent “a very different approach.”
“This is an approach where you take a medication that puts you in an altered state of consciousness—and if you are prepared for it in the right way, and you do it in the right setting with the right facilitator, different kind of material will surface,” Yehuda, who was speaking in the interview in her capacity as director of Mount Sinai’s Parsons Research Center for Psychedelic Healing and not appearing as a representative of VA, said. “Emotions, thoughts, memories—a lot of things that usually you spend a lot of time keeping down.”
“But the reason that we have mental health symptoms is because we feel those things and because things have happened to us,” Yehuda said. “So this is a way to access and be able to work with really what’s at the core of the problem.”
“This is a way of taking a medicine—a medication once or twice or three times at most—these are sessions that take several hours with psilocybin or MDMA [and] could be six or eight hours, and you’re with therapists the whole time,” she said. “Stuff comes up that you talk about, and hopefully you won’t have to keep taking medications once you try to get at the root of the problem.”
“But let’s be very clear that there is a danger in having unfettered access to psychedelics and having people—I wouldn’t say danger, the drugs themselves are not very dangerous—but the material that can surface with these drugs can be very overwhelming. So you want to really make sure that you take the drug with a professional who is able to help you make meaning out of the experience that you’ve just had. For many people, what comes up can be very overwhelming, and if they don’t have somebody there to talk them through it, then maybe some things can happen that would be harmful.”
“I think that really, when we’re talking about what’s new in the field of mental health, we are not talking about handing somebody a psychedelic and saying, ‘let me know how it goes,’” she said. “We’re talking about a supervised experience.”
Yehuda has routinely discussed the therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicine with respect t0 veterans with conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
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Meanwhile, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) over the summer extolled the therapeutic promise of ibogaine on an episode of his podcast, drawing attention to a Stanford University study that found the psychedelic showed potential to treat PTSD, anxiety and depression in military veterans with traumatic brain injury.
The message around the therapeutic potential of psychedelics has been getting out in a number of ways, including in prominent conservative media circles and within the Trump administration.
For example, a Navy SEAL veteran credited with killing Osama Bin Laden said during a Fox News interview that psychedelic therapy has helped him process the trauma he experienced during his time in the military, stressing that “it works” and should be an available treatment option.
That interview came days after the U.S. House of Representatives included an amendment to a spending bill from Reps. Lou Correa (D-CA) and Jack Bergman (R-MI) that would encourage VA to support research into the benefits of psychedelics in treating medical conditions commonly affecting military veterans.
Meanwhile, HHS Secretary Kennedy recently said his agency is “absolutely committed” to expanding research on the benefits of psychedelic therapy and, alongside of the head of FDA, is aiming to provide legal access to such substances for military veterans “within 12 months.”
VA Secretary Doug Collins also disclosed in April that he had an “eye-opening” talk with Kennedy about the therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicine. And he said he’s open to the idea of having the government provide vouchers to cover the costs of psychedelic therapy for veterans who receive services outside of VA as Congress considers pathways for access.
Collins also recently visited a facility conducting research on psychedelics, and he reiterated that it’s his “promise” to advance research into the therapeutic potential of the substances—even if that might take certain policy changes within the department and with congressional support.
The secretary’s visit to the psychedelics research center came about a month after the VA secretary met with a military veteran who’s become an advocate for psilocybin access to discuss the therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicine for the veteran community.
Collins also briefly raised the issue in a Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump in April.
Correa and Bergman—co-chairs of the Congressional Psychedelic Advancing Therapies (PATH) Caucus—introduced a bill in April to provide $30 million in funding annually to establish psychedelics-focused “centers for excellence” at VA facilities, where veterans could receive novel treatment involving substances like psilocybin, MDMA and ibogaine.
Bergman has also expressed optimism about the prospects of advancing psychedelics reform under Trump, arguing that the administration’s efforts to cut spending and the federal workforce will give agencies “spines” to tackle such complex issues.
Kennedy, for his part, also said in April that he had a “wonderful experience” with LSD at 15 years old, which he took because he thought he’d be able to see dinosaurs, as portrayed in a comic book he was a fan of.
Last October, Kennedy specifically criticized FDA under the prior administration over the agency’s “suppression of psychedelics” and a laundry list of other issues that he said amounted to a “war on public health” that would end under the Trump administration.
In December, VA separately announced that it’s providing $1.5 million in funding to study the efficacy of MDMA-assisted therapy for veterans with PTSD and alcohol use disorder (AUD).
In January, former VA Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal said that it was “very encouraging” that Trump’s pick to have Kennedy lead HHS has supported psychedelics reform. And he hoped to work with him on the issue if he stayed on for the next administration, but that didn’t pan out.
Photo courtesy of Dick Culbert.
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