Margaret Gladieux, COL ’23, Lynchburg, VA
This summer, I had the unique opportunity to be a summer intern at SoundMind Institute, a local psychedelic-assisted therapy clinic and training center located just a few blocks from Penn’s campus in West Philadelphia.
Psychedelic drugs have been a subject of growing interest in the field of medicine, particularly for treating mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Ketamine is approved as an off-label therapeutic drug. Recently, Oregon legalized psilocybin for clinical use to treat a variety of mental health conditions. SoundMind focuses on psychedelic facilitator trainings, where they teach a course for people to become certified in administering psychedelics and guiding them through their treatment in a safe way and helping integrate their experience on the medicine. They focus on training people with marginalized identities and funding mentorship opportunities that make facilitator trainings more accessible. At SoundMind, they also offer ketamine sessions through their clinic where they hold ketamine assisted psychotherapy sessions for patients.
Through my time at SoundMind, I got to work on all sides of the organization, from day-to-day operations and business promotion, to grant research, all while learning about the growing field of psychedelics and working with people at the forefront of the psychedelic medicine movement.
SoundMind was one of the first three psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy facilitation education programs to be approved in Oregon to certify psilocybin facilitators to practice psilocybin-assisted therapies when therapeutic psilocybin administration becomes legal in January 2023. I was able to help work on the proposal for the training modual through organizing literature before submission. Then, after approval, I put together literature review summaries of current research on psilocybin in medical literature, including its effectiveness for treating treatment-resistant depression, life-threatening anxiety, and its efficacy in group facilitation settings.
On the business and non-profit side, I worked on researching grants to help fund SoundMind’s efforts to provide clinical services and trainings to people with marginalized identities and worked on letters of inquiries for future grant applications.
I also wrote blog posts about the role of psychedelics in helping cope with inter-generational trauma and organized social media content to be shared on SoundMind’s Instagram from some of their training materials.
Beyond these administrative tasks, I also was on-site a lot at the SoundMind clinic setting up for ketamine-assisted psychotherapy sessions by preparing beds and doing laundry. I really enjoyed being able to get involved in the clinical side and help prepare for ketamine sessions. A highlight of the summer was preparing and participating in a ketamine retreat, where graduates of SoundMind’s training course experienced a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy session in a group setting as an experiential part of their training to become facilitators. While I didn’t get into sit in on regular patient sessions, this was such an incredible part of my internship because I was able to see the entire ketamine facilitation process, from breathwork for preparation, to administration of ketamine, to people being in the medicine (this lasts 2-3 hours) to the integration process, where people discuss what they were experiencing while they were on the ketamine. Although I was just observing, it was incredible to be trusted to be a part of the group ketamine retreat and to experience a facilitation session firsthand.
Overall, I feel like I accomplished a lot this summer with SoundMind and got to see a lot of the behind-the-scenes efforts in the nascent-but-growing field of psychedelic medicine and training of psychedelic facilitators. I look forward to applying what I learned this summer to my studies of cognitive science, particularly SoundMind’s emphasis on patient-centered treatment that is experience and identity-oriented.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2022 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here.
