Growing the Workforce for Psychedelic Assisted Therapy: Dr. Ingmar Gorman & Dr. Elizabeth Nielson, Co-Founders of Fluence Training

Shiv Gaglani: Hi, I’m Shiv Gaglani, welcoming you to Raise the Line with Osmosis from Elsevier, an ongoing exploration about how to improve health and healthcare. 

As regular listeners to Raise the Line know, there is growing concern by proponents of

psychedelic-assisted therapy that the demand for therapists will outstrip supply in the coming years. We're going to talk today about where this workforce will come from and how it is being

educated with the co-founders of a company called Fluence Training, which educates mental health providers in psychedelic treatments. 

Dr. Ingmar Gorman is Fluence's CEO and lead trainer, and Dr. Elizabeth Nielson is the company's Chief Visionary Officer and is also lead trainer. They are both psychologists who have been involved in FDA-approved clinical trials of MDMA and psilocybin. 

And before we get started, I’d  like to thank Don Burton, who is an investor in Osmosis and a good friend of mine, for making the original introduction to Ingmar. So, Elizabeth and Ingmar, thanks for taking the time to join us.

Dr. Ingmar Gorman: It's a pleasure to be here. 

Dr. Elizabeth Nielson: Yeah, thanks for having us on.

Shiv: Well, so obviously I know a lot about Fluence and your backgrounds having done the research, but for our audience's sake, they’d like to hear about how you guys even got healthcare in general, but then psychology and psychedelic-assisted therapy in specific. So, maybe Ingmar, we can start with you. 

Dr. Gorman: Sure. My origin in terms of psychedelics, the question is like, how far back do you want to go? But an important aspect of my development and upbringing has been somebody who has grown up in an environment traveling between and living between the United States and the Czech Republic. I went to elementary school there and high school and a little bit of college and just sort of had my foot in two worlds, particularly two very different worlds.

The Czech Republic in the early nineties was like this fresh post-communist country, culturally very different than where I was growing up in Florida and so I think having that foot in two different worlds influenced me a lot. Actually in Czech, Prague comes from the word “prah” which means a threshold, so the city that I lived in is actually named Threshold, and when I think about having our psychedelic experiences, it’s like having a foot in two worlds or being on sort of the threshold of something that is a kind of frontier that is maybe slightly beyond our awareness or is maybe bringing us to the edge of our understanding of ourselves. 

So, I like to think that I kind of had a predisposition to be interested in psychedelics, but it wasn't really until I was in my twenties that I learned about psychedelics, and also that psychedelics had a very, very rich history in the former Czechoslovakia in terms of the research that was happening there from about the 1940s with mescaline. But it was some personal experiences that I’ve had, and also close loved ones who were suffering with some mental health issues, where I learned that, hey, there was this period of psychedelic research that took place primarily in the 1960s and partly in the 70s, where there was this tool that was potentially overlooked. 

So, that sort of piqued my academic and research interest and you could say that the rest is history. So, that's where that interest in psychedelics began. 

Shiv: Yeah, that's, that's awesome, and, you know, I think there's some luminaries out of

the Czech Republic as well, like Dr. Stanislav Grof, I think, is the most famous one I can think of and his wife, obviously. We'll get into a deep dive into the actual work you guys do, but let's turn to you, Elizabeth. We'd love to hear your origin story. 

Dr. Nielson: Yeah, sure. Thank you for asking. And again, we'll see how far back you want to go. I actually grew up in a community that was really steeped in psychedelic culture and history of the psychedelics movement in the 1950s and 60s in the United States. And in that community,

I was exposed to a lot of really interesting stories about the history of the use of psychedelics, both in medicine and in psychiatry, as well as, you know, the association with the counterculture movement, with anti-war protests, with all kinds of other things that had become associated with psychedelics and that had really contributed to the current stigma and the current environment where they were prohibited and not talked about in academic settings or being researched at all. 

So, kind of through being aware of that history, and then getting out of that community as an adult and realizing, wow, people don't really know about this…it seems like this has just been omitted from so many people's awareness, and there isn't a whole lot of knowledge about what kind of history there is there, was actually really surprising for me. But I didn't intend to pursue it as a career. I was simply just aware that there was an absence of knowledge.

