The Truth About Healing Complex PTSD with Psychedelics with Dr. Will Van Derveer
The Truth About Healing Complex PTSD with Psychedelics with Dr. Will Van Derveer
In this powerful episode, psychiatrist and psychedelic therapy researcher Dr. Will Van Derveer joins John to explore the cutting-edge world of MDMA-assisted therapy and how it's changing the game for trauma recovery. They unpack the failures of conventional psychiatry, the neuroscience behind MDMA’s healing power, and why training—and restraint—are everything when it comes to this work. If you’re curious about psychedelic therapy or working with trauma more effectively, this one’s for you.
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Key Takeaways:
🌱The MDMA Data That Stunned the Field – Discover why an 83% recovery rate from treatment-resistant PTSD shook the psychiatric world—and how it’s even possible.
🌱Healing as Remembering, Not Escaping – Why psychedelic therapy often works by accessing the mind’s natural blueprint for healing—and how “parts work” arises spontaneously.
🌱The Danger of Doing Too Much – Learn why well-meaning but untrained therapists can unintentionally cause harm—and what true “holding space” actually looks like.
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👤 Guest: Dr. Will Van Derveer
Dr. Will Van Derveer is a psychiatrist, integrative mental health leader, psychedelic therapy researcher, and host of the Higher Practice Podcast. He is the co-founder of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, which trains clinicians in cutting-edge trauma and psychedelic modalities.
Learn more: psychiatryinstitute.com
Instagram: @will.vanderveer.md
Facebook: @will.vanderveer.md
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TRANSCRIPT
Will Van Deveer: [00:00:00] Well, I think, I think you're speaking to the discernment around, um, I. One of the big differences in psychedelic therapy is this concern about, uh, how vulnerable people are on in a psychedelic state.
Yeah. And that, you know, people who are not well trained to hold that space on behalf of a client, um, even with really good intentions, can actually do a lot of damage. And, and that's where the training piece comes in.
John Clarke: Going Inside is a podcast on a mission to help people heal from trauma and reconnect with their authentic self. Join me trauma therapist John Clarke for guest interviews, real life therapy sessions, and soothing guided meditations. Whether you're navigating your own trauma, helping others heal from trauma, or simply yearning for a deeper understanding of yourself, going inside is your companion on the path to healing and self-discovery.
Download free guided meditations and apply to work with me [00:01:00] one-on-one at JohnClarketherapy.com. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in.
Excited to introduce my guest for today. Dr. Will Vandeveer is a psychiatrist, integrative mental health leader, psychedelic therapy researcher and host of the Higher Practice Podcast. You can learn more about the institute he co-founded at psychiatry institute.com. Uh, will thank you so much for being here.
What else should people know about who you are and how you got here?
Will Van Deveer: Thanks, John. Um, it's great to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation. I, I guess, um, I, I would say that I came to where I am today, uh, mostly from noticing the limitations and how I was trained as a psychiatrist and.
Seeing too many of my patients not do well, with the conventional treatments that were out there. Um, so that's, that's, that's how I came into, [00:02:00] um, you know, becoming an integrative psychiatrist and, and getting involved in psychedelic research and then founding an institute to train people in that stuff.
John Clarke: Yeah,
yeah. The question I have for you right off the bat is. Where do you feel this gap is? Because in my experience, and part of how I got here is leaving graduate school learning virtually nothing about trauma, what it is or how to treat it. So I had to go learn. Yeah. And I had to go get EMDR training and I had to get IFS training all these pieces.
Right. And kind of go find that elsewhere. Where, where do you find the gap to be?
Will Van Deveer: Well, I think. My, my experience is very similar to yours. I, I also went out and got, uh, EMDR training. Share a quick story about that. It was kind of a funny thing that happened. I was a resident in psychiatry in the late nineties and, uh, my wife at the time was a graduate student at Naropa.
And, uh, through her I [00:03:00] started hearing about EMDR and, um, inside of my conventional residency training, I was. You know, learning about PTSD in the very conventional way and what, what the treatments were. And so I asked my training director if it was okay if I went and got, uh, training with EMDR and he said, let's not talk about this publicly, but I'm gonna support you.
And, I know a person in the community, another psychiatrist who could, um. Who could supervise you with that? We don't have anybody in the department who, we could talk to about this, but, he really supported me and I, I'm very grateful. Um, so, uh, so that was, like you said, it was, it was an important thing for me to go do.
