At Skylight Psychedelics, we recognize that the era of psychedelic medicine is here, and with it comes new hope for people struggling with depression, trauma from PTSD, anxiety and addiction. Hobbled for decades by draconian federal regulations, psychedelic medicines like ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, DMT, mescaline, ayahuasca and iboga are becoming increasingly recognized by the medical and scientific communities as powerful medications that can heal, and even save lives.
Let’s be clear: in 2020 there were 91,799 deaths due to drug overdoses in the U.S. Of these, 56,000 involved synthetic opioids, 13,000 involved heroin, and 16,000 involved prescription opioids; deaths involving multiple drugs plus alcohol make up the rest. Every year, alcohol kills about 100,000 people, and tobacco related deaths total almost 500,000 people per year.
The idea that psychedelics are illegal is becoming increasingly absurd, since these compounds are actually demonstrating robust clinical efficacy at treating a myriad of mental health disorders like depression, PTSD, addiction, anxiety and OCD.
While the clinical benefits of psychedelics have been known for decades, ketamine, a long-standing FDA approved medication used for anesthesia, was the first medication to legitimize psychedelic medicine as an effective and ground-breaking treatment modality. Ketamine is known as a dissociative anesthetic. It has an impressive safety profile, because unlike other agents, it does NOT cause airway compromise (ketamine actually opens airways, and facilitates respiration during anesthesia).
At low doses, ketamine produces feelings of euphoria, a sense of “oneness” with the world, decreased levels of anxiety and an overall sense of well-being. At higher doses, ketamine can produce more profound dissociative effects and even hallucinations, which are welcome in the psychedelic medicine space. ER physicians regularly use ketamine for procedures where they need to achieve anesthesia quickly, but do not have time to establish an airway. Ketamine has been used since 1970, and has been a medicine of choice for those in the military due to its excellent safety profile.
A major discovery occurred around 2000 when Berman, et al. published a paper demonstrating ketamine’s ability to safely and rapidly treat patients suffering with depression. Since then, there have been a number of studies supporting the use of ketamine to treat not only depression, but PTSD, addiction, severe anxiety and OCD.
Another breakthrough occurred when it was found that ketamine is effective when given sublingually, in lower doses, in a therapist’s office. Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy has become a well-established, well-studied treatment modality that affords clients the ability to participate in a therapeutic process during ketamine administration. Being able to perform ketamine-assisted psychotherapy requires specialized training, but is absolutely doable for licensed therapists who already have doctoral-level training.
At Skylight Psychedelics, we train and certify licensed professionals to perform ketamine-assisted therapy. We offer a comprehensive online training course that fully prepares therapists to offer this cutting-edge treatment. Once enrolled in our course, therapists also have access to our online therapist community where they can interact with others involved in ketamine-assisted therapy. Additionally, therapists have full access to the Skylight clinical team, and we will list our certified therapists on our directory. At Skylight, we offer bi-weekly zoom office hours where therapists can talk, in real time, with our physicians who are experts at providing all ketamine treatment modalities. At Skylight, we believe in community and that any and all therapists trained by us are considered part of our collaborative team.
Furthermore, since we are 100% physician owned and operated, we are also able to medically evaluate clients, and prescribe sublingual ketamine to those clients who are medically likely to benefit from this treatment.
At Skylight, we see you…
Warmly,
Dana Lerman, MD.
Scott Bienenfeld, M.D.