I went to school for psychology. I was very interested in how to create better ways of working with people who are struggling with mental health, and with addiction problems specifically, and wound up getting a lot of training and experience with harm reduction interventions…more compassionate interventions and approaches like mindfulness therapies. I did a lot of training during my doctoral degree in New York City and postgraduate work, and it wasn't until right about the end of my doctoral studies -- I didn't know what I was going to do after I graduated because I was just so focused on finishing -- and I happened upon someone who was looking for a clinician to join a research study on psychedelics and something just clicked. 

It was my early awareness of what had been going on and what was now out of a lot of people's awareness, as well as the training and education that I had amassed over twelve, thirteen, fourteen years of study and work…bringing those two things together was really the opportunity that I had when I joined my first research trial and it made a lot of sense to me at the time. You have to remember this was ten years ago. People were really questioning this

work and really saying, well, why would you do that? That seems really out of the box and you're just starting your career. And I never had any doubt about getting involved. I’m really just proud of and excited about what we've been able to develop in that last decade. 

Shiv: Yeah, no, absolutely, and let's turn to that, actually. I would love to hear how your two stories connected and then why you wound up founding Fluence and what the mission is, plus any highlights you want to share. I know we could talk for hours about Fluence, but for our audience, maybe some of the quick hits of how you started the company, the mission, and then some of the highlights of what you've achieved. Maybe let's start with you, Ingmar, and then Elizabeth, you can fill in the gaps, especially your interesting title, Chief Visionary Officer, which we don't see that often. So, after Ingmar, we'd love to hear what you do, too. 

Dr. Gorman: Sure. So yeah, where Elizabeth left off is a good point to pick up. That was

sometime around 2014, 2015, if I have that right, Elizabeth. You were at, if you don't mind me speaking, you were at NYU doing the research project. Your audience may be familiar with maybe Jeff Guss, Steve Ross, Michael Bogenschutz, the researchers there. So, it was on those studies that Elizabeth was participating and I was also in New York City at the time, still a graduate student and we were introduced through Jeff Guss.

I think our collaboration really began through a psychologist named Andrew Tatarsky who's well known in the world of harm reduction psychotherapy who focused mostly on substance use treatment. But he was, and still is, very sympathetic to the idea of psychedelic therapy. And Elizabeth and my paths sort of came together. We began to collaborate around a program called the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program, which happened at the Center for Optimal Living, which is no longer operating in the US. And what we were doing there was offering psychedelic integration therapy, as well as education. 

Originally, we were doing these psychedelic 101, 102 workshops that were geared towards the general public, and then we thought, well, to make an impact, why don't we actually focus on training clinicians? Why don't we try to reproduce ourselves, so that people who are having psychedelic experiences -- not necessarily in a clinical trial or psychedelic assisted therapy context, but really in any context -- can go to their clinician and their clinician can be informed and at least know how to support a person, whether that be through preparation beforehand or after an experience. So, we started to create these workshops at the Center for Optimal Living. Those were selling out. They were incredibly popular and then Elizabeth and I decided that we would create our own company, go our separate ways, although we in the center and Andrew are still closely connected. 

Maybe one thing that I'll add in terms of our mission before I hand it off to Elizabeth is, as we were doing these trainings, we realized that there was also an opportunity to work with the drug sponsors or psychedelic pharmaceutical companies, because they have intellectual property around a molecule. They have expertise in drug development, but they don't know anything about psychotherapy because the concept of a drug-assisted psychotherapy really wasn't something that was well-known or part of the repertoire of somebody who wanted to take a drug and turn it into a medicine. So, we began to offer our services to help drug sponsors create therapy manuals and train up their clinicians and we started to offer our services to help specifically for FDA clinical trials. And I'll name that our very first client was Beckley Psytech.

Shiv: That's awesome. Yeah, very diverse kind of work that you guys have done. And similar to how we started Osmosis, it was sort of solving a problem that we ourselves faced and that's one thing I love about what you guys have done. 

So yeah, Elizabeth, let's turn to you as Chief Visionary Officer. What's your role, but also any highlights of what you guys have achieved at Fluence that you want to share? 

Dr. Nielson: Yeah, well, I think, you know, one of the most important things to me is Ingmar and I, as co-founders, have always just worked really together as partners, as business partners. When we started, it was just us so any question or problem that arose, one of us had to figure out how to solve it and we've been working really well together that way for a long time. Now, of course, we have a wonderful team of people that we share all those responsibilities and duties with, but we've had to be very flexible in terms of what we're able to get down. 

