The institute was established to provide faster, better therapies for depression, anxiety and more.
The revolution in psychiatric treatment is here, and one of its earliest proponents and founder of La Jolla-based medical center calls the new approaches “really exciting.”
Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute was founded to provide improved treatments for diagnoses such as depression, anxiety and PTSD by Dr. David Feifel, a former UC San Diego School of Medicine professor and director of its Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Medicine Program.
Dr. David Feifel
Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute
These “advanced treatments,” such as ketamine therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation, are allowing people who historically “have not benefited sufficiently” from traditional medications like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or talk therapy to finally address their mental illness and heal, Feifel said.
Kadima administers ketamine therapy through a series of on-site treatments, provided in a “thoughtfully decorated room to bring calmness and connect [patients] with nature,” Feifel said.
In an environment conducive to healing, the patient is monitored during the treatment and invited to a “mind altering experience,” he said, processing the treatment afterwards with a therapist who helps the patient integrate healing into daily life.
Ketamine, originally an anesthetic discovered to have “incredible potential to rapidly improve people’s clinical depression, anxiety [and] PTSD” at low doses, Feifel said, produces “a very distinct psychedelic-like effect, which … is what actually is the therapeutic aspect of it.”
When used in the proper situations, ketamine is “a game changer,” he said.
Ketamine works differently from SSRIs and traditional medications in that ketamine improves neuroplasticity, “a broad term for stimulating growth and new pathways in the brain,” Feifel said.
When psychedelics are taken, they stimulate chemicals in the brain that act like “fertilizers for the brain cells,” Feifel said. “When these chemicals are released, the [brain] grows more … connections.”
These “rapid therapeutic effects” mean ketamine works faster to treat mental illness, he said, altering the pathways in the brain that generate a person’s sense of self.
Ketamine therapy “opens a door to changing the grooves that have been produced over decades in terms of their sense of self, and who they are, usually in a very positive way,” Feifel said, noting his patients have experienced a return to former passions like surfing and painting, or are able to see relationships in a new light.
“We see these amazing, amazing things come out of this,” Feifel said, adding the success of ketamine treatments is lighting the way for other psychedelic therapies to come to market.
“We are anticipating many more drugs like psilocybin and MDMA,” he said. “There are companies developing, with great success, formulations of LSD and DMT.”
Doctors are “excited about having this whole toolkit of different psychedelics to do things that are much more effective and fast and definitive than what we’ve been struggling with” using traditional medication, Feifel said.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, works similarly to change activity in the brain but with technology, in the form of a device that creates a rapidly pulsating magnetic field “on parts of the brain that we know are not functioning right, causing the symptoms of depression, anxiety and PTSD,” Feifel said.
TMS “causes those brain cells in its pathway to fire, … and just like exercise, they get stronger over time,” he said, a benefit that increases over several weeks of treatment.
Where psychedelics are quick to work but the benefits can sometimes wear off, “TMS is more durable,” Feifel said. “It takes longer to create the kind of neuroplasticity that it creates, but it does last longer.”
Since leaving UCSD, Feifel has “really endeavored to create a center that is a healing place,” he said. “It’s not just the things that we do. It’s also the incredible staff [and] the physical environment.”
The future of mental health treatments, he said, looks “very promising.”
This article is sponsored.
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