Mindbloom Archives - Green Market Report

Dave HodesMarch 2, 2022

A psychedelic experience can be very gratifying, and indeed, profoundly life-changing. As the demand grows for having such an experience, new ways to go on that journey in a safe and complete manner outside of a clinical trial have emerged.

These are not the psychedelic retreats in places like The Netherlands and Jamaica and other vacation-destination places where psychedelic experience seekers spend three or more days and pay thousands for the journey they want to go on with psychedelics in what is essentially an exotic vacation with a twist for the well-heeled.

Now there are better, more convenient ways to take that profound journey at home. Anybody who wants to can now find a different sort of psychedelic experience, in a more cost-effective way than a retreat—safe and comfortable at home, monitored by a team of medical specialists, and directed before and after their experience via online consultations.

Call it a new take on set and setting, which is the hypothesis that the effects of psychedelic drugs are dependent first and foremost upon set (personality, preparation, expectation, and intention of the person having the experience) and setting (the physical, social, and cultural environment in which the experience takes place).

Set and setting have become a more critical part of the psychedelic experience than when the concept was invented by psychedelics guru Timothy Leary in the 1960s. Current research suggests that these nonpharmacological effects are responsible for a major part, if not a majority, of therapeutic benefits in a variety of accepted drug treatments.

One company providing this new type of psychedelic experience is Las Vegas-based Better U, offering ketamine treatment, functional medicine, proprietary treatment protocols, and integration within the comfort of your own home, guided by a team of psychiatrists, therapists and psychedelic medicine experts.

The Better U team guides the experiencer through thinking about what they want to accomplish, with online information to get someone ready for the experience, and for what they should expect after the experience.

The process is called a “mental health reset,” starting with a free assessment followed by an online visit with a doctor to setup a custom treatment program.

The at-home ketamine treatment session begins after ketamine is delivered to the home that will be self-administered. The team then follows a treatment preparation process designed for that person based on what they said they want to accomplish and follows up with post-session integration.

Better U offers two choices for the at-home psychedelic experience: The four treatment introduction for $149 per treatment; and the 8 treatment complete program for $129 per treatment.

Another company, Mindbloom headquartered in New York, follows a similar online model using ketamine with a slightly different treatment and followup structure. Pricing is $99 a month for 6 treatments for new clients, which includes psychiatric clinician consults, and 3 guide sessions; or $58 a month for returning clients that also includes 6 ketamine treatments and a psychiatric clinician consult.

If you really want to do it simpler—and a bit riskier because there is no one overseeing you—you can use the Trip app, a mobile app from Toronto-based Field Trip Psychedelics (NASDAQ: FTRP) available for both Android and iPhone devices.

The app allows people from anywhere in the world to access tools that support self-exploration and consciousness expansion through meditation, breathwork, and more.

A user starts a “trip” at the touch of a button and breaks the experience into four stages: Preparation, Exploration, Reflection, and Integration. It is designed to help the users start the working of emotional processing and integration of what they experience in their consciousness expansion efforts.

The app supports users with intention setting, mood tracking, guided journaling and integration, and personalized music that has been designed to help guide them through emotions associated with different intentions.

Trip is designed to assist self-guided consciousness explorers to expand their minds, break from everyday thinking and develop a deeper connection to their emotions and psyche.

The Trip app does not specify which psychedelic substance a user should be doing, nor does it encourage a user to be using a psychedelic while on the app. Instead it guides users through a set of structured questions to share and reflect on key insights or emotions that may have emerged during a trip, encourages the emotional processing to begin, and enables users to revisit their experiences and develop insights by aggregating data from recent trips.

On the surface, while these new at-home tools and techniques for getting more people access to psychedelics seem to be simply about convenience, they actually go much further into advancing psychedelics and mental health treatment.

The concept of set and setting can be crucial not only for psychedelic research but also for advancing drug research and developing more effective drug policy.

As noted in one study about set and setting, studying the ways nondrug factors shape the effects of drugs both inside the lab as well as outside it “can significantly contribute to our understanding of the ways drugs act in the real world and allow us to make strides by focusing not only on the science of psychopharmacology, but also on the art of using psychopharmacological agents, thereby optimizing their patterns of use.”

Video StaffMarch 23, 2020

Mental health company Mindbloom provides guided psychedelic therapy treatments using ketamine. The company opened its first location in New York City during the COVID-19 crisis. Mindbloom has quickly pivoted to telemedicine as the demand for its services has risen during the pandemic. Green Market Report was able to speak with Founder Dylan Beynon to discuss the company’s response and its plans for expansion.