And so Ingmar certainly does a lot of things that maybe a CEO of a larger company might not be taking on. My title was really designed to kind of capture the idea of we're envisioning a field here, we're creating the field, and we're creating the market as we're servicing it. So it has to do with being able to identify gaps, identify problems, identify need, create solutions, and then, you know, understand how are we going to really keep innovating so that those solutions can actually serve the needs of the field. 

A lot of what we're doing as a company really is in new territory, things that haven't really had to be addressed before. There's not a lot of precedent for it, and so it does take really a high level of attunement, I think, to the field and to the problems and to the companies that are out there -- the things that they're doing and the types of solutions that they're looking for -- for us to be able to go in and say, “Okay, we've got this thing. We're going to offer it.”

It's not always just incremental improvement on an existing product, but oftentimes it's an

entirely new solution for the field and what has to come together. So, on a daily basis, I do a lot of internal company leadership. I do a lot of business development. I do a lot of relationship work in terms of working with our partners. But I’m also having conversations with a lot of other organizations to understand what the needs are, what the barriers are, what the regulatory situations are that are hindering people and keeping them from being able to progress and then synthesizing all of that and being able to say, “Okay, here's where we're going to go in terms of our direction to solve the problems in a way that makes sense for us as a business, but also in a way that makes sense for the field and continues to maintain this high level of ethical care, a high standard of care and a high standard of training.”

We think those two things go hand in hand and are compatible, but we are always looking for how are we going to get those solutions into the hands of providers so that it's accessible to them and they can actually join the field and work. 

Shiv: Yeah, it's totally an exciting time. Over the past two years we've had some of the pioneers in psychedelics -- people like Jim Fadiman, Rick Doblin, Bill Richards -- on the podcast and it's interesting comparing where the field was when they were first originally pushing it in the 60s 70s, 80s and where it is now. I’m sure we were all at the Psychedelic Science conference last summer which had over ten thousand people. So I’d  love your commentary -- maybe we'll start with you Elizabeth -- on where the field is going. I know we're pending some FDA approvals. What are the needs that you're seeing? 

You know, we’ve talked about the healthcare workforce shortage on this podcast for everything from genetic counselors to physicians to nurses but it’s certainly something Rick and Manish Agarwal and many other people have raised on this podcast: the great need we will have to train more psychotherapists, psychologists and especially those who are interested in incorporating psychedelic therapy into their workflows. So, yeah, can you comment a bit about where you see the field going? 

Dr. Nielson: Yeah, I mean I think the place that the main thing that we started offering was this training in the model of psychedelic harm reduction and integration which Ingmar and I and a few other authors actually published in 2021. That model is a model that's accessible to pretty much all clinicians or anybody that's working with people to have a framework for having these conversations when someone comes into your office and they have questions about psychedelics or they want to talk about a psychedelic experience. 

Most clinicians do not have a framework for having that conversation unless it's something about assessing for addiction or trying to identify a problem, you just don't have a theoretical basis for having that conversation in a way that that we would suggest that you do. So that's the kind of level of training and knowledge and orientation that I hope that all therapists and clinicians and healthcare providers will have and be able to incorporate into their conversations because people are using psychedelics and they deserve to be able to have conversations that are non-stigmatizing and not harmful with their providers.

Beyond that, for people that want to get trained in psychedelic assisted therapies, I think a lot of people are getting training to work with ketamine right now. It's a really great option. It's

largely available in many communities, it's fairly straightforward as far as getting set up to practice and then there’s the opportunity to potentially work with people who are not

working with FDA-approved psychedelics for specific indications if and when we do start to see some of those approvals coming through. There's a lot to learn so there's a lot of background stuff that people can be learning now. They could be taking courses, they can be learning the history, they can be learning the pharmacology…all of these are kinds of continuing education things that we make available to the community of clinicians. 

And then there will need to be some specialized training with a specific molecule, a specific drug product and the specific therapeutic intervention that you want to use when that when that time comes. That's the place that we don't always have all the answers for yet because a lot of that stuff is sort of being determined as we're as we're talking about it, but I think there's a lot that people can do to now to get themselves educated ahead of curve. 

