Curing Mental Illness with Psychedelics

"Psychedelics saved my life," says Payton Nyquvest. "Now [I'm] on a mission to pay that forward." Nyquvest is the CEO of Numinus Wellness, a publicly traded Vancouver start-up that manufactures such illegal psychedelics as MDMA and psilocybin for clinical drug trials. The intent is to determine how effective they are as a therapy for mental illness. And if their potential pans out, Numinus Wellness wants to administer the drugs to patients in guided sessions across the continent. In this episode, the second of a two-part series, host Shaun Francis walks Nyquvest through his fascinating life story, his predictions for the future of psychedelic therapies—and how ayahuasca kickstarted his journey. Episode 85 webpage. Part one of the series.   LINKS Check out Numinus Wellness and read Payton Nyquvest's bio here. Check out Payton on Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram.   Learn more about MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and John Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, two of the leading entities in psychedelic research.  Read up on some exciting studies on psychedelics and mental health:  MDMA and PTSD trial in Nature Medicine  Trial on psilocybin and depression in New England Journal of Medicine  Psilocybin clinical trial for treatment-resistant depression Ketamine clinical trial to treat bipolar depression Psilocybin-based compound clinical trial for MSP-1014 to treat mood disorders MDMA clinical trial to treat PTSD (phase 3) Learn about Project MK-Ultra, which experimented on human subjects with LSD, in this episode of The Fifth Estate by CBC.  Check out this study in Nature Medicine to learn more about ayahuasca and its effects. Read this story in The New Yorker to learn more about its cultural history and current popularity. Learn about how marijuana was legalized in Canada in October 2018. Read the Cannabis Act here.   Read some books that spurred the hype around psychedelics and wellness: How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan A Really Good Day by Ayalet Waldman Learn more about True Patriot Love and its support of military members, Veterans and their families, founded by Eat Move Think host Shaun C. Francis. Plus here's a link that provides information on how TPL is supporting innovative therapies to treat PTSD.    INSIGHTS Nyquvest turned to psychedelics as a last-ditch therapy for chronic pain. He had been trying treatments for years with no results. "When you're in the emergency room," he says, "and physicians are looking at you sort of compassionately, saying, 'Sorry… we don't have answers here for you,' it's a very lonely and isolating place." Eventually, Nyquvest became desperate for relief. "I was getting hospitalised two to three times a week, and had really run out of options, and turned to psychedelics, really as a last ditch effort to try and save my life." Nyquvest insists that psychedelics aren't a panacea or a magical solution, but they were the first thing that worked for him to treat his chronic pain. [02:55] Rather than making psychedelics available on the open market, Nyquvest believes psychedelic therapies should be administered by experienced professionals in guided sessions. "It's a service-based model, not a product-based model," says Nyquvest. By way of contrast, cannabis is a product-based model, which sees the substance available for sale for recreational use by civilians. Nyquvest doesn't want to see the same thing happen to psychedelics. "The integration, the working with therapists, the support system is as much, if not more, important than just the psychedelic experience itself," he says. [12:58] "When you have depression, you become labelled as a depressed person. You get put on some kind of an SSRI, and it's this symptom management thing that pharmaceutical companies have been profiting from significantly over the last number of years," says Nyquvest. Psychedelics, in contrast, are already showing that they have potential not just to treat, but to cure mental illnesses, Nyquvest says. He mentions a MAPS study where "over 66 percent of the people who did MDMA for post traumatic stress disorder no longer met the PTSD criteria after three treatments." In other words, two-thirds of participants were cured. Today, psychedelics may be administered as a last-ditch effort to cure a certain mental illness. In future, Nyquvest wants psychedelics to be administered on a "preventive mental health model, where people are able to get ahead of some of these things before they become a significant problem… so that they can get back to continuing to do their jobs, and living more happy and full lives." [23:20] With the help of psychedelic-assisted therapy, Nyquvest has been able to separate his physical and mental health from the conditions that once plagued him. "I was labelled as someone who was very, very sick… and the recognition that there's actually inherently nothing wrong with me, [but that] there were events that happened in my life that I was struggling with… that was a big thing for me," he says. Nyquvest uses the metaphor of dentistry to describe the way he sees psychedelics being used preventively. "Most people have great teeth… and still go to the dentist twice a year. I think it's a similar sort of thing in the way we should be treating the brain. I don't know a person who gets out of life unscathed in terms of some kind of event that happens in their life that they could probably use some looking at, and some support. And I think that's a huge opportunity for psychedelics." [26:03] Nyquvest says that the old stereotype, of psychedelics users simply looking for an escape from reality, is just plain false. "A lot of the people that I know that have worked with psychedelics are very high-performing, entrepreneurial or otherwise type of people," he says. "They've been able to clear a lot of the noise and really look at what is motivating [them]. The more deeply you understand some of those motivations, the better you can work with them, and the better you are at some kind of control or understanding of what's driving you." [27:35] When Payton Nyquvest co-founded Numinus Wellness, his focus was on healing, curing, and developing new treatments. "The plan was always to just build a company that could make a significant impact, there was no plans of taking the company public, it wasn't even really something we thought was going to be on our radar screen for quite some time," he says. But the world's excitement around psychedelics has led to more interest, more research and more funding. "It made sense for us to go public," he says, because that's provided the funding to acquire mental health clinics, where Numinus may one day provide guided psychedelic therapies to patients at large. Going public came with challenges, though. "People talk about the overnight success and huge amount of enthusiasm in the psychedelic space, but when we went public, it was actually met with a significant amount of challenge and scrutiny." Numinus has come a long way since then, holding onto a cash balance of more than $63 million in their latest quarter. [29:38] Asked to predict the future of Numinus Wellness, and the psychedelic space in general, Nyquvest says that he believes we're only just starting to learn about what psychedelics can do for mental healthcare. He hopes Numinus will remain at the forefront of the field. "Our goal has always been to be the number one most trusted brand in the psychedelic space… Our licencing out of the lab is an international licence, so we can work with any organisation all over the world… when you think about doing psychedelic therapy, [we hope] you go to a Numinus location in order to do that." In the short term, Numinus Wellness will continue to collaborate with mental health clinics and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. [31:20]