Debra Borchardt, Editor, Green Market Report: Mindbloom is a new company that has a clinic in Manhattan in New York City that is starting ketamine treatments, but they have plans for many more types of treatments using various psychedelic drugs for people with really pressing issues having to do with anxiety, drug-resistant depression. Dyan, tell us how you came up with this idea and what prompted you to start this company.

Dylan Beynon, Founder Mindbloom: First super excited to chat with you today, Deb, and to share the incredible work that our psychiatric clinicians are doing in mental health care for people here in New York and soon all across the country. I got the idea for Mindbloom really over the past 10 years. I grew up in a family that had a severe mental illness, both my mother and my sister and throughout my development, getting through some of the turbulence that I grew up with, I turned to psychedelic medicine 10 years ago and it was one of the most transformational events of my life and it’s been a big part of my life for the last 10 years. 18 months ago I became a ketamine patient in a clinical setting and saw that there was an opportunity to take this profound transformational medicine and help bring it to more people and increase access to help people who need it most get the care that they need.

GMR: And how are you reacting to the current COVID crisis? Because we’ve been hearing that some doctors don’t want to see patients in person right now and with this particular situation, because this virus is so frightening, I would think that your very patients are the ones that really need treatments the most right now, that maybe their anxiety levels have skyrocketed or maybe if they weren’t even an existing patient that, if they weren’t one before, they are one now. How are you guys responding?

Dylan Beynon: You nailed it, Deb. We used to say that mental health care is the number one public health crisis in the United States and that’s no longer the case. Coronavirus is without a doubt the number one public health crisis in the United States. We’re in a state of emergency and we’re seeing a demand for treatments for anxiety, depression on Mindbloom a skyrocket since the onset of coronavirus. The way that we’ve responded, and I’m really proud of our clinicians for really feeling the call to service during this time, is we had already begun piloting virtual and remote sessions to help increase access to treatment. So essentially like telepsychedelics. And we had already done through the platform a couple of hundred remote sessions for people who had started their journey in Mindbloom’s nomad center.

Dylan Beynon: And so now in response to coronavirus, we are really excited to announce that our clinicians are treating 100% virtually. So remote enabled and guided psychedelic therapy sessions with guided ketamine therapy so that people can stay home and get the treatment that they need for their anxiety and depression without having to come in and keep both our clinicians and clients safe in these tough times.

GMR: Beyond the inpatient experience, Mindbloom also has special software that you’ve created around the treatment process. Can you dig into that a little bit better? Is that followup software or how does this software relate to the treatment?

Dylan Beynon: From day one, we set out to become a technology company, helping use technology to increase access to people and to help our clinicians improve outcomes to help people really get the most out of these treatments. So you can think of it as a teletherapy meets a Headspace platform designed specifically for psychedelic therapy where clients are able to do video consults and video therapy to prepare and integrate their experiences with trained psychiatric clinicians and therapists. Mindbloom also helps people with guided psychedelic therapy content, including audioscapes with guided meditations and music for their sessions and journaling prompts and other content to help them really maximize the experience.

GMR: One of the things that I know you were planning to do is expand, so right now you mentioned you’re in Manhattan and you’ve got plans to go into other cities. What are those other cities and what are the goals here?

Dylan Beynon: In the next 30 days, we’re already going to expand into states that have, in the state of emergency dropped their in-state licensure requirements for physicians and clinicians to need a license in that state to practice. And so that’s an effort to respond to the coronavirus crisis by helping to increase access to behavioral health and mental healthcare treatments. And then we’re going to continue to expand across the country over the next year or two with both our clinic-based and remote-based approaches.

GMR: And how are you funded? Because you are a new company and expansion is not cheap. And I was just curious, are you self funded? Have you done a raise? What has gotten you to this point?

Dylan Beynon: We’re a venture-backed healthcare technology company. We closed our first round of funding in the summer of last year to begin treating our first cohort of clients through the platform and bringing clinicians on to do that treatment. And so we’ve raised funding from some of the biggest investors in healthcare technology and psychedelic medicine. So some of the same people who funded and backed Zocdoc and Oscar and COMPASS Pathways. So right now we’re laser-focused on helping people during this crisis and helping clinicians on Mindbloom add the tools that they need to create these astounding outcomes for people. And I think as long as we continue to do that, then the next funding for expansion will fall in place.