And it helped address some of the trauma. But, um, you mentioned IFS such a huge fan of, of the work and , and somatic approaches in general, um, can be so. Much more powerful than what we see as far as FDA [00:04:00] approved approaches to trauma. Yeah. I think the biggest gap though in, in my, on the medical side of training is, is a gap around understanding what trauma is in the first place.
Yeah, there's a big focus on what the event was, um, as opposed to like, what, what's the impact on the nervous system or what's the pattern there?
John Clarke: Yeah. Yeah. Let's unpack that a little bit more. Because I think you're right. Even just the word trauma often implying the thing that happened, the event that happened, rather than the trauma reaction, which often is the thing that brings people to treatment of going something is ruining my life, or, you know, driving me to drink or use or feel spacey and dissociated and I want to get rid of that.
Right?
Will Van Deveer: Yeah, absolutely. And you're, you're naming. Uh, I think the, the, the essence of it, which is we all have moments, whether we have full [00:05:00] blown PTSD or, or we just have, um, what I would call maybe subclinical, um, trauma patterning or . Um, adverse childhood experiences from childhood that leave us, um, prone to overreact to things that we perceive as threat.
Our nervous system perceives as a threat. Consciously we might not label it as a threat, but we're, we're experiencing that overwhelm and that flood and that, um, operating, um, from a place inside of us that we know is not our best effort or our best expression of our best self. And so. Folks.
I, I think the difference between, um, subclinical and clinical trauma is, is, is, is kind of a gray area, but I tend to think about it as. Uh, is the person, is the witnessing, um, ego or the capital s self and IFS terminology able to hold the witnessing and, and the perspective [00:06:00] while the dysregulated part of us,
freaks out. Um, or are we captured by the part of us that's freaking out and, um, and lashing out or, uh, withdrawing or as you said, numbing or turning to substances or, , and, and so, , big part of the, the recovery process is, is cultivating that capacity to hold our experience and not get, um.
Carried out to sea by our experience.
Yeah.
John Clarke: Yeah. That, that word threat is a big one. Or perceived threat in our nervous system doing what it's designed to do, which is to perceive them. Yeah. Get outta the way or fight back or whatever. And that threat could be as explicit as, I don't know, getting back with a partner who has physically hurt you, or it could be as implicit as, you know, I have a client where, um, it could be a text from your boss who says, Hey, can we, we need to talk.
Mm-hmm. Right? Or says, Hey, this spreadsheet isn't right. What, what [00:07:00] happened here? And that can extremely activating around someone is pointing the finger or calling me bad. Right. Or I'm in trouble or my boss looks and feels a lot like a mom, you know, my abusive mom all of a sudden, or whatever it is. Yeah.
Will Van Deveer: Yeah. And those, those cues in our current environment, um, provoke a reaction because there is a part of us that. Had experiences that were very overwhelming to our nervous system, and they, they registered a memory of, of a threat. And as you said, our, our nervous system is supposed to keep us safe, so it's going to be surveilling our environment for threat all the time.
And so this is really the tragedy of, of trauma is, um, really literally living in the past, uh, responding to present moment experiences as if. The past is what's happening and not the present.
John Clarke: Yeah, it, I have a lot of feelings about [00:08:00] this because it literally risks robbing people of the ability to live their lives, and a lot of times I end up seeing people for treatment who they've already lost a decade running from this thing.
Or feeling incredibly unsafe on the inside and doing whatever they can to run from it or numb those feelings, or again, drink or use or overwork or whatever it is, and they've just been red lining for 10 years. They also don't know what it feels like to not be red lining. You know? It's like getting your glasses prescription updated after 10 years and going, oh, I had no idea there's a stop sign there.
Or that trees were this green or whatever. It's like, yeah, because all you've known is redlining. Of course.
Will Van Deveer: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. You know, um, when I got involved in MDMA assisted therapy research, uh, in the beginning I thought, this has gotta be the worst thing, the worst idea ever. You know? 'cause I had been trained to think that MDMA was a drug of [00:09:00] abuse, that, you know, people partied with it, raved with it
caused holes in the brain and so on. Um. And then I read a paper, this is back in, uh, 2012. Um, I read a paper that had been published the year before where 83% of the folks who went through the protocol that involves MDMA therapy on three occasions, no longer met criteria for treatment resistant PTSD. Uh, and that just kind of blew my mind.
