Bridging the Divide in Psychedelic Wellness feat. Dr. Will Van Derveer

Merging The Clinical & Psychedelic Worlds

Growing up, Will Van Derveer never expected to fall into the world of psychedelic healing. He had never done psychedelics, and grew up in Nashville, a place not known for its acknowledgement or acceptance of psychedelics. 

While he didn’t grow up with a curiosity surrounding psychedelics, he was interested in other cultures, and it was his investigation into other cultures that ultimately led to his discovery of psychedelic healing.

Phase 1: Influence from India

Van Derveer started down this journey when he found himself in India during medical school. There, he found a meditation teacher and a different approach to basic medical care than what he was used to in medical school. 

“One of the things I learned was just really appreciating basic medical care when you don’t have a lot of technology or a lot of money to throw at problems. There’s a different approach that I saw there that stood in stark contrast to our hyper-technical, hyper-expensive, way of doing things over here.” — Will Van Derveer, MD

Here, he had a mentor that taught him healing comes in many different forms. He saw her not only doing her job in primary care, but also healing through the relationships she held with her patients. 

Through simple conversation and ordinary, everyday resources, he had noticed his mentor made an incredible difference in the lives of her patients. 

He also had a personal experience as a patient traveling through India that led to his realization that there’s more to healing than Western medicine.

He was traveling through India as a young medical student and ended up getting very sick after being submerged in the same river as a dead, decomposing cow. 

He heard of an American doctor at a refugee clinic where he received a strong antibiotic that turned his urine the “color of Coca-Cola.” 

The next day he went to a Tibbetan clinic to see a Tibetan doctor for assistance, where he was told that the American antibiotics would ruin his kidneys. Instead he was given herbal medicine to take for three weeks. It worked like a charm and he didn’t have any consequent problems. 

“I was just really humbled by how arrogant I felt as a Western medical student and you know we’re the ones with the answers and we’ve got the technology and all of this stuff but actually the American technology was killing me and I would have I don’t know what would have happened if I kept going with that.” — Will Van Derveer, MD

He soon found out that meditation, psychotherapy and medications were not enough to completely heal from the childhood traumas he carried with him.

Phase 2: Legacies of Peruvian Medicine Work

As time went on, he became a practicing Buddhist sometime in his early thirties, where he would meditate for multiple hours a day. One day, a fellow Buddist invited him to an ayahuasca ceremony the night before Mother’s Day.

This ceremony began when the Peruvian shaman gave prayers for all the mothers on the planet, including Mother Earth herself. Something about this moment struck a cord deep within Van Derveer, and he began to weep.

This anecdote reminds us of Mikaela De La Myco, a regular guest on our podcast who spearheaded the movement to rematriate entheogens. 

We must remember that psychedelic healing is ancient and sacred. So how do we protect as well as partake in and promote it in a western civilization?

“It just cracked me wide open and I realized that there was a lot that I hadn’t worked through about the feelings I had about my own mother. It was very humbling. But it put me on a path.” — Will Van Derveer, MD

Thanks to that first ayahuasca ceremony, Van Derveer began exploring the ceremonial world of South and Central America. 

He was immersed in healing his entire being through psychedelic ceremonies, but at the same time he was still very much in the Western medical model as a practicing doctor, and the separation between the two worlds was getting hard to ignore. 

 “It started to dawn on me that it was, it didn’t feel right ethically for me to be choosing a different way to get well from what I was talking about in my work with people.” — Will Van Derveer, MD

Phase 3: The Precipice 

Around the time that he had this realization, he was invited to work with the team that was trying to start the first MAPS study for MDMA assisted therapy for severe PTSD in 2013. 

After participating in that study for many years, including having a hand in writing the final research paper, he saw with his own eyes the immense healing power that psychedelic substances hold. 

Two thirds of participants (~66%) no longer met the criteria for PTSD, and these participants had been battling PTSD with therapy sessions for decades with null results. 

Seeing the results of this study in a clinical setting was his first introduction into just how impressive psychedelic healing can be, but also that it can have a place in modern research and medicine.

Finding the Balance Point

“My large takeaway of your share is that you have found yourself at maybe at odds with these almost different polar opposites of how people regard this, like this Westernized, medicalized approach versus something that is more akin to community and is a little bit more relational and is a little bit more environmental. Talk to me about that.” — Jimmy Nguyen

All of these realizations that Van Derveer was experiencing were happening in tandem with his working through the westernized medical model to become a doctor. 

He opened a practice after medical school and spent two years doing psychotherapy, meditation, and prescribing medications to his patients.

