Discussing Resources in the Field of Psychedelics

In this video, Psych Congress Steering Committee Member Andrew Penn, MS, PMHNP, shares resources and education opportunities for clinicians interested in psychedelic treatments to build a foundation with Heather Flint, senior digital managing editor, Psych Congress Network. This interview was conducted at 2021 Psych Congress in San Antonio, Texas.

Read the Transcript:

Heather Flint:  It's a collaborative effort, but you need to have this foundation. Have you experienced the same thing? Also, what training programs are out there? Where can people find this information? Where can they get trained? 

Andrew Penn:  I went through what was the first program that I'm aware of in the US a few years ago, which is in San Francisco. It's based in San Francisco. They do another cohort in Boston now as well, which is offered by the California Institute for Integral Studies. It's called the Certificate in Psychedelic Therapies and Research. 

It's a postgraduate. Everyone in the program is a licensed clinician already in psychedelic therapies. You have mentoring as part of that. I agree. I think having people that have experience in this are essential to learning how to do this. Not unlike psychotherapy. 

Again, this is not something that should be surprising to anybody who's already a mental health clinician. We all had mentors. We all had supervisors. This is no different. It's just a different modality. 

There's that program, CIIS. There are a number of other programs, I’m thinking of IPI out in Colorado. I can't remember what it stands for. Fluence in New York does a psychedelic integration therapy training. 

This is another area that even if people aren't going to give psychedelic therapies or ketamine therapy, which arguably, is a psychedelic therapy, that there are some people choose to do this on their own. They might go to a country where this is legal, or they might go to an underground therapist. 

They come back from that experience, and they're like, "I need to talk this out. I need to understand this." We call that integration. 

There are some therapists that while they're not providing psychedelics  because at this point, with the exception of ketamine, they're still illegal in the United States  that there are people that have training in order to be able to help people integrate that experience, and make sense out of it.