PTSD and Psychedelics in the age of COVID-19: An Ethical Framework for Inclusivity
A message from our founder, Dr. Hannah McLane:
COVID-19 is affecting us all in different ways. A lot of us are feeling mixed emotions. Some of us are on the front lines and others are at home looking for ways to help out in some way. At SoundMind we are also contemplating the ways we can best help.
I wanted to share with readers the presentation Michelle Joy, MD and I gave last summer at the SOAP Conference in Pittsburgh. Harvard Professor and world-renowned ethicist Dan Wikler and I created a series of animated videos several years ago about healthcare priority setting. Now, amidst COVID-19, these videos are even more relevant and can help us understand how incredibly difficult it is to weigh all the options and factors when deciding the fairest way to distribute scarce resources.
In the context of these shortages, we have decided one of the best ways we can put our skills to work here at SoundMind is to provide therapy and services to frontline healthcare workers who are faced with long hours, impossible decisions, dying patients who often have to die alone, and fear of infection themselves. It is truly a recipe for developing high levels of stress, burnout, and PTSD. The process of having to make these extremely difficult decisions about resource allocation is one that can cause moral injury, and moral injury is a key component in many forms of PTSD. Many institutions that are deploying these workers aren’t providing the mental health services they need on the frontlines, and we don’t have time to negotiate with them when these psychological traumas are already happening. We need a healthcare workforce when this is all over, and at this rate, people will be completely burned out by the end of this pandemic.
Many of us at SoundMind have already volunteered free therapy hours to meet the needs of these workers, but we each only have a limited number of free slots. In order to offer more hours to these patients, we are creating a fund for these therapy hours, which will facilitate access for not only medical personnel in training but also others on the frontline such as nurses, techs, and sanitation workers. We also hope to use funds for providing relevant psychedelic therapy for people who have developed PTSD from COVID-19, such as Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy and, in the future, MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy as well. These therapies are now more important than ever! Donate here to our campaign: https://soundmind.center/donate
Please join us in the fight to make much-needed therapy available to all, and keep our healthcare workforce mentally strong so that our system can stay together after this is all over. It will take a lot to make this happen and we are committed to this process along with many others who are dedicating their time, energy, and expertise.
If you are curious or would like to share the animated scenarios, here are the direct links to those:
