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Integrative Psychiatry

Integrative Psychiatry: Past, Present and Future by Scott Shannon, MD

By November 21, 2020No Comments

Where are we in Psychiatry? What is the future for mental health?

Come join us with Dr. Scott Shannon as he talks about Integrative Psychiatry: Past, Present and Future.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Not to be too morose on this, but I think, you know, we don’t want to dismiss all the advances and scientific underpinnings that have been developed, and how far we’ve come. But I think we really need to be able to see that history has something to teach us. And basically, one of the things that teaches us is that because the brain is so complex, and so difficult to understand and manage, that we will develop these ideas about how we can approach mental illness that makes sense to some degree and give us some comfort.

Where are we in Mental Health?

Number one, neuro psychiatric disorders are contributing most to morbidity in the modern world in the United States. As of 2020, depression is the number one disabling condition worldwide according to the World Health Organization, medical spending, if we look at medical spending, both institutionalized active duty military and civilian, we see that mental disorders at far outpaced the next competition and and this spending is accelerating. So in 10, or 15 years, probably the spending for mental disorders will be twice that of the next most impairing condition.

Trauma

As we understand the profound, lifelong implications of early life trauma, this becomes something that could shift and potentially dramatically change should shift and potentially dramatically change our approach to all mental illness. If you go into a community mental health center, it seems unusual to find someone who doesn’t have an ACE score over five. And this is one of the great flaws the problem. And the reason why the DSM is not built more centrally around trauma, is because it creates a shift that moves us from a biological perspective, that there is a chemical imbalance that we and we alone can master and treat to an understanding that people’s life experience changes and alters their trajectory. And that it’s incumbent upon us to not only relate to them and their life experience and trauma, but also to figure out ways to prevent it. And I think we’re doing horrifically, in both of those.

Here is what we have: Our medications place us in a fight with homeostasis.

We’re losing ground in mental health, our culture is toxic and debilitating. And I think as psychiatrists and mental health professionals, we need to be advocates for that type of change. We have no interest in defining what the health and mental health is. And as such, we have little ability to practice prevention, talk therapy works, but has little true support or philosophical inclusion. And our medications place us in a fight with homeostasis. So that basically, when you introduce a neuroleptic in someone, their body and their brain does its best to create more dopamine and more dopamine receptors.

Our Future: The Body is Impportant

So I think the future for mental health is understanding that the body is damn important. And I mean, this should not be a revolutionary insight. And the fact that if inflammation is going on in the body, it affects the brain. If gut function is impaired, it affects the brain, you know that if diet is poor, it affects the brain, that if our water is polluted, and our air is polluted, it affects the brain. So this is important, and this is crucial. And this seems like sort of common sense. our grandmothers could have told us this, but we’re going to discover it psychiatry is on that path to discovering it. And that new paradigm is opening up from here, I think this new paradigm is going to be one that honors the psyche in ways and it’s going to be a paradigm that moved from a model of suppressing the psyche, with antidepressants, anti psychotics, and medications, that blunt awareness and blunt capacity to a new model that is an evocative model that calls through and respects and honors all that we are an all that we can be as colleagues and collaborators for the people that we’re working with.

Sara Reed, MS, LMFT

Sara Reed is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and CEO of Mind’s iHealth Solutions, a digital health company that provides evidence based and culturally responsible mental health services for underserved groups. As a mental health futurist and clinical researcher, Sara examines the ways culture informs the way we diagnose and treat mental illness. Sara’s prior research work includes participation as a study therapist in psychedelic therapy research at Yale University and the University of Connecticut’s Health Center. Sara was the first Black therapist to provide MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in a clinical trial and continues to engage in ongoing advocacy work around health equity in psychedelic medicine.

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Jeffrey Guss, MD is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher with specializations in psychoanalytic therapy and the treatment of substance use disorders. He was Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Psychedelic Therapy Training for the NYU School of Medicine’s study on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of cancer-related existential distress, which was published in Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016. He currently is a study therapist in the NYU study on Psychedelic-Assisted therapy in the treatment of Alcoholism, a collaborator with Yale University’s study on psychedelic-assisted therapy for Major Depressive Disorder and a study therapist with the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) study on treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy. 

Dr. Guss is interested in the integration of psychedelic therapies with contemporary psychoanalytic theory and has published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He has published (with Elizabeth Nielson, PhD) a paper on “the influence of therapists’ first had experience with psychedelics on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy research and therapist training” in The Journal of Psychedelic Studies, August, 2018. He is an Instructor and Mentor with the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Supervisor in NYU’s Fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry. 

Dr. Guss maintains a private practice in New York City.

Will Van Derveer, MD

Will Van Derveer, MD is Co-Founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute and Integrative Psychiatry Centers. Dr. Van Derveer was co-investigator on a phase 2 MAPS study of Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, and co-authored the publication of this study in 2018. He has also provided Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in two MAPS training studies. An active provider of KAP at his clinic in Boulder, CO, he has been teaching others KAP therapy for several years. Dr. Van Derveer contributed a chapter on mescaline in the 2021 "Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens" (edited by Charles Grob and Jim Grigsby). He is co-host of the Higher Practice Podcast.

Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant under-recognized root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass.


Scott has been a student of consciousness since his honors thesis on that topic at the University of Arizona in the 1970s under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Weil. Following medical school, Scott studied Jungian therapy and acupuncture while working as a primary care physician in a rural area for four years. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy became a facet of his practice before this medicine was scheduled in 1985. He then completed a psychiatry residency at Columbia program in New York. Scott studied cross-cultural psychiatry and completed a child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of New Mexico.

In 2010 he founded Wholeness Center in Fort Collins. This innovative clinic provides cross-disciplinary evaluation and care for all mental health concerns. Scott serves as a site Principal Investigator and therapist for the Phase III trial of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD sponsored by (MAPS). He has also published numerous articles about his research on (CBD) in mental health. Currently, Scott works extensively with psychedelic-assisted-psychotherapy. He lectures all over the world to professional groups interested in a deeper look at mental health issues, safer tools, and a paradigm-shifting perspective about transformative care.

Will Van Derveer, MD is co-founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI), along with friend and colleague Keith Kurlander, MA. He co-created IPI as an expression of what he stands for. First, that anyone can heal, and second that we medical providers must embrace our own healing journeys in order to fully command our potency as healers.

Dr. Van Derveer spent the last 20 years innovating and testing a comprehensive approach to addressing psychiatric challenges which transcends the conventional model he learned in medical school at Vanderbilt University and residency at University of Colorado, while deeply engaging his own healing path.

He founded the Integrative Psychiatric Healing Center in in 2001 in Boulder, CO, where he currently practices. Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass. In addition to his clinical work and teaching, he was co-investigator in 2016 a Phase II randomized clinical trial, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He continues to support this protocol, now in a Phase III clinical trial under break-through designation by FDA.

Dr. Van Derveer is a diplomate of the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine (ABoIHM) since 2013, and he was board certified in the first wave of diplomates of the new American Board of Integrative Medicine (ABIM) in 2016.