So I'm curious what you think.

I think this is a huge, huge issue.

And yes, I mean, I'm neurodivergent.

I've had a lot of trauma in my life.

I was conceived by artificial insemination.

I didn't find out about it until I was in my 30s.

It was a deep secret.

Okay, so if we move from there, I'm curious about, we look at the psychedelic therapy, right? and bringing that in as a central context, what happens with authority within that framework? Can you talk a little bit about it compared to a psychotherapy approach, as an example?

Tell us what made you go that different route and what was it?

Well, I've had a lot of experience with therapy and most of it not that helpful.

In some cases, even worse than not that helpful.

I did have a very successful psychoanalytic, relational psychoanalytic therapy in the 90s.

returned to therapy when a lot of life traumas and marital problems started to become unmanageable.

And they're both individual and couple therapy.

And my ex-wife and I had been working with psychedelics for a number of years before that therapy started.

So with you being a unique case, as you put it, what made you write this down? make a record of it, publish it?

me were ever going to be like

a big aha moment.

They're a tool that what I got in that 10-week period was a level of, I don't even want to call it symptom relief, but improvement in overall state that was astonishingly rapid.

A feeling of coming back into myself in ways that... you know, I was just not getting with all of these other, and, and I did have a, what I consider to have been a successful psychoanalysis in the nineties, but that was six or seven years of work.

Um, with this, it's not nearly as frequent and the benefits have been just enormous.

Um, and, you know, and, and continue to be, I mean, I, I've, I've got, still got work to do the, the end of the marriage and the, the loss of, so of community and COVID.

I mean, there, there, there was like a ton of trauma for me in, in adult life.

Well, that's one of the

But at the same time, I'd imagine there is some downturn to that as well.

Um, I think the downturn really was around.

how my mother in particular reacted to it.

And both of my parents have died fairly recently.

My bio dad died before COVID and my non-bio dad and mom died year before last at And my dad was very concerned that everyone in the family should know about it, and he forgot that everybody did.

But in the last few months of his life, he worried a great deal about the secret.

And I felt in the moment when the truth came out that he was kind of relieved by it all.

Why is that? What is that? Because EMDR is pretty powerful on its own,

But at the same time, I'd imagine there is some downturn to that as well.

I think the downturn really was around... how my mother in particular reacted to it.

And both of my parents have died fairly recently.

My bio dad died before COVID and my non-bio dad and mom died year before last at 99 and 100.

And I was very...

My dad was... very concerned that everyone in the family should know about it.

And he forgot that everybody did.

Because EMDR is pretty powerful on its own,

[upbeat music] Mark, what are we getting wrong when it comes to therapy?

Oh, [laughs] where to begin? I, I mean, I think that, uh, as with all healthcare in the US, there are, there are just enormous problems with access, affordability, the insurance industry.

The way that everything is structured makes it very hard.

And I come at it as a person who's-- has a great deal of privilege so that I've been able to create my own.

But even there, um, it's hard to find therapists who are willing to work that way because the, the standard model is forty-five minutes or fifty minutes for an hour.

Um, and e- and even in couples therapy, that can be the case, and it's just not enough time to go into any depth.

So one of the things that I've become acutely aware of in, in the past eight months since I've started working in the way that I have been is that longer sessions and more concentrated work can be a much more effective way of, of generating benefits.

Yeah.