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CHANGING THE MIND THROUGH PSYCHEDELIC HEALING Q+A with Melissa Jones
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here is quite the buzz going around lately about psychedelics in the healing space. The benefits of therapy in general are clear, including stress reduction, increase in self-esteem and improvement in depression and/ or anxiety. Studies show that therapy can greatly improve the quality of someone's life. According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 75% of people who enter psychotherapy show some benefit from it. Traditionally, talk therapy has long been the gold star in treatment. However, as more advances have become available, modern healing modalities have led to newer, experiential forms of therapy. Enter, psychedelics. Psychedelics are a newly revived option that have allowed therapists to provide a wider range of available treatment options. As a licensed clinical social worker, Melissa Jones is a professional guiding the field, offering ket-
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amine therapy treatments in her practice. “Over the past 20 years or so, ketamine has proven to be an off-label treatment for certain mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” Jones shares. “Psychedelic therapy is a new paradigm. It is not about popping a pill; it is about changing one’s mind.” You perform ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. What made you want to incorporate this type of treatment option into your practice? I work with a lot of clients that suffer from treatment resistant depression as well as PTSD. I believe that being able to incorporate psychotherapy with ketamine will be the most beneficial for these clients. However, ketamine is not for everyone. Clients need to be screened carefully to determine if ketamine is a good fit for them.
How does it work? The short answer is that it causes growth in different parts of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex. These areas of the brain are associated with emotional regulation and mental health disorders. I like to describe it to my clients as ketamine allows them to see things that are going on in their lives from a different lens. During the session, most clients feel relaxed, open-minded and less defensive. People often describe it as feeling like they are floating outside their body. Does it work better than traditional therapy approaches? Institutions such as Yale, Stanford, Harvard, UCLA, USC, NYU, the National Institute of Mental Health and the Cleveland Clinic have found that 70% of patients treated with ketamine showed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms; virtually all of these
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