I mean, anyone who's a fan of your podcast, who's in practice is probably. Just thinking about that number, it's like impossible to think about people with severe PTSD, 83% of them getting well in a five month protocol. Um, yeah. Then when I joined the team and we got our study finished in 2018, uh. The number of years that people had been suffering from, from PTSD in our cohort of people we treated was 29 years of symptoms coming into [00:10:00] the study.
And we had 76% of people at the 12 month follow up, no longer meeting criteria for PTSD. So, unbelievable. It's, it's quite remarkable. Um, this new tool. Very exciting.
John Clarke: Hey, if you're a therapist, I want to help you deepen your client work, help them get better results without burning yourself out. You can do all this by learning to harness the power of IFS. So I want to tell you, we've got a free IFS resource library that you can download. Now, this is full of resources like my Quickstart Guide to IFS, the full IFS protocol, a bunch of demos of me doing IFS.
With real people and, um, extra self-care practices for therapists. You can get all this for free in the link in the description, and I hope you enjoy.
I, I wanna hear a lot more about that. Also, I really appreciate the, the, the research piece. Just giving us a foundation for, the impact of this stuff, right?
And cutting through the noise of it. Um, because on one hand, my [00:11:00] sense is that psychedelic assisted work is, uh. Very in vogue now. It's kind of like arriving. It's also, there's still a lot of friction around it. There's also a lot of like underground work that happens. There's both people doing really good work and also people doing damage.
You know, I guess like all things really. I mean, same could be said about CBT for that matter, but, um. I already forgot my question, but maybe you can just keep going.
Will Van Deveer: Well, I think, I think you're speaking to the discernment around, I. One of the big differences in psychedelic therapy is this concern about, uh, how vulnerable people are on in a psychedelic state.
Yeah. And that, you know, people who are not well trained to hold that space on behalf of a client, even with really good intentions, can actually do a lot of damage. And, and that's where the training piece comes in.
John Clarke: And, and I know you guys [00:12:00] do a whole lot of that. It's a big part of how you, um, serve folks is that, is training clinicians to do this work with clients.
Right. Maybe say more about that. Actually before we go there, but I was wanting to ask is, can you break down more of the current understanding of how MDMA actually helps facilitate the healing process?
Will Van Deveer: Yeah, it's what I'm gonna. Offer you is my opinion. So there's a lot of theory here. Yeah. Not a whole lot of definitive research, but yeah.
What we do know is MDMA, through one of the serotonin receptors has a secondary effect of spiking a hormone called oxytocin. And uh, for folks who aren't familiar with oxytocin, it's the social connection hormone. It's the hormone that is released during breastfeeding, um, both in the breastfeeding mom and also in the infant to [00:13:00] support, um, connectivity and attachment healthy attachment.
So what that effect means for someone with PTSD, uh, on MDMA is that it dramatically reduces the interpersonal fear that people usually have with trauma. And this allows you to open up, uh, with your therapist to such a degree that. After the MDMAs warn off, people often will look back and say, wow, I just shared as much with you, two strangers as I've ever shared with another human being.
And there can be a little bit of a rubber band effect of like, whoa, was that okay? And you know, obviously you work with that in integration. Yeah. So oxytocin is a big part of it. Um, the amygdala, which is one of the big parts of the fight or flight response in the brain. Uh, has oxytocin receptors on it that downregulate the fear levels.
And this also allows a person to access [00:14:00] memories without the thing you commonly see in ordinary states working with trauma is the flooding effect. , So. People tend to, um, be able to access, you could say in IFS language, the self-energy or the capacity to, acknowledge that you were there when the things or thing happened.
Uh, you were a part of it, but it's not your fault. And, and so self-compassion really comes online very strong with MDMA, uh, pretty consistently.
John Clarke: Yeah, this is fascinating. As a, as a therapist, not a psychiatrist, obviously, you know, , how does our, the current understanding around MMA and the mechanism there at MDMA, that's really silly.
Uh, I'm a huge MDMA fan, uh, not relevant to this show, but I think about it all the time, so there you go. Um, how does that compare to our understanding of, let's say, SSRIs? [00:15:00]
Will Van Deveer: Yeah. Well first of all, the, yeah. You know, having pre having prescribed SSRIs for 25 years and having been involved in MDMA research, to me, the obvi, there are a couple of obvious differences.
