Psychedelics
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Ketamine is one of the up-and-comers in the new hallucinogen craze that’s taking over; and it just got pushed to a whole new level. According to recent reports, ketamine is now offered by healthcare provider Enthea, throughout the entire US.
A bit about ketamine and hallucinogens
First off, ketamine isn’t a psychedelic. It’s often classified that way today, as a means of simplifying for the public, what is actually a complicated categorization system of drugs. There are different kinds of hallucinogens, and psychedelics are one grouping. However this grouping only consists of LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and mescaline. Though MDMA is often included in this group, its technically classified as a psychostimulant. These drugs (psychedelics and MDMA) are specifically known to cause an agonist response at serotonin receptors; which means they raise the amount of serotonin in the system.
Ketamine is classified as a dissociative hallucinogen, along with drugs like PCP and DXM. These drugs have a primary action as antagonists at NMDA receptors, among other actions. The other official grouping of hallucinogens, is deliriants; a classing which involves plants like datura, and compounds like scopolamine, or even the allergy medicine Benadryl. These are all anticholinergics, which means they have an antagonistic effect at acetylcholine receptors, and decrease acetylcholine in the system.
Ketamine is a synthetic, lab-made drug, which was formulated in 1962 by the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. The idea was to find a powerful anesthetic, which didn’t cause damage, or lower vital body processes; like blood pressure, or breathing rates. Ketamine works as a sedative, but not as a hypnotic; meaning it makes a person drowsy, without putting them to sleep. It causes what’s described as “electrophysiological and functional dissociation between thalamocortical and limbic systems.” In my personal experience it quite literally feels like the parts of the brain are moving away from each other.
Unlike a lot of the drugs we speak about here, ketamine is not a Schedule I compound. In fact, it’s a Schedule III compounds, legal for medical use as an anesthetic in humans and animals. However, as per FDA rules for off-label prescribing; wherein a drug can be prescribed by a physician for uses other than what its officially cleared for; ketamine has been at the center of a growing gray medical market. Legal by off-label prescribing, but with no governmental regulation for what its being used for.
This loophole spawned an entire industry of clinics that offer treatments for pain and different psychological disorders. And patients don’t need to worry about their primary care physician (or specialist) giving them a prescription; they can get it directly from the clinic. This is a major benefit, as individual doctor opinions do not update at the same speeds.
Ketamine now offered as healthcare throughout US
Gray markets present an issue for government bodies. Unlike defined black markets, they aren’t necessarily illegal; in fact, by definition, they’re not. But they’re also not legal markets, which means they’re hard to go after legally, but they also provide no additional tax benefit to regulating bodies. As such, regulating bodies either want to get rid of them (think vapes and cannabinoids), or formally regulate them. Currently with ketamine, there’s a standstill; and this is being taken advantage of by Enthea Healthcare.
I’ve covered Enthea before, and its pioneering efforts to provide ketamine as a basic healthcare benefit. The company is the first licensed workplace healthcare provider for psychedelic therapies, and plans to utilize other hallucinogens for treatment upon their approval. Due to recently closed deals, Enthea expanded out to the point of now offering this coverage nationwide.
I reported last year that Enthea partnered with Dr. Bronner’s, making for the first offering of ketamine therapy as a part of worker healthcare. In late summer, Enthea released a progress report indicating that so far these ketamine treatments have been used by a small percentage of the staff, and provided positive benefits.
As per its report: 7% of Dr. Bronner’s staff utilized ketamine services since their initiation into the healthcare program. Initial reporting indicates that workers experiencing PTSD, general anxiety issues, or major depressive disorder, reported improvements of 86%, 65%, and 67% respectively. While no one said ketamine treatments will help everyone; imagine the possible improvement if these percents are relevant across an entire population’s use.
Now, Enthea is expanding its coverage further with new deals. According to Live5News, Enthea’s new deals are with the clinic chains Skylight Psychedelics and Innerwell. Both provide ketamine therapy throughout the US, which expands Enthea’s reach. The first, offers treatments in its Skylight Journey Centers, as well as at-home treatments, for those who prefer not to be in a clinic.
The second, Innerwell, provides therapy as a combination approach; involving a team of holistic therapists, along with standard medical approaches, and coaching. The company seeks to use data and patient outcomes, to drive the direction of treatment. This company also provides in-house and at-home services.