In the beginning, he felt confident in his ability to help his patients, until he began to realize that it wasn’t a permanent fix. Medications were constantly having to be rotated out, and while it did help some people, he felt it wasn’t helping enough people. 

This caused despair to bubble up inside of Van Derveer and he quit after two years in an attempt to simplify his life, interested in becoming a meditation teacher instead. 

After quitting the psychiatrist side of things, he ran into a former patient of his who suffered from anxiety. This patient told him that after Dr. Van Derveer had left town, the patient had gotten tested for celiac disease and it turned out he had a wheat allergy. 

He stopped eating wheat and his anxiety completely disappeared and he did not need the anxiety medication that Dr. Van Derveer had prescribed him.

This interaction simultaneously woke him to a broader mindset and made his life more complicated. He decided he was going to be an apprentice to a shamanic teacher.

As an apprentice, he would go to ceremony with a prayer to ask: is this the right path for me? Again and again he would get the same answer from the medicine: we have enough apprentices, we need more people to bridge the gap for people who have not been exposed to this form of healing.

Now, he commits to “multiplicity,” which is the idea that each client may have things happening on multiple levels, all needing a different healing modality. 

If someone needs a high tech treatment like TMS, Van Derveer says go for it. If someone needs a Chinese herbal medicine regime, go for it. 

This approach to healing is all-encompassing, no holds barred. Each person is examined as an individual with individual differences and needs. 

Here we can take a moment to recognize that not everyone has the privilege of autonomy. The United States medical system isn’t exactly known for the patient’s sovereignty. 

This all-encompassing approach that Dr. Van Derveer offers prioritizes the patient’s needs, rather than forcing their symptoms into a limited framework that often characterizes Western medicine, where doctors may focus rigidly on specific paradigms.

The Reverberation of Our Culture

The medical system in the U.S. reflects the culture in which it was created. The idea of “holding in” or controlling our emotions is praised, reminding us of the Pink Floyd lyrics, “quiet desperation is the English way.”

Van Derveer was taught in medical school that those with treatment-resistant depression needed to be on medication or else they were taking a huge risk.

These are people who have been in the mental health system for a long time, and have tried many different medications and therapies.  

He believes that medications for treatment-resistant depression are suppressive treatments, allowing people to cope by turning down their ability to feel. Popping a pill to eradicate a symptom is the American way, but does it have a home in the mental health system?

Psychedelic therapy, being a much more evocative treatment, goes against the paradigm we are used to, suddenly requiring us to fully feel our emotions and all the things we’ve been trying to suppress. 

But Van Derveer believes that this is the way forward, and this is how we collectively heal, bringing material to the surface in order to eradicate it from negatively affecting our lives.  

The Hard Problem

So, what do we do when we have a revolutionary healing modality in a culture that expects us to shut up and sit down? 

“We find many folks who have these potentially wonderful healing experiences or people who find healing through the really hard ones like I have. And then they go back into the same aquarium that they’ve been living in.” — Jimmy Nguyen

Even participants of the MAPS MDMA study complained about a lack of community to share their experiences and offer and receive support. It’s almost as if humans have a natural desire to support and be supported by others.

It just goes to show how important integration is in all forms of healing, because it helps you enact the changes you wish to see, while also getting continued support. 

Where Do We Go From Here?

As advocates in the psychedelic space, we have to continue to offer support to those who are going through healing sessions and coming back into a culture that isn’t ready for them.

By creating a microcosmic culture within the wider, unwelcoming framework, we can start from within and build a community for those on healing journeys to come back to that is conducive to their need for expressive healing.

Together, we can gradually and carefully unwind the historical narrative of the War on Drugs that has steered legislation and kept psychedelic healing from the mainstream.

“We need examples, we need models, we need things that we can reference. You went to India and got sick and so you had that lived experience that you can reference, which then informs the rest of the decisions in your life.” — Jimmy Nguyen

In “America, the Melting Pot,” where most of the population has roots in immigration, there’s a lack of lineage. Most of us aren’t fortunate enough to have access to our rich family history, where in indigenous cultures, information gets passed down through generations. 

In a sense, we have started over, and now a lot of people find themselves walking down their healing path alone, instead of having a robust community behind them to offer their wisdom and guidance. 

Luckily, you have found yourself here, in the middle of a community who have made it their mission to offer that sense of community and guidance that has been hard to pin down in our individualistic society.

The Integrative Psychiatry Institute

The IPI (Integrative Psychiatry Institute) was established in 2018 by Dr. Will Van Derveer, MD and Keith Kurlander, MA, LPC in an effort to show other medical professionals how mental health is all encompassing, and how to train them to approach it as such.