One is, I mean, on a neuroscience level, the. There are about five major serotonin receptor families. So SSRIs work on a different family. So there's that part of it. But, but maybe the more important thing to say is that SSRIs, tend to, uh, numb or, uh, take the edge off of the symptoms of PTSD. Uh, they come with a lot of side effects, and of course, as soon as you stop taking the SSRI.
If you're lucky you don't have withdrawal effects, um, but universally the benefit is gonna go away. Um. As you go off of the [00:16:00] drug. So what's really exciting for me as a psychiatrist is, is to have a model with MDMA therapy where someone only needs maybe one MDMA session. Um, maybe two, maybe three. Uh, we were seeing these, again, very severe treatment resistant cases of PTSD.
Uh. Mostly resolve in three sessions. So to have an intervention where the person uses the medication as a catalyst to gain a deeper connection with themselves and recover parts of themselves that have been splintered off, as opposed to using a, a kind of a blunt tool that just keeps you, uh, maybe able to work or able to, you know.
Not get divorced or so forth. It just, it's, it's very different, you know?
John Clarke: Yeah, I, I'm so interested in, um, the things we do and the type of medicine we offer that supports natural healing processes. Processes that are already [00:17:00] like, wanting to take place. Right. And something I've had other folks come on and talk about various types of, psychedelic assisted therapies and how some of them.
If, for instance, people will even just experience their parts or spontaneous unburdening or kind of do this inner child work without having any framework of like IFS and managers and exiles and all that stuff. Yeah. It's really just for therapists to understand like what we're trying to do here, but
yeah, that, that, that came to mind in terms of like, what, what is a natural process of healing in the same way a cut on your arm wants to and will start healing, given the right conditions and everything. Um, how do we, you know, create that for the psyche?
Will Van Deveer: Totally agree with you. It's, um, quite interesting that the.
Participants in our MDMA trial, um, began to do, so to speak parts work or IFS work. Um, yeah, without having any background, uh, without being, [00:18:00] you know, seated with that language. Yeah. Uh, during the preparation sessions.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Will Van Deveer: Uh, it, it, it occurs to me, my background in college was, um, I was studying cultural anthropology and I was really interested in rituals and how people in, uh, traditional cultures get well as a community.
And, , I thought it was fascinating that we. You know, we have rituals that we call mental illness of, you know, you have to cross the threshold five times before you can go through and like OCD kind of rituals. But in a, in a community healing environment and traditional setting,, someone might have to turn around three times, uh, during the dance to perform the transition ritual of the child being born in the tribe or so forth.
So in the same way, I think that. There's something very ancient about parts coming forward inside the mind. Yeah. And, when you, [00:19:00] if you look at traditional or, or maybe you could say universal shamanistic, uh, approaches to, to, well, to trauma to, to the fragmentation, the soul loss that happens at the impact of a traumatic event.
You'll see that. The language of recovering, um, splintered off parts of the self is actually just very, um, routine. I mean, that's, yeah, not anything unusual or new or you don't need to talk to Dick Schwartz about it and so on. So, exactly. It, it's, it's, it's fascinating to me that, um. Some of these medicines, um, seem to facilitate access to an inborn,
architecture of healing or, or map of healing that can, that can just unfold. . And , and when I said that therapists can do damage who have good intentions, part of the damage you can do is by interfering with that process when it's [00:20:00] already flowing in a beautiful way. And the, the, the better, you know, the more helpful intervention is to sit back and.
You know, allow it to unfold rather than Yeah. Getting involved and interpreting it and talking too much and so on.
John Clarke: Yeah , yeah. As one of my mentors used to say, you know, don't just do something, sit there. Exactly who coined that. But, um, it goes against a lot of our instincts as therapists because we wanna do something or be helpful or that wanna rescue or save or make sure it's not too much or make sure, you know, I'm here with you or whatever.
Um., And so right. It's like it, those moments where getting out of the way is the thing to do. Right. And even just with if FS alone, I find over time, the more my clients get a, get the hang of it, they will just come in and kind of go inside and drop in and start doing the work. And I'm literally here quote, holding space, which is like, okay, what does that mean?
You [00:21:00] know? And right. Is that worth 200 and some dollars an hour or not? You know?