Shiv: I’m really glad you brought that point up about the framework that clinicians currently have to talk even about psychedelics. Just today I was admitting a patient and using the traditional history of present illness, social history and family history templates that our audience will be very familiar with, the SOAP notes, and under social history where we talk about substance use, we talk about how many pack years do you smoke, alcohol usage, we do the CAGE questionnaire for if they're addicted or not, and then there's a whole like black box of illicit substances which could range from meth and heroin to psilocybin and LSD.

It's really an awkward conversation with a lot of these people because sometimes you'll meet extremely high functioning people who are, you know, maybe just doing a wellness check but maybe they've done an ayahuasca retreat or they've done some psychedelics and they don't even want to talk about it because there's no real framework to talk about it in a way that's accepted yet. So, I’m glad you even brought that up. That's really interesting to me. 

Dr. Gorman: Well, maybe just to build on that a little bit, I have a colleague who's been assessed for life insurance and in the evaluation of my friend in terms of, I guess, potential risks there was a question around substance use and my friend admitted to having had psychedelic experiences and the interviewer said something like “Are you sure? Do you want to reevaluate your answer to that question?” It kind of reflects some of the assumptions and some of the potential stigma that exists within our systems related to psychedelic use because it's going to get flagged a certain way. 

I just wanted to also answer your question, Shiv, in the sense that there’s this bottleneck. It's easy to scale a medicine, it's harder to scale therapy and so that is what we are trying to resolve in terms of training more clinicians to be able to do the psychedelic assisted therapy but within that there's also sort of an embedded assumption or question, which is what is the dose of therapy that is necessary for us to be assisted by the psychedelic or is it even necessary at all? 

So, we do see the emergence of psychedelic pharmaceutical companies that are looking to only provide safety  support during these psychedelic experiences rather than psychotherapy and we'll see whether the psychotherapy contributes to  the effectiveness or not of these interventions. Just to be honest, we don't have good comparison studies that would be able to answer that question. People are getting at it, particularly at Hopkins, in different ways. There's a recent publication that spoke to the importance of the subjective experience on psychedelics. So, yeah, maybe I’ll stop there, but there's a lot that could be dived into right there. 

Shiv: Yeah, actually let's keep pulling on that thread because we talk a lot about the challenges of scaling this therapy. Once the FDA approves MDMA, which is widely expected later this year, I think the estimate is it's going to be at least $10,000 to $20,000 dollars to take one patient through a protocol because of how much therapist's time is required and the cost of actually procuring the medicine etc. So, obviously supply of these therapists is one problem and I’ve heard solutions like group therapy…you know, have multiple people in at the same time which is pretty typical of these underground retreats, especially ayahuasca retreats. Or I’ve heard about using AI, potentially. Maybe one therapist and one trainee or one therapist and maybe an AI that listens in or something like that. 

Maybe you can talk a bit about how Fluence is scaling it and anything else you want to talk about in terms of how do you stay fresh on releasing courses and modules that keep up to date with each of these potential protocols?

Dr. Gorman: Well, two thoughts come to mind here. One is how do we stay ahead of what to train? This is where our relationship with the drug sponsors is so important because we're actually helping to write and design the therapy that is being studied and delivered within

the FDA clinical trial context so that puts us into an excellent position, if and when those drugs go to market, for us to be able to know the right way to treat them and to be able to then train clinicians in the community who will be working with those compounds and indications. 

The other thing that I’ll mention quickly is in terms of our training methodology, I heard about an interesting study on how people learn. We, at Fluence, don't want to just teach people through pre-recorded lectures or even just through pre-recorded demonstration videos. Even though clinicians love to watch demonstrations of the techniques -- that tends to be their favorite form of content -- those don't necessarily produce the most reliable results in terms of performance according to this study that I alluded to.

If I am getting this correct, they had participants in a study observe recorded videos of somebody doing the moonwalk and then asked them to rate their confidence in their ability to perform the moonwalk. Those participants who watch the videos more tended to rate their confidence very highly but then perform poorly, and the participants who just maybe saw the video less, they were more accurate in being able to judge their performance or predict their actual performance. 

So, this is a long-winded way of saying that just by watching and passively receiving information or passively watching a demonstration, you could produce highly confident clinicians that actually don't know how to do it when they're actually in that position of having to have to answer a question or use some sort of therapeutic technique. And so that's why what we do at Fluence is we leverage technology and a lot of peer-to-peer learning to -- and this is where the scaling comes in – ensure our learners cannot just observe, but actually practice and get feedback on their performance. 