What does a company need to do to offer these services to their workers? Simply add it on to the plan, as they would for dental or vision coverage. All the employer must do, is sign up. Enthea handles everything else, including: a providers network, established policy which includes standards of care, treatment authorization and reimbursement for companies, educational services, and specifically tailored plans for a company’s precise needs.
Sherry Rais, Enthea’s co-founder and CEO stated, “Nationwide availability represents a pivotal moment in accomplishing Enthea’s mission of helping employers with workplace mental health challenges. Our services at Enthea make it easy on businesses to embrace this safe and effective treatment offering for their employees and we’re proud to have the potential to impact the millions of people in the US living with mental health conditions.”
The problem of workplace depression
How necessary is it to find better treatments and services for employees? I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. Some people love getting up every day to navigate their work environment. Others cringe at the sound of each alarm; sickened by another day of office politics, possible bulling by bosses or peers, long work days away from family, and feelings of being overworked and underpaid. Let’s take a closer look at the issue of workplace depression.
According to an American Psychological Association 2021 Work and Well-being Survey, 59% of respondents said that just within the past month, their work was impacted by work-place stress. A huge 87% said they believe that better handling by employers could reduce mental health issues in workplace environments.
Further to this, a CDC informational page on workplace depression, states that depression causes a loss of 200 million working days a year, combined. This overall costs employers approximately $17 – $44 billion yearly. Depression issues lead to missed work days, and simply not being present or productive while at work.
According to NORC in conjunction with University of Chicago’s National Safety Council; “employers that support mental health see a return of $4 for every dollar invested in mental health treatment.” This indicates that if employers are more thoughtful of their employee’s issues and mindsets; they can improve their own spending, and essentially, waste less.
What jobs cause the most stress? According to the CDC, 10.8% of personal care and service workers report workplace stress, making for the highest stress jobs. Food industry workers clock in at 10.3% who experience stress. Lower stress jobs such as engineering, architecture, and surveying, report that only about 4.3% of employees are stressed.
Life, physical, and social science workers also experience lower stress, at a rate of 4.4%; the same as installation, maintenance, and repairmen. Of course, not everyone understands the concept of their own depression, or wants to admit to it in any context, given the massive stigma attached. I expect these numbers are actually incredibly low for these reasons of possible skewed reporting.
The National Safety Council, for its part, contributes that mental health issues among workers accounts for an extra $3,000 yearly per worker in healthcare services; and that the cost for days lost to stress-related issues is $4,783 per employee, every year. It’s a bad cycle. Stress issues lower worker ability, which means employers lose out as well. Perhaps this makes them then put more stress on employees.
Conclusion
So far, the broad use of ketamine therapy for workplace employees is still a new and growing concept. With the help of Enthea, however, it can now be utilized by any employer in the US who wants to offer ketamine, and other psychedelic treatments, as they become available. If you are an employer, and you want to offer your employees these services, go here. And if you’re an employee who wants coverage of these services; you’ll soon have a growing number of workplaces offering it. Just hold tight.
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Related
The numerous benefits of psychedelics have been coming to light in recent years, and women are taking notice. With little options in the way of pharmaceutical drugs, especially when it comes to treating mental illness and hormonal imbalances, it’s no surprise that women are experimenting with hallucinogens to see what can actually help. And better yet, a recent study found that psilocybin can help regulate menstrual issues. Let’s dig deeper into how and why psychedelics are so valuable for the fairer sex.
Women and psychedelics
The psychedelic renaissance is in full swing, and women are at the heart of it. After decades of prohibition and condemnation (following a brief period of them being studied and used medicinally), the western world is finally starting to reexamine the many therapeutic benefits of these substances. LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin have been undergoing various clinical trials to see how they can be utilized to address a growing mental health crisis in the United States.
Jennifer Gural, a psychotherapist from Los Angeles, California, commented about how hallucinogens have helped change her life, and how she began using them to help her female patients as well. “It shifted the focus of my life,” she stated. “It really helped me to tackle how my brain works and how I was thinking … It was such a profoundly life-changing experience. I have done ayahuasca and I’ve done psilocybin. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again, but I’m open to that if it’s needed—which I think is how we should use psychedelics.”
While there seems to be a recent influx of ladies trying psychedelics, self-medicating is nothing new for women. This could stem from frustrations with our existing health-care system, and how it has been historically geared toward treating men and either dismissing our issues or over-medicating us.
As women – daughters, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, wives, friends – we have many struggles that we are often forced to face alone. Women are more likely to suffer from PTSD than men – particularly women of color, transgender, and gender-diverse individuals. Women also deal with depression and anxiety more often, and one in seven women have postpartum depression after childbirth.