Will Van Deveer: Well, it beats, it beats the, the slower path, right? Of, some of these. Older approaches to therapy that, you know, take a lot longer and may not ever get you to where you need to get to. Um, exactly. We, we, we teach a similar, uh, approach at our institute.
It's the acronym Wait, WAIT, which means why am I talking?
John Clarke: Exactly. That's golden. That's golden. Yeah. Yeah. By the time you run through that acronym in your head, the client might have already moved on or unburdened, you know. Exactly. Yeah, I'll tell some of my trainees, you know, something you can do physically is when, when I'm feeling that that energy or that like tension, I will literally sit on my hands and just do that and see how that feels. And that can be kind of grounding or at least help me wait a little bit more. Yeah. And see if I really need to jump in here. Yeah. Yeah. [00:22:00] Or just to see like, is that my stuff coming up exactly. Or does the client really need me? Yeah.
Will Van Deveer: Whose anxiety is it?
John Clarke: Yep, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm, I'm gonna throw this out there because, uh, on one hand, the more I do this work, the more things come back to this central word idea, which is love, and that trauma is in a nutshell, loss of love and connection. Uh. Healing has to be the antithesis of that. Right? Or it's like, you know, uh, Peter Levine talks about the, the healing vortex, right?
Versus a trauma vortex. And so. I think a lot of what we're doing with IFS is like, self is another form of like love and bringing love to parts of you that need it. Whether the pissed off drinking parts or the hurt inner child parts. My, it seems like MDMA helps naturally access more of that love. Or you think about like, I've been , I don't know, like out with friends who are using [00:23:00] MDMA or whatever and there's just like that love or they're just like extremely loving toward me.
Um, but it also doesn't feel. Fake or un completely unwarranted. But, how, how relevant is, is that while also maintaining our like, kind of clinical lens here?
Will Van Deveer: Well, I think, I think you're right that, uh, the, the core of it is love. I totally agree with that. And you know, I think one of the. Problems that we're dealing with in human nature, um, is this problem of the lenses, right?
That our lenses, and especially if we're carrying a lot of trauma in our body, our lenses are very distorted. And so the ability for us to perceive the love that's already there, both, both within and without, is very. Challenging. Yeah. And it's not uncommon to meet people with lifelong PTSD who've never had that experience [00:24:00] before.
Yeah. Where they, they experience the world or, you know, their environment as supportive or for their success rather than against them always. Um, so, um, the. Kind of most important part of the work, of course, with psychedelic therapy is to turn what we call a state change into a trait change. You know, we, you can have a trophy of some kind of like ayahuasca experience or MDMA experience or whatever, that doesn't have any legs in terms of changing your character or how you relate to the world.
And what, what your daily experience is like, and how hard is it for you to do the health affirming, um, behaviors that we all have to do to maintain every aspect of our health and wellbeing? Yeah. Uh, so. What happens inside the session, you know, where let's say a [00:25:00] manager part can, connect with an exile and protectors can, you know, be more easily facilitated to take a step back and make room, uh, for that conversation.
Is the beginning. You know, it's a taste of, of what's to come or what the possibilities can be. Uh, but, but the. The session itself is not, doesn't produce the change. You know, it produces the, the vision of the opportunity.
John Clarke: Yeah , yeah. It's, it's like at the end of, uh, or clients that have skeptical parts around IFS, which I very much welcome those parts.
All that really matters is our clients getting better and staying better. You know? Yeah. Are they less symptomatic than they were before they started with us? Right. Right. And in, in the case of your research, right, it's like that's what you're looking at as well. So, same thing if you're doing, you know, working with a psychoanalyst who after nine months gives you this great interpretation, it's like, did that change your life?
Right. You know? Right. Did you, do you have less social anxiety? Or is it the [00:26:00] same or is it worse? Right. Or whatever it is, right? So I'm, I'm very much like, I love the, more ethereal and like spiritual elements of things like IFS, um, but also very practical in that, um, people want to get better and I want them to get better too, and have real impact in their life, right?
Sometimes, you know, in the case of, I mentioned like this client who gets activated with her boss, it's the lack of a trigger that implies that that progress. And that train in progress. And so noticing that and going, wow, this was the first time where you went into your boss's office and you didn't get activated.