Shiv: That's awesome. Very relatable too, because I can't tell you how many videos I’ve watched on how to take a patient history or how to place a Foley or do a lumbar puncture, but it's only when you actually go out and do it, when you have that sort of challenge and that deliberate difficulty, where you truly understand it and know the limits of your perceived self-knowledge, right? So, I'm glad that's a huge part of what you guys are doing. Sorry, Elizabeth, go ahead. 

Dr. Nielson: Yeah, I just want to say one of the greatest things that we've been able to establish in the last couple of years is our own film studio. So, we film our own demonstrations and didactic videos and mock patient clips and all kinds of assets that we can use in these training programs. We've got a great crew that is really able to produce some super high quality work there and it's, it can be custom. So, if we're trying to demonstrate a specific technique or a specific way of working on something, we can bring the group in and we can get that done. 

Another really important aspect of what we're doing is, in our sort of more continuing education courses that are available to clinicians from the community, we also have this whole arm of our work that is with drug developers. Right now, I think we're actively working with about ten companies on clinical research trials at various stages. And we have a whole list of ones that have been already completed as far our involvement and our training. So that gives us a lot of exposure to what's going on in research and what the highest standards are for research. And even though we may not be training people specifically in that methodology that's being used in the research studies because it's still experimental, we can make sure that what we're training people for in the community-based settings is informed by the highest standards of care that are being practiced in research studies.

We're exposed to that thinking on a daily basis, and that's really important because the standard of care and the level of care that goes into conducting a clinical trial and bringing people through psychedelic treatment in a clinical trial environment is just incredibly high.

It's been informed by years and years of research in terms of how to run clinical trials, how to ethically interact with trial participants, and how to really, you know, think through every possible thing from a safety perspective. So, we're really bringing that experience to bear on everything that we do.

Shiv: Yeah, I’ve seen some of the videos coming out of your studio. It's really impressive and very high quality so I recommend our audience check those out. Actually, that leads me to this next question, which is, you know, our audience is primarily current and future health professionals -- mostly doctors, nurses, physician assistants -- many of whom are interested in mental health, psychedelics, psychedelic therapy. What kind of a message do you want to give them about Fluence? Like, say they wanted to start learning something. What could they expect if they go to Fluence? Are there certificates? Are there credentials? Is there a licensing body if they want to learn more, either just to have those one-on-one interactions with patients or to actually become full-fledged therapists once things are approved in the US? Maybe we can start with Elizabeth. 

Dr. Nielson: Okay. So please come visit us. You're more than welcome. We've tried to do everything we can to make sure that there's a variety of opportunities available for people that are at variety of levels of engagement and commitment. So that could be anything from coming to some of our free webinars that we hold monthly to engaging in a couple of hours of completely on-demand continuing education content. We also have live online workshops a couple times a week. Sometimes we actually have in-person workshops a couple times a year. It's not a whole lot of those these days, but there are a few.

We also have weekly courses where you can do more of a deep dive in a topic area that might be of interest to you. For instance, if you're training to be a psychoanalyst and you want to take a course about psychedelics and psychoanalysis, we've got some really great small group courses for that. We also have certificate programs where you're going to get just a much more comprehensive education in a specific topic area. Our core certificate is called Psychedelic Therapy and Integration and that serves as a basis for continuing on to work with specific treatment interventions such as ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

So really, depending on what level of readiness you've got and what level of commitment you're ready to make, we've got a lot of solutions for different people and we look forward to your involvement. If we don't have something that works for you, let us know because we want to be here to really meet people's needs.

Dr. Gorman: If I could add on to that, I think your audience might be thinking, like, well, how do I interface with psychedelics in this field? One area is probably the most obvious one for a prescriber is to be somebody who prescribes psychedelics in combination or in collaboration with a psychotherapist in this drug-assisted psychotherapy model. MDMA potentially -- aside from ketamine, which is currently used off label -- may be the first prescribable psychedelic. We'll see what the FDA lands on in terms of REMS training requirements for prescribers there, if, again, MDMA is approved.

But in relationship to Fluence and what we offer, one area that doesn't necessarily involve psychotherapy is just for general practitioners or other doctors to just have some basic understanding of psychedelics that can be learned through our introductory courses. And so what would be a practical use of this knowledge? Well, say you are a general practitioner, you're a family doctor, you're seeing patients coming in and it's actually quite common now for the general public to have heard about psychedelics and be interested in, say, psilocybin for depression. And again, although that's not a currently approved medicine, it may be one day, and so what comes to my mind is how is that doctor thinking about making a potential referral -- not as a conclusive assessment -- but just to be able to speak about these possible treatments?