They began teaching prescribing doctors evidence-based practices that just were not taught in the very limited conventional mental health care training. These practices included the gut-brain connection, effectively tapering off medication, supplements and homeopathic medicine. 

After several years, they transitioned their focus to a year long psychedelic therapy training program. They recognized a need in the space for facilitators in training to be able to safely have their own psychedelic experiences. 

It’s important that prospective facilitators are given this opportunity because if they’ve never explored their own internal landscape, how are they supposed to help others traverse theirs? 

Their training program works within the legal landscape, so in Oregon they have facilitators in training experience a group psilocybin session, in Colorado they have an optional ketamine practicum, and if MDMA gets approved they will create a training program for that as well.

“It’s really exciting to see people, many haven’t ever had a psychedelic experience before, going to a group experience and they’re having a psilocybin experience and it’s deeply powerful. It’s by far the most meaningful part of the training program is what the students say on the way out.” — Will Van Derveer, MD

As time goes on, more and more pathways will open up for those who want to pursue a job in psychedelic healing, but also for those who want to experience it for themselves and haven’t been able to.

At this point, where psychedelics are still in a prohibitionary period in most of the country,  we want to remind you of three aspects of psychedelic healing that Dr. Van Derveer feels are important to negating risk: always test your substances, and be thorough in vetting your facilitator, and psychedelics aren’t for everyone.

“Powerful tools come with, have to come with a lot of humility and care for the risks.” — Will Van Derveer, MD

A Conversation Past Psychedelics

While we’ve discussed a lot about psychedelics, and the merging of two worlds, it leads to a bigger conversation: Giving people the opportunity to heal, and seeing healing as a broad, all encompassing, life-long experience. 

It’s about changing the narrative from “psychedelics are the answer” to “psychedelics are a piece to a larger puzzle.”

“In my own lived experience as I was trying to handle things in secret or didn’t feel like I could talk about this openly because it would make me less than or less of a man or people thinking I’m unstable or not trustworthy or too much of a problem, and I think folks in this audience and community know that I’ve been very suicidal through my life. And for a long time, it was this notion of like, ‘that is a demon, that thing needs to go away, that thing is out to harm me. How do I dampen this thing or make myself impervious to this thing?’ And it wasn’t actually until I invited that part of me in to actually understand that that was a part of me that was crying out, that was actually asking for help. And then for me to get my own support and my own courage and bravery and model to like invite that part of me into my heart so that we can all heal together, that opportunity came through psychedelics, but then it was me who had to keep open.” — Jimmy Nguyen

It’s about finding the healing modalities that work for you, but it’s also about putting in an earnest effort and wanting to heal.

So, we wanted to find out if Dr. Van Derveer had any advice for people who are interested in psychedelics and want to talk to their doctor or mental health provider about it, and here’s the advice we got.

Interestingly enough, Dr. Van Derveer believes that it’s the professionals who may be the ones in need of more information, so to approach it from a position of curiosity. 

You can ask your practitioner about their experience with psychedelics, have they read the most recent research about psychedelics and X, Y or Z? Are they familiar with Micheal Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind? How do they feel about the emerging research?

If you find that your practitioner is afraid or off-put about psychedelic healing, you may want to seek practitioners in your area with a more open mind and more familiar with psychedelic healing. 

Recommended Reading: How to Speak to Your Doctor About Intentional Psychedelic Use

We have found more and more practitioners being open about psychedelic healing over the last 10 years as more and more clinical research is being done, so you may be pleasantly surprised.

If you have already had a conversation with your provider and they are indifferent or don’t have any experience with psychedelics, you can start by educating yourself online (which is probably why you’re here!)

We ended the conversation with Dr. VanDeer by asking him the more overarching question of: what can people do to improve their mental health, or wellbeing in general?

He offered some great wisdom: life is short, and our spiritual path isn’t straight and narrow. He reminds us of his own healing journey, how getting infected by a run in with a decomposing cow sent him on his own unimaginable life story. 

If we can approach life with open curiosity and less desire to control things, we realize that we aren’t in control anyways, and that’s okay.  

Engage in All-Encompassing Healing

Don’t wait for it to come to you, go out and grab it! Explore for yourself what the Westernized mental health model has missed. 