Notice that absolutely huge for the first time ever. He wasn't your mom, you know, or whatever, whatever it is, right?
Will Van Deveer: Yeah. Yeah. And these, these emotional tags or, triggers in our current present day environment, um, can get, uh, I don't wanna say permanently 'cause that doesn't [00:27:00] feel accurate, but there can be very long term.
Relief. Yeah. From the amplitude of the response and the nervous system to that particular trigger. But if you don't use it, you lose it. Right. So it it, it's what you're saying of like, she has to go into the boss's office and have that conversation, you know, to Yeah. To. The neurons connect in that new formation of like, oh, this, this, now this is what happens when I go in my boss's office. Yeah,
John Clarke: yeah. Well, luckily, you know, life, everyday life is full of trailhead opportunities to get triggered, whether you're like checking Facebook or ordering a sandwich, you know, and the guys. In a bad mood, what, whatever it is, right? It's like totally. Or you have a tiff with your partner about loading the dishwasher a certain way, which I still think my way is right.
But , you know, it's just like opportunities abound, but also we go and sometimes clients will go and have these peak [00:28:00] experiences, you know, and then come back and wanna tell me about these peak experiences, whether it's with psychedelics or ayahuasca, whatever it might be. Um, and also. Number one, like there has to be the preparation work.
It has to be saved, then the integration work. But it's also like, can this thing have real impact on your, your, your life and how do we do that? And in my experience, a lot of times people that are doing not so great work around this stuff are. Yeah, just not as thorough as, as they should be around the integration piece or clients that are truly not ready or not stable or have a combination of medication that doesn't fit well with this stuff.
I've seen that as well, where people just go do it and end up in a way worse place. So, , sure. But I've also seen clients have the breakthroughs that they have needed, that they've been on the precipice of for months with our work or whatever. Yeah.
Will Van Deveer: Yeah. I, I, I agree with you. I, I think there's a, there's a huge public education piece of work that [00:29:00] we need to do, and, uh, what I mean by that is psychedelics are sort of in this.
Gray area in between, a really powerful healing tool on the one hand and a recreational device on the other hand. Yeah. And so people, because of that, people tend to underestimate the power of, of the healing opportunity. And one way to underestimate it is to, you know. Take MDMA with friends on a Sunday and then go to work on Monday and not, you know, or, or even have a psychedelic therapy session , on a Monday and go to work on Tuesday.
Um, now obviously people have jobs. They have to, you have to do what you have to do, but, but the point is that , I think the real, the most powerful transformations occur when the practitioner is helping the, the client understand that this is a sacred , moment that is worthy and, [00:30:00] and that the, you know, the individual's worthy of setting aside the time, you know, saving up the FMLA to. Go to the Iboga retreat or whatever the thing is that really protects the , the time around the experience.
John Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, so sometimes, you know, yeah. Clients, really we, we. We do need to push pause on life and go and do that work in a separate kind of container outside of the daily grind of our lives.
Which, you know, in the case of traditional therapy, it's often this, you know, 50 minutes in the middle of your workday or work week or right. Clients heading right back into a call on Zoom or you know, 10 minutes later, whatever it is. So it's like, right. , They're only gonna disintegrate so much. On your couch if there's that call with the boss.
That's right. That boss we were talking about in 10 minutes. Right. And then therapists are like, why is my client not opening up? Or, you know, going deeper. It's like, for very good reason. Yeah. You know, very protective reason. Yeah.
Will Van Deveer: Yeah. Absolutely.
John Clarke: [00:31:00] Yeah, catch me up a little bit more and, and, and around.
Where are we at,, nationally and on a state level with legal legalization of this stuff or the FDA, stuff like that. And,
Will Van Deveer: yeah. Yeah. So we're speaking together here in mid-July of 2025, and I'm just putting the time in there because Yeah. Things are changing so quickly here. Right. , One. So the short story is that MDMA, uh, went through the entire phase one, two, and three at the FDA and failed to get approved in August of last year.
Psilocybin uh, has two states that are fully functional in terms of being able to do psilocybin healing work above board Oregon and Colorado , and psilocybin. In the process of getting finished with the phase three study, two different organizations, one for-profit, one not-for-profit., And then we have other drugs that are already, um, getting set up for phase three.
