“South London and Maudsley” – a press release on the website of the SLaM NHS Foundation Trust dated 24th of March 2022 makes public (bold added for emphasis) – “has announced a new partnership to launch The Centre for Mental Health Research and Innovation to accelerate psychedelic research and develop new models of care for mental health in the UK.
Working together with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, and COMPASS Pathways, a mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health, this pioneering collaboration will provide patient access to cutting edge research studies in multiple areas of high unmet need in mental health.
The Centre will accelerate research of emerging psychedelic therapies, support therapist training and certification, evaluate real-world evidence, and prototype digital technologies to enable personalised, predictive and preventative care models.
George Goldsmith, Chairman, CEO and Co-founder, COMPASS Pathways, said, “In 2021, the UK Government included mental health care as a core pillar of its Life Sciences Vision – a signal of how critical an issue this is becoming. We are grateful to be able to play a part in this, and to be working with SLaM and the IoPPN, UK leaders in patient care and research in mental health. The Centre will accelerate the integration of innovative psychedelic therapies into the NHS following regulatory approval and reimbursement. It is a key part of our strategy to work with health systems to develop innovative evidence-based therapies, and ensure they reach those who might benefit from them as quickly as possible.”
Research will initially focus on COMPASS’s investigational COMP360 psilocybin therapy and supportive technologies, and will also cover other novel therapeutic approaches being researched and developed by COMPASS, in areas of significant unmet mental health need including treatment-resistant depression (TRD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anorexia nervosa.
The ambition is for the Centre to be a beacon of innovative mental health care models, and help inspire and accelerate the development of such public-private partnerships among industry sponsors, academic investigators and the NHS under the Mental Health Mission within the new UK Government Life Sciences Vision. The Centre will initially be located at Maudsley Hospital, London, while state-of-the-art facilities are built within a 200 acre woodland at Bethlem Royal Hospital, London. This dedicated and purpose-built space for late-stage clinical trials will be managed by leading clinical investigators with extensive experience in conducting psychedelic clinical trials, and will provide access to COMP360 psilocybin therapy to an estimated 650-700 patients over a five-year term.
David Bradley, Chief Executive of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, said, “We are seeing a rapid growth in the number of people with mental health care needs, in South London and across the UK. We are proud to continue our legacy of innovation and research by partnering with COMPASS Pathways to directly translate research into healthcare treatment and significantly improve care in our communities.”
Professor Allan Young, Head of Academic Psychiatry at King’s IoPPN, said, “This new Centre is all about putting patients first. The collaboration with COMPASS Pathways will focus on developing new and effective therapies, as well as considering the patient experience in the real world. We hope it will pave the way for how research and innovations partnerships are developed in the future.”
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PsyPolitics was the first outlet in 2020 to inform the Italian public – through an interview in ilGiornale.it – that for the very first time in history “a pharmaceutical company, the British Compass Pathways, dedicated to hallucinogens and related substances in medicine was quoted at the NASDAQ“.
See also:
The “ultimate revolution” (2019) – PsyPolitics
Viktor Frankl: drugs, LSD and subjective vs. objective meaning (2020) – PsyPolitics
The “prodigious transfer.” From outside to inside, anti-politics (2020) – PsyPolitics
Psychedelics. Or hallucinogens? (2020) – PsyPolitics
Evola on hallucinogens (2020) – PsyPolitics (in Italian)
Cyber-psychedelic freedom? (2020) – PsyPolitics (in Italian)
The economics of ‘ego death’ (2020) – PsyPolitics
Hallucinogens enter the stock market (and not only): a breakthrough in the USA – ilGiornale.it (2020) – PsyPolitics (in Italian)
‘The Birth of “Psychedelic”,’ 1981 (2021) – PsyPolitics
Origins of the cyber-psychedelic subculture (2021) – PsyPolitics
[Photograph at the top, Pre-Columbian mushroom stones, religious statues involving Psilocybe Mushrooms. Psilocybin mushroom – Wikipedia]
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Last Updated on July 12, 2022 by Federico Soldani
Typical move by psychiatrists looking for another drug to prescribe when so many of those they now use have been shown to be ineffective and dangerous. Chemicals/ drugs are not the answer to most causes of severe distress. Psychiatry has few answers except drugs, and they are continually forming liaisons with companies in elves in selling new drugs/chemicals for them to prescribe. That is all they commonly do – prescribe drugs.
Frankl explained in the sixties his opposition to drugs and to the then ongoing experimentation at Harvard on LSD and other hallucinogens such as psilocybin, so-called magic mushrooms. Frankl expressed his opposition to subjective experiences caused by chemicals without connection with corresponding objective experiences in the world: subjective experiences induced by hallucinogens lead to a loss of objective meaning and are the cause of unexpressed potential.
https://psypolitics.org/2020/07/04/viktor-frankl-drugs-subjective-vs-objective-meaning/