• Nothing Can Replace Self-Love: Self-love isn’t just about positive thinking, your physical health is imperative to loving yourself. 
• Privilege, Accessibility & Ethical Responsibility: See for yourself how living your truth can mean many different things, but that there are parallels hidden in each unique story where we can all find common ground.  
• Embracing Vulnerability: Discover the power of openness when sharing your psychedelic experiences, to foster a sense of belonging and acceptance. 
• “Here, Take a Psilocybin”: What if we lived in a world where you could go to your primary care doctor and get a prescription for a psychedelic? Maybe we’re getting closer than we think.
• Ethical Considerations and Industry Insights: For those navigating the psychedelic space, gain critical perspectives into consumerist traps in the psychedelic industry and the media’s influence surrounding psychedelic therapy.
• Support Comes In Many Shapes & Sizes: The ins and outs of psychedelic support are dynamic and often work in tandem with the person it’s geared towards, learn what it truly means to “hold space” for someone. 
• Antidepressants, SSRIs, Oh My: Like any drug or medication, learning about possible interactions is imperative to a safe healing journey, and the Spirit Pharmacist, Dr. Ben Malcolm, helps us do just that.

Ready to Find a Trusted Psychedelic Coach Near You?

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. How did Dr. Will Van Derveer experiences in India shape his perspective on healing?

Dr. Van Derveer’s experiences in India exposed him to a different approach to healthcare that emphasized relationships and basic medical care over advanced technology. 

Through this experience, he realized the tremendous benefits that a multifaceted approach to health had to offer by addressing the person as a whole and not just the symptoms. 

His mentor demonstrated that healing can come from deep connections with patients and the use of simple resources other than pharmaceuticals, an approach that humans have been utilizing for thousands of years. 

This realization was further compounded by his own experiences as a patient, which taught him that Western medicine was not always the best option for healing, highlighting how healing transcends medication and technology.

2. What role did ayahuasca play in Dr. Van Derveer’s journey?

Dr. Van Derveer’s first ayahuasca ceremony profoundly impacted him, allowing him to confront unresolved emotional issues related to his mother. 

This experience deepened his exploration of ceremonial healing practices in South and Central America and marked a pivotal point in his realization of the ethical implications of integrating psychedelic experiences with his medical practice.

3. What are some challenges that individuals may face when integrating psychedelic experiences into their lives?

Individuals often struggle to reintegrate into a society that may not understand or support their healing journeys. 

This lack of community can hinder their ability to process and share their experiences. Dr. Van Derveer emphasizes the importance of integration to support ongoing healing and create spaces where people can express and discuss their experiences openly.

Offering a community that people can turn to for support can soften the reintegration into everyday life, offering insights and a place of nonjudgement. 

4. How does Dr. Van Derveer view the traditional medical approach to mental health treatment?

Dr. Van Derveer critiques the traditional approach, particularly the reliance on medications for treatment-resistant depression, which he believes can suppress emotions rather than foster genuine healing. 

He argues that psychedelic therapy, by contrast, encourages individuals to confront and express their feelings, which he sees as essential for true healing. It challenges the Westernized approach to healing that we’re used to: popping a pill to relieve a symptom.

5. What advice does Dr. Van Derveer offer for individuals interested in exploring psychedelic therapy with their healthcare providers?

Dr. Van Derveer encourages individuals to approach their healthcare practitioners with curiosity rather than confrontation. 

They should ask about their provider’s experience with psychedelics, awareness of the latest research, and overall attitudes toward psychedelic healing. If their provider is indifferent or resistant, seeking other practitioners who are open to these discussions may be beneficial.

6. In what ways does the Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI) approach the training of future psychedelic therapy facilitators?

The IPI focuses on comprehensive mental health training that emphasizes the importance of personal psychedelic experiences for facilitators. The year-long facilitator training is meant to open up prospective facilitators to their own healing journeys in order to better serve others.

They provide legal opportunities for hands-on experiences with psychedelics to ensure that future facilitators can relate to the internal journeys of those they assist, fostering a deeper understanding of the healing process.

References

Kalfas, M., Taylor, R. H., Dimosthenis Tsapekos, & Young, A. H. (2023). Psychedelics for treatment resistant depression: are they game changers? Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1080/14656566.2023.2281582

Mitchell, J. M., Bogenschutz, M., Lilienstein, A., Harrison, C., Kleiman, S., Parker-Guilbert, K., t’alora G., M., Garas, W., Paleos, C., Gorman, I., Nicholas, C., Mithoefer, M., Carlin, S., Poulter, B., Mithoefer, A., Quevedo, S., Wells, G., Klaire, S. S., van der Kolk, B., & Tzarfaty, K. (2021). MDMA-assisted Therapy for Severe PTSD: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 3 Study. Nature Medicine, 27(6), 1025–1033. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01336-3