Um, LSD [00:32:00] for social anxiety. Uh, five MEODMT for tremor resistant depression, , and Iboga of course. Um, a big initiative passed in Texas, uh, a few weeks ago where they're gonna. The state of Texas is putting in $50 million. There's a consortium of , I think it's for-profit and non-profit that are putting in an additional 50 million for research.
So the, the local scene is, very active, um, in different. Locations. Um, what we're excited about right now, I, I would say we as, as in, you know, people who are doing a lot of training and research is that. There are changes happening with RFK running Hs, HHS , in putting, um, the. People in place at the FDA to support fast tracking and even potentially reviewing MDMA.
Looking again at why it was denied. Um, there are some questions about that process and how that went down. . [00:33:00] And because the efficacy and the safety data was, um, impeccable, there were some questions about , the double blind and whether that was effective and kind of hard to, to blind a psychedelic, you know?
Um, yeah. And it's a whole nother story, but yeah. But we're, um, we're optimistic that, um. Because the, the rhetoric coming from RFK and, , a couple of people at FDA is um, very positive saying that they're prioritizing psychedelic therapy and that they want to push this through, in the next two years.
So we'll see.
John Clarke: Yeah. Yeah. What's it been like for you to see. In not only the interest rising from clients and practitioners alike, but also some legislation catching up.
Will Van Deveer: Well, it's, it's really exciting. Of course. , I am. Um, hoping that we'll be moving away from state measures into federal [00:34:00] legalization., Obviously access is a huge issue if we only have two states that are approved and these state programs are , they're great, but they're also, um, complex and expensive and . And they're different state by state. So for someone like me who's training people to be able to provide psilocybin in Oregon and also provide psilocybin in Colorado , the rules in Oregon and Colorado are different enough that, you know, as a trainer, we're having to navigate all of those complexities.
Yeah. Um, so. Um, I'm, I'm really hoping that in the next couple of years we're gonna see something federal that can really open things up.
John Clarke: Yeah, makes sense. , We've got just a little bit of time left, but, um, let me know a bit more about how you work with practitioners , the process you walk them through to get trained to do this work.
And then , what do you wish [00:35:00] practitioners who are interested in this stuff kind of, uh, knew?
Will Van Deveer: Yeah, thanks for asking. So we're currently enrolling for , what we call our level, level one psychedelic therapy training. And it's the first level out of three. So we, in our mind, a person can be, , trained well enough to get started in about a year of training.
Um. And we have been running year long trainings for many years. We've trained a little over 2000 people in psychedelic therapy , we only work with licensed, uh, clinicians as students. There are trainings for people who wanna be coaches or other formats. Um, but we also really believe in, uh, first starting with information and then also moving into for.
Students that where it's a fit for them to have their own psychedelic experiences. And that doesn't [00:36:00] have to be necessarily taking a psychedelic, , substance, I mean, holotropic breath work and other ways to, to find into that. But we feel strongly that it's difficult to facilitate someone, uh, in a psychedelic state if you haven't had to encounter some of the, , places that we need to encounter inside of ourselves.
John Clarke: Yeah. Uh, I really appreciate that you make that a part of the training. , I have a strong belief in that, regardless of whether it's with psychedelic work or anything. You know, before I ever touched EMDR or used it on a client with a client, uh, I went through it myself. And in fact, you know, , I remember when I was getting trained.
Uh, and I was someone's client for like a demonstration and it was a, a student, you know. Um. And I used something quite real. Of course, I wanted to be a good client, so I, I probably used something that was like a seven out of 10 instead of like a three out of 10. Uh, and I [00:37:00] got completely flooded. She completely stopped in the middle of it, right?
I was in a very, very bad place in the middle of basically the worst panic attack of my life and feeling flooded, associated everything they had to bring the trainer in. It was horrible. It, it was horrible. It took me probably the rest of the day to come back. Right. To feel even somewhat. Okay. Um, I'm sorry I had to go through that.
I'm also really grateful for it because I got to experience the potency of it. Right. Yeah. And also know this is what happens if you get someone into the thick of their traumatic reprocessing and you just stop or you slow down. It's like quicksand, right. Yeah. And that's what kind of happened. So, um, that taught me so much.
Right? And I even offer some of that story to clients in varying degrees, um, just to let 'em know, I know how intense this is and I know that there might be both a party that really wants to do this and is excited and also a part that's terrified of like, is this gonna hurt? [00:38:00] You know, or whatever it is. So
Will Van Deveer: I appreciate you sharing that.