GMR: Right now you’re really focused on ketamine because that’s legal, but you have plans for Psilocybin and other products, correct?

Dylan Beynon: We don’t think of Mindbloom is either a ketamine therapy company nor even a psychedelic medicine company, but as a next-generation mental health and wellbeing platform who are helping to increase access to the most effective science-backed mental health and wellbeing treatments available. Today based on research, based on my experience, based on the experience of our medical director, Dr. Casey Paleos who’s a principal investigator on the MDMA clinical trials and was an early pioneer in ketamine therapy research and practice, we think that ketamine is the most effective science-backed treatment that is not readily or widely available to people. So that’s our focus today, but we are super excited based on everything I just mentioned plus the research for MDMA assisted therapy, which is in phase three clinical trials, Psilocybin assisted therapy, which is in phase two clinical trials. Both breakthrough therapies designation by the FDA as well as other non-psychedelic medicine treatments that we think can be really powerful to help people with anxiety, depression, and other conditions that we begin helping people with.

GMR: Thank you so much for joining us and good luck with that. And really, I think it’s super that you’re out there helping people, helping them through this crisis and helping them so that they can be functioning adults.

Debra BorchardtMarch 10, 2020

Psychedelic medicine company Mindbloom has opened its first location in New York City. Located in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan, the company is offering. The company has plans to expand rapidly, with a new state-of-the-art flagship space set to open in the city later this year. Additional Mindbloom locations are planned for Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Austin.

The treatment at this time offers physician-supervised ketamine treatments. Currently, when it comes to psychedelic medicines, MDMA and psilocybin treatments are still undergoing clinical trials for FDA approval. Ketamine is the only psychedelic medicine that can currently be prescribed in the U.S. The company said that at lower doses, ketamine can induce physical sensations and thought patterns described as psychedelic.

“Psychedelic medicine is increasingly demonstrating that it can provide profound, long-lasting and life-changing effects. We’re helping people achieve a deeper therapeutic experience in order to grow, heal and expand their human potential,” said Dylan Beynon, Mindbloom’s CEO. “We partner with licensed psychiatric clinicians to improve client outcomes by facilitating treatments in a comfortable, elevated, hospitality-inspired space.”

“Mindbloom’s therapy protocols are designed to alleviate suffering for depression or anxiety and facilitate lasting transformation for the people who need it most,” said Dr. Paleos, the company’s Medical Director. “Our programs are backed by extensive medical literature and my own experience researching psychedelic medicine for more than a decade and, more recently, providing ketamine therapy in my private practice.”

How It Works

Mindbloom’s initial offering is guided ketamine therapy, affordably priced at $150 – $250 per session. Prior to booking a session, patients undergo a rigorous initial screening which includes a psychiatric evaluation with a clinician, qualifying clients are prescribed a 4-session program of ketamine therapy administered via sublingual tablet or intramuscular injection. Each session lasts approximately one hour and takes place in a private, spa-like setting with amenities such as zero gravity chairs, weighted blankets, eye masks, noise-canceling headphones and aromatherapy on hand for optimal comfort. Afterward, clients reflect, refresh and journal on their experience in one of Mindbloom’s integration rooms.

Mindbloom has also developed a proprietary software platform to provide patients with customized psychedelic therapy programs and ongoing support throughout their therapeutic journey. In addition to video consultations, clients have access to remote treatment options such as 1:1 virtual integration therapy and coaching, designed to transform clients’ new insights into actionable plans for the day to day life.

The Founders

Paleos has devoted his career to researching ketamine and other psychedelic medicines such as MDMA and psilocybin in both academic and clinical settings. A Co-Principal Investigator for the NYU-Bellevue Ketamine for Depression Study, Dr. Paleos was one of the early researchers to identify ketamine as a breakthrough treatment for depression. Paleos is also a Principal Investigator and Study Therapist for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)-sponsored MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD Phase 3 Clinical Trials. Previously, he was a Principal Investigator for the MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Phase 2 Clinical Trials and a Study Therapist for the NYU Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study.

Dylan Beynon is an impact entrepreneur with a track record of building socially conscious technology companies that have positively affected thousands of people across multiple markets. He is Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Mighty, a New York microfinance and civil justice company helping plaintiffs in need get a better deal from the justice system.

“At Mindbloom, we are democratizing access to psychedelic medicine and destigmatizing the most common, often crippling, mental health conditions,” said Beynon. “It’s our aim to become America’s trusted destination for cutting-edge, science-backed approaches to achieving and maintaining optimal wellness and mental health.”