So, one of the things that I’m particularly concerned about is the idea that these psychedelics would be a sort of panacea or a kind of easy sort of work like an antidepressant, right? The concept of an antidepressant is that it decreases or eliminates the depression. We, of course, hope that a psychedelic treatment would eliminate symptoms of depression, but it is not just a switch, right? It's not just an on-off. There is a subjective experience that goes into the psychedelic treatment. What we often see is that there is a period of adjustment for the patient in psychedelic treatment, where there may be aspects of trauma that are arising for them over the course of a period after the treatment, or other kinds of life changes that they realize that they have to make in order to live a more fulfilling life. 

So there's a kind of shift that occurs that is more than just sort of a biological reductionist perspective. It involves a whole biopsychosocial kind of change and one of my worries is that uninformed medical providers will communicate a very simplified idea of how these treatments work and it will lead patients to be more dissatisfied or unhappy or sort of say, “Well, this is not what I signed up for. I didn't want an ontological shift or shock to my system. I just wanted to get rid of my depression.” So, that's one place where I think, again, your audience may be able to reach out to us, learn a little bit in a very accessible way, and then there's a kind of shift that occurs in terms of how we can then be able to speak about these treatments with more information.

Shiv: Yeah, I think that's extremely important work, especially if this field is to avoid what's clearly happened multiple times in history, which is this hype around it, or this widespread use and then this banning once people realize, for various reasons which might be political or safety related or whatever it may be. So, to avoid that in the next ten to twenty years, I think the work that you guys are doing is going to be really critical. I think that's so important. And that point that you just made, Ingmar, is really important for our listeners to pay attention to. 

I want to be respectful of your time, so just a couple last questions. One, is we love asking for career advice. You guys are very successful. You're both healthcare providers, you're entrepreneurs, you're innovators, you're running a company. What advice do you want to give our audience about approaching their careers in healthcare or innovation? And maybe let's start with you, Ingmar, and then go to you, Elizabeth.

Dr. Gorman: It’s a good question. I think about medical students or anyone else who is looking to become involved in the psychedelic field or industry, if you will, and often there is this assumption that everybody needs to become a psychotherapist. One piece of advice I'll share is that you all have some knowledge or expertise, and you don't necessarily need to become a psychotherapist in order to participate in the industry or field. So, whether you are an accountant or somebody who is an expert in marketing, there are many ways that you can contribute. Having some basic knowledge about psychedelics is really, really helpful, because you could imagine there are some really wrong ways to market psychedelic education, or psychedelics themselves. And so, again, not thinking that you have to restart from scratch and learn a whole new career, but you can apply the knowledge that you have. Just adapt it. There's definitely a significant need. 

Shiv: Yeah, that's great advice. But I think in general, too, people may never take the first step because they're worried about reaching mile one thousand and it's just too intimidating for them. So people may not even take a course if they think they have to become a psychotherapist first to get a PhD or whatnot. So, that's great, great advice. Elizabeth, what advice do you give to our audience? 

Dr. Nielson: Yeah, I really want to build on that, because we hear so often, “Oh, I want to be involved, but I’d have to go back to school and go get all these years of clinical experience.” There's just so many ways now to get involved, so many more pathways. So, I echo what Ingmar said. I also think that finding organizations that are of interest to you and following those organizations, going to their events, getting to know the people there and the people who work there is a really good strategy, because the field is a growing field, but it is organized in organizations. Oftentimes, they're small, and they're approachable and they may have a need for you to do a little volunteer work for them or to help them out with an in-person event, or maybe there's some other way that you can be of help to the organizations that you really find inspiring and motivating. 

Another really great thing to do if you're interested in getting involved is to come to some of the conferences that really are focused on psychedelics. There are a number of them that are fairly well established at this time. Upcoming, we've got Horizons in New York, ICPR in Europe, and other places that are really, really solid ones. And those tend to be very much community events, people who have long relationships with the field, people who know each other, and a lot of people who are new to it, and many are very, very approachable. It's a great way to meet people in person, develop some relationships, and just start getting to know who's out there and what they're doing, and if you have skills or services that you can share to start with, you'll find the right place for them, through those relationships. 