That's such a great example of how important it is to, to undergo what, what we're providing to other people. Yeah. Um, you know, the, when I talk with people about psychedelic experiences who haven't had them. Sometimes the metaphor of, um, a fairytale or, you know, like a, an environment that has the internal landscape that has, um, beautiful meadows like, you know, Dorothy coming up to the Emerald Castle with the poppies, you know?
Yeah. But it also has really dangerous and scary, uh, dark, like the fire swamp in, uh, the princess Bride or something like that. Like really?, Uh. Places that we would never choose to go if we had the choice. Yeah. Yeah. And so having this experience inside of ourselves, , like you did of, of going to a [00:39:00] really scary place and then integrating that.
You know, coming out of it, um, it, it, it allows you as, as a practitioner to trust , that people can go to very intense places and come through it and come out the other side, and that you don't have to, going back to what we were talking about before, about whose anxiety is it, right? Yeah. Like, you don't have to over support that person or intervene.
Because you, yeah. Gain to that trust in your own experience, and so now you can offer that to the other person. Yeah, it's, it's very important. Yeah.
John Clarke: Yeah. That's great., I'm already feeling like, uh, we'll have to have a follow up conversation because this always happens with these interviews is, you know, 40 minutes in , I now have a hundred more questions and we have our own trailheads here that we could go down.
And I just can appreciate that your work is so deep and you've been at it. You know, um, uh, for a long time doing this work [00:40:00] and helping practitioners. And so , there's just a real depth to your work that I want to hear more about. But with that being said, anything you feel like was left out of the conversation for today or that you want folks to hear?
Um, yeah.
Will Van Deveer: Well, thanks John. I'd, I'd love to come back and, and keep, keep going in the conversation with you. One, one thing that's on the horizon is, uh. My, institute co-founder Keith Lander, and I have written a book, uh, that's coming out in February. , It's way too early to talk about, but it, uh, it could be something that we talk more about if I come back.
Yeah. Um, would love that. It's written for the, um. Person out there who's suffering or who has a family member who's suffering to help them as a guide to walk through the whole process of how do you interface with psychedelic therapy, what do you need to look out for, how do you pick a practitioner? And so on.
Uh, so that's great. So I can be on the lookout for that.
John Clarke: Yeah. Yeah. I would love to have you both on, uh, [00:41:00] you know, closer to the book launch. We've, we've done that with some other authors, and that's been really neat too. Yeah, to talk through that stuff and to, to promote, promote the book. , And I, I, I know of Keith just through the grapevine, through .
Therapist and being, you know, someone online. I've just seen him for years in his various pursuits. So, yeah. That's neat that you guys, uh, worked together. Yeah.
Will Van Deveer: Yeah. I feel really fortunate to have, a partner like him. We, we met in a men's group and we've, we've been friends for 15 years, so it's, it, it works well.
John Clarke: That's
great. Yeah. Yeah, the, so, um, I, I guess just to wrap us up here, um, let me know a little bit more about current offerings you have, whether it's for clients or practitioners, and then of course, how people can reach out and learn more about your, your offerings.
Will Van Deveer: Yeah, thanks. So we can be found at the website you mentioned at the beginning, psychiatryinstitute.com.
We are. [00:42:00] Offering a number of different trainings that you can find out about. Each one has a different page on the website, in the dropdown menu at the top. Some are for therapists, some are for medical providers. Some are psychedelic oriented, some are integrative medicine oriented. Yeah, for example, we're, we're about to launch a counseling course for nurse practitioners and physician's assistants to just learn more about how the body , expresses trauma, um, for their medical visits with their patients.
So there's a wide range of different things. , That's most of what we're doing right now and, uh, trying to finish up this book. So.
John Clarke: Good stuff. Yeah. , Will, thanks again so much for being here for, for your work and contributions and, um, we'll put links to everything in the show notes, of course, for folks who are interested in learning more about your work and, and offerings.
And, , yeah. Thanks again. And, uh, until next time,
Will Van Deveer: Thank you John. Great to be here.
John Clarke: Thanks for listening to another [00:43:00] episode of Going Inside. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching, and share your favorite episode with a friend. You can follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at John Clarke Therapy and apply to work with me one-on-one at JohnClarketherapy.com.
See you next time.