What is Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy?
In our clinics, we deliver Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy as a treatment for mental health and addiction. This approach combines talking therapy with sessions assisted by psychedelics. We currently use Ketamine-Assisted Therapy.
This combination has unique effects on the brain circuitry associated with unhelpful thinking and behavioural patterns. It may allow you to work through issues in ways that have not been possible with therapy alone, and help you to relearn the behaviours and thought patterns that hold you back.
If other therapies and treatments have failed to deliver, ketamine therapy may offer potential to create fundamental changes that deliver profound improvements to your mental health.
What do we treat?
We offer Ketamine-Assisted Therapy for five indications:
Addiction
The use of psychoactive substances in a way that is harmful or hazardous to health.
Anxiety Disorders
A category of mental health diagnosis that leads to excessive nervousness, fear, and worry.
Depression
A mood disorder that may be described as feelings of sadness, loss or helplessness.
Eating Disorders
A group of related conditions including anorexia, bulimia and binge eating.
PTSD
An anxiety disorder typically developed after experiencing a traumatic, frightening or distressing event.
How Ketamine-assisted therapy works
Addiction – like anxiety, depression, PTSD and Binge Eating Disorder – is based on patterns of behaviour established in the brain, often in response to trauma.
Our approach using Ketamine, disrupts the brain circuits that underpin these unhelpful patterns. The Ketamine weakens the neural connections linked to harmful thought patterns and addictions, opening the door for our trained and skilled therapists to harness this flexibility and help clients to develop more effective ways of responding to challenging thoughts and feelings and to make lasting behavioural changes in their lives. Using ketamine in combination with talking therapy can facilitate psychological breakthroughs, which therapy alone can often fail to achieve.
Our highly experienced clinicians deliver a course of bespoke therapy, which includes several sessions which include doses of medical grade ketamine, administered in a safe therapeutic setting.
This is an entirely new paradigm for mental health and we believe this is the biggest change to psychiatry in 100 years.
What our clients say about our treatment
Client Quotes
Client Testimonials
What is the evidence Ketamine-Assisted Therapy works?
ALCOHOL ADDICTION
The therapy and dosing regimen delivered in our clinics for people with alcohol problems was developed and tested through Awakn’s KARE (Ketamine in the Reduction of Alcoholic Relapse) clinical trials.
These trials showed ketamine-assisted therapy delivered 86% abstinence at 6 months post treatment, which is significantly more than the approximate 25% abstinence in the standard treatment. Trial participants also experienced significant improvement in liver function and substantial decrease in depression.
Anecdotally, many participants also reported sudden profound changes (‘like taking off my alcoholic jacket and hanging it up forever’) and ease of giving up after struggling for years. The results were published in the American journal of psychiatry in January 2022.
Because psychedelic-assisted therapy is effective at addressing underlying traumas that are linked to harmful repetitive thinking patterns, it presents the possibility to address a wide range of mental health issues rooted in trauma.
DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, PTSD, EATING DISORDERS & OTHER ADDICTIONS
The therapy and dosing regimen delivered in our clinics for depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders and non-alcohol substance abuse, has been developed by our team of world leading researchers, drawing on both a global evidence base, and on decades of direct experience working as researchers and therapists in the field of psychedelics.
While many clinical trials of ketamine for the treatment of mental disorders have focused primarily on the medication itself, decades of clinical experience in this field and a growing body of empirical data suggest that positive and more lasting therapeutic change can be achieved by combining the treatment with carefully structured therapy before, during and after the ketamine sessions. This combined approach helps prepare the client for their experiences, it also increases the likelihood of positive experiences, and helps integrate what they have been through to achieve lasting change. In this way, ketamine is used as a tool to stimulate neuroplasticity, facilitate cognitive flexibility, and optimize the conditions for beneficial effects of the therapy. Over the past decade, results from clinical trials on substance use and other mental disorders have supported the approach of combining ketamine and psychotherapy to contribute therapeutically and maximize lasting meaningful recovery to a good life.
Visit our Scientific Research page for details of clinical trial outcomes.
What to expect?
You will need to answer a questionnaire on the Self-referral page to check if you are eligible for the treatment. The eligibility criteria being met are a critical step in the process. Once the questionnaire has been answered, you can submit a referral form to register your interest. We will then need your GP records to ensure the eligibility criteria are correct. Our medical team will review this and then get in touch to either invite you in for an initial assessment or to inform you that unfortunately we will not be able to offer you this treatment.
Finally, the initial assessment will determine if psychedelic therapy is right for you. You will then be allocated to one of our clinics to undergo an 11 session course of therapy, which will include four ‘dosing’ sessions.
Why Awakn?
01
Europe’s only Psychedelic-Assisted
Therapy clinics for treating mental health and addiction
02
Focused on long term change, not a lifetime of treatment
03
A new clinically proven approach to mental health that provides hope to those where other approaches have not worked
04
Licenced clinics and research led by the world’s foremost experts in psychedelics and therapy
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Awakn Clinics London
18 Dukes Road, WC1H 9PY, London, United Kingdom
Phone: +44 20 7387 2596
london.clinics@awaknclinics.co.uk
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