The philanthropic arm of atai Life Sciences, atai Impact, has donated $500,000 to The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelics (MAPS) for multi-year support of MAPS’ ongoing initiatives, including its Health Equity programme.
MAPS launched its Health Equity programme in the face of the current global mental health crisis. With the aim of training thousands of therapists each year to help speed-up and scale-up the delivery of psychedelic care, the programme’s initiatives focus on patient access, education, training and outreach among marginalised communities.
atai Impact’s donation to the programme was issued through the atai Impact Fund at Vanguard Charitable.
“We were already facing a global mental health crisis, but the pandemic has escalated this even further. To solve this crisis requires innovation, passion and collaboration,” said Florian Brand, CEO and Co-Founder, atai Life Sciences.
“MAPS has been the driving force of the psychedelic renaissance over the last 35 years, promoting healing and well-being through education and research into psychedelics and their potential to revolutionise mental health for those in need.
“Their work has been an incredible source of inspiration and motivation to all of us at atai, and we’re pleased to work alongside them.”
Health equity
Racial and gender disparities in healthcare have been widely known for a long time, however, a 2017 study showing that 8.7 per cent of African American adults received mental health services compared to 18.6 per cent of white adults, shows there still remains a need to make drastic improvements.
A number of historical incidents have also contributed to mistrust in medical institutions amongst minority groups – such as the the US Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.
Additionally, despite America introducing the NIH Revitalization of Act in 1993, which supported the inclusion of ethnic minority populations as well as women in clinical research, there also continues to be disparities in representation in clinical trials today.
Speaking at a press conference, Rick Doblin, PhD, founder of MAPS, commented: “I really was blind to this idea that it would be difficult to get people of colour to volunteer for our studies, and I particularly thought that when we were going to work with veterans in the US, 40 per cent of the military is of colour and they’re very well integrated.
“I assumed that once we would start enrolling veterans in a study that we would naturally get a lot of veterans of colour, and it didn’t happen. That led us to question what are these historical factors that have created an enormous amount of distrust by certain minority communities from the medical establishment?
“That made us realise is that in order to get patients of colour, we really needed to start training therapists of colour, and from all different minority groups, sexual orientation, race and religion. So, the Health Equity programme was designed to remedy this lack of diversity and inclusion in our patient population.
“The support from atai for the Health Equity programme, which some of this donation will go to, is really important.”
Doblin added: “We are both committed to the idea of healing for all. One of the ways in the future that I look forward to doing this is working with refugees who are now increasingly traumatised, and working in prisons, when people are released from prison, to help try to reduce the trauma. I see so many things that we can work on.
“Another synergy is going to be insurance coverage, because unless we can get this both regulatory approved and also covered by insurance, a lot of people will do self-pay, particularly when we get couples therapy, which is what MDMA can be good for.”
Developing an ecosystem of psychedelic care
MAPS’ Health Equity programme is aiming to develop a diverse network of therapy providers reflecting the diverse experiences of those who have experienced trauma and mental health conditions.
Doblin stated that he envisions approval for MDMA-assisted therapy in 2023, and that following this communities will start to see psychedelic treatment centres popping up across America.
“We should have, by 2035, around 6000 Psychedelic treatment centres,” said Doblin.
“There is a bit over 6000 hospice centres, where it is a new approach to death. You take it out of the hospital, you don’t see it as something to be completely medicalised and tranquillised. So, any community that is large enough to have a hospice centre would be large enough to have a psychedelic therapy treatment centre.”
MAPS will be training therapists not just to be MDMA, psilocybin or ketamine therapists, but to be psychedelic therapists.
Doblin said: “The Health Equity programme that we have will be training therapists initially for MDMA for PTSD, but we hope that the same therapists will eventually start learning how to work with psilocybin and go through a training programme.”
“I think this collaboration is so important, and the [atai] donation means that we can move forward at an expedited rate. It’s been very difficult to receive philanthropic donations, particularly in this climate of so many for-profit companies. This support from atai is fundamentally beneficial for us moving forward together to help the whole ecosystem develop,” Doblin added.
Collaboration across non-profit and private companies can help catalyse the development of this ecosystem and help to get care and medicine to the patients that need it at a rapid rate. This can help tackle the escalating mental health crisis affecting over one billion people worldwide which has been massively compounded by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Floridian Brand, CEO of atai, which works with innovative digital therapeutic tools alongside psychedelics, stated atai has been speaking with MAPS to define areas of collaboration.
Brand highlighted its development programmes looking at second and third-generation compounds, as well as its digital tools, could help contribute to scaling up access to psychedelic therapies whilst maintaining efficacy – achieving the same therapeutic outcome as with first-generation compounds.
“I think this is a very nice way we can be supportive of an organisation that is really trailblazing the field of psychedelic medicine development and mental health innovation,” said Brand.
“I think they are so far ahead and we would like to contribute with a specific focus on health equity to ensure that the therapists are diverse that there’s equitable access to therapy. This is very much aligned with our vision to ensure that everyone everywhere gets access to mental health innovation.
“We hope to see our clinical trials make significant progress to generate the data that alludes to the safety and efficacy of the compounds, and also demonstrate that digital therapeutics in combination with our compounds can be very effective at making those therapies safer, more efficacious and also most scalable.”
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