Shiv: Yeah, that's amazing advice, and something we definitely promote a lot here at Osmosis. One reason we have the podcast is to introduce our learners to all these great companies and people in various really interesting spaces, ranging from psychedelics to AI, with the hopes that many of them wind up joining and contributing whether as a learner or customer, or as a teammate. We really encourage that. 

My last question is open mic/open ended, there were a lot more things we could have talked about in this short podcast episode. What are one or two things you want to leave our audience with?

Dr. Gorman: I’m thinking of your audience as being largely medical professionals or scientists, maybe, and what I’ve been thinking about lately is going to be kind of a grandiose idea, or a big idea, but just how, over the course of history, the pendulum swings from one direction to the other. We had psychoanalysis which was about unconscious and emotions. And then we had the swing towards behavioralism, this idea that we could monitor people's behavior, and then sort of understand who they are. Then there was sort of an internalized version of that into kind of a cognitive mindset, and then mindfulness, which I think is somewhere between this idea of romanticism and rationalism. I think it's actually a quite nice solution where I land… the kind of integration of these things. 

But one thing that I see with psychedelics, particularly as they're emerging, is maybe a swing back towards a little bit more of the romanticist way of thinking, which is the importance of the somatic, the importance of, perhaps, things that are on the edge of our understanding, the emergence of the subconscious. We have this concept of the inner healer intuition, these ideas that are more about connecting to emotion and emotion informing truth. 

I don't know if this is where we're going to necessarily land. I think the pendulum is going to be swinging in the other direction as well. So, I think as your audience reads psychedelic research papers, clinical trials, engages in trainings, you know, they may find that their assumptions are challenged, perhaps by this more romantic way of thinking but I would ask them to not judge too quickly. I think that is my answer. 

You know, this is a young, young field in terms of its emergence in the modern medicalized world and there's so much that we have to learn. One of my concerns is that there will be, in this pendulum swinging in the other direction, a kind of knee jerk reaction to it. So I would say, be patient, be open minded and remember that we're still trying to figure things out. Hopefully, we don't become too precious about our priors and we're able to be flexible with regards to this emerging new treatment. 

Shiv: Well, if there's one thing I know psychedelics are described as doing, it's supposed to help make people more flexible and more open-minded, so hopefully, as a field, they can do that. Elizabeth, final words for you.

Dr. Nielson: Well, I am so glad we're moving on from the CBT years because that was really not my style. I think if there's one thing I’d like people to keep in mind it’s that psychedelics can be amazing tools and give us some access to amazing experiences. Those, of course, we think can be quite useful in this way that we've been discussing. But they're not the only answer, and they're not the only way to get there. And so when we sort of idealize them as the only avenue or the only means or method that we may have to self-actualization or personal growth or even healing from mental stress, we may really limit ourselves and shut down the possibility of other options. 

These are human experiences. They're experiences that humans have been having since the origins of time and not always at the command of having ingested a specific molecule, or a psychedelic, or a plant or something like that. So, just keep the mind open to this as a human experience. It's part of our human nature and our human capacity, and not be totally stuck on which specific molecule or which specific dose or that sort of thing, but realize this more in a much broader context as far as our capacity as beings for self-realization. So, I'll leave it with that. I mean, I think we’ve both got some really forward-thinking ideas here for your audience, and hopefully some open-minded folks will be able to understand these things. Definitely learn as much as you can about psychedelics and what's happening with them right now. Keeping this context in mind will really probably help you go super far with your interest. 

Shiv: Again, those are really good thoughts and advice. From what I’ve seen from Fluence -- just giving you guys a plug -- a lot of the training you guys do is not just on this particular molecule or that particular protocol, but rather the foundational skills that anyone who wants to be a good listener, good healer, good therapist can benefit from. 

And so, you know, who knows how the industry will evolve over the next few years, but my hope is people will go to your site and go through trainings like what you guys are offering so that they're able to be prepared for whatever may come and just be good providers, or even just patients who want to pursue these experiences themselves. 

So with that, Ingmar, Elizabeth, thanks for taking the time to be with us on Raise the Line, and more importantly, for the work that you guys have been doing for many years now to raise the line yourselves and strengthen our healthcare system. 

Dr. Gorman: Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

Dr. Nielson: Thank you. 

Shiv: And with that, I’m Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show and remember to do your part to Raise the Line. We're all in this together. Take care.