New studies have found that even a couple experiences with psychedelics, especially when combined with talk therapy, can lead to lifechanging, psychological developments. As a matter of fact, MDMA and psilocybin have been labeled as “breakthrough therapies” by the FDA, a designation given to “promising drugs proposed to fill an unmet need”. With so many pharmaceutical antidepressant and antianxiety drugs on the market, and the number of mental disorders still rising, we can clearly see that treating our troubled human minds is that unmet need.
Is this the beginning of a brighter, more beautiful future for women’s healthcare? One where common mental illnesses, chronic pain, and hormonal conditions are treated successfully with psychedelic trips, rather than a lifetime of pharmaceutical medications? It seems quite promising.
The new research on psilocybin and estrogen
Although no clinical trials have been conducted, researchers from John Hopkins University have been looking over case files and anecdotal reports on women and psychedelics, and how estrogen can change the effects of psilocybin specifically. We know that estrogen can impact binding at serotonin receptor sites, and because most hallucinogens interact with serotonin receptors as well, experts believe that our cycles can influence how psilocybin works in our bodies, and vice versa, the psilocybin itself can have an impact on our hormones.
Based on the aforementioned case studies, researchers discovered that psilocybin seemed to help regulate menstrual cycles. One of the women studied had premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is a very severe form of PMS, and she used psilocybin to help regulate it. In another case, a woman suffered from polycystic ovarian syndrome and was having irregular periods. At one point, menstruation completely stopped for a while, but after taking psilocybin, it came back.
“Our menstrual cycles occur along the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, so as one hormone kicks off, it tells another hormone what to do in this feedback loop and that’s the trajectory of our menstrual cycles,” says Jennifer Chesak, author of The Psilocybin Handbook for Women. “We also have the axis that manages our stress response, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. These two axes sort of overlap, and so they each impact one another. When we use psilocybin, we are at doing something along that stress response along the HPA axis.”
Chesak added: “We already know from research outside of psychedelics, that these two axes do impact each other: our stress response can impact our cycle, and our cycles can impact our stress response. So, it’s not a stretch to think that when we are using psilocybin, that something is going on with our stress response that then impacts the menstrual cycle”
Although we only have these few case studies and anecdotal reports at the moment, the results are telling. And it begs the question of when we can see a real clinical trial on this topic, so we can better understand the mechanisms of how it works from a scientific perspective.
Aside from medical benefits, do women experience psychedelics differently than men?
Honestly, who really knows? Obviously, no studies have been done on whether women trip differently than men. But it’s possible that because women tend to be more emotional, empathetic, and receptive to spiritual experiences – this could be beneficial to producing better and more positive, even more therapeutic highs.
Historically, statistics indicate that men use more drugs than women – and this across the board, from illicit drugs to legal substances like tobacco and alcohol. And since most research is still conducted on male subjects, female drug use patterns and their subsequent experiences remain somewhat of an enigma.
However, we do know that in general, psychotropic drugs impact women differently than men, but sex-based responses to medications are often overlooked. It wasn’t until the 1990s that women were even allowed to participate in clinical trials in the United States, and many studies are still done using a larger number of male participants.
Despite this, women are twice as likely as men to be prescribed psychotropic medication (back to that overmedicating issue), and recent research shows that factors like different hormones, body composition, and metabolism can cause different drug-reactions. For example, the sleep medication Ambien was found to be twice as potent for women.
Additionally, experts claim that women are “between 50 and 75 percent more likely to experience side effects”. An analysis of existing clinical trials published June 5, 2020, in the journal Biology of Sex Differences, authored by Prendergast and Irving Zucker of UC Berkley, they noted 86 drugs which presented “clear evidence of sex differences in how the body broke down the drug.” They found that “For nearly all of these drugs, women metabolized them more slowly than men, leading to higher levels of exposure to the drug; in 96% of cases, this resulted in significantly higher rates of adverse side effects in women.”
Final thoughts
To reiterate, because the foundation of modern medicine is structured around research performed almost exclusively on men, most of what science tells us about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of illness may not be applicable to women. With so much of our population feeling like they are not understood by healthcare professionals, it’s no surprise that a growing number of women are self-medicating with cannabis, psychedelics, and other natural, alternative solutions.
As we learn more about how psilocybin and other hallucinogens interact with female hormones, we can better understand how to use these incredible products to improve our health, and our lives.
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