Last month our co-founder and COO Myriam Barthes was featured at SXSW on the panel session Beyond the Hype: The Business of Psychedelics 2.0 alongside Imran Khan, Executive Director UC Berkeley Center for Psychedelics, Daniel Goldberg, Co-Founder & Partner, Palo Santo, and luke pustejovsky Co-Founder & COO of Tactogen.
When asked about Journey Clinical’s unique model for expanding access to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, Myriam responded,
“The problem we’re trying to solve was to understand why therapists, who went to school for a really long time, many of whom hold masters degrees, are not offering psychedelic therapy when we have a substance that’s perfectly legal and evidence-backed like ketamine that we can start with today?
That led us to understand that actually forming and maintaining relationship with a prescriber, whether it’s an MD or a psychiatric nurse practitioner, is really difficult.
And so we started off by taking on the medical aspect of the treatment. And this is how we developed our approach to care, which is a collaborative care model, where there’s this collaboration between the medical team and the therapist to support the patient and to really support enhanced clinical outcomes.
This is how we started with Journey Clinical, by building this collaborative care model. We started with a small group of therapists and we built really close relationship with them to understand, “What are their other needs?”, “What else do they need in order to grow their practice with this treatment?”.
We started understanding that they really needed community. Oftentimes they’re people that are solo practitioners that have been stuck, like all of us during COVID, in their home. So we started building the community.
Then we understood that these people also needed education. We partnered up with Fluence to offer some training and then they also needed professional resource in order to grow their practice.
So it started off from this medical organization, growing into this membership program for therapists. And today we’re really happy that we have 700 therapists on our platform who are actively offering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to their patients and using ketamine as an adjunct for patients who really feel better.“
We invite you to watch the full panel conversation below: