This week’s Psychedelic Groundbreaker is Journey Clinical. Journey Clinical Inc. is a platform that provides services to members in psychotherapy practices.
Journey Clinical empowers psychotherapists to grow their practice with psychedelic therapy. Their ketamine prescription services enable psychotherapists to offer safe, effective, and transformative ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) to their patients.
What’s this article series about? Psychedelic Groundbreakers is a get-to-know-you-style blog series highlighting prominent and groundbreaking companies in the psychedelics industry.
What’s your company vision?
Our vision is of a world where people with mental health challenges have full access to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Our mission is to build a delivery mechanism for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy that will solve a key bottleneck for its mainstream adoption.
We believe psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies are one of the most promising new means of treatment available.
Why was your company started?
Together with my wife and co-founder Myriam Barthes, we set up Journey Clinical as a result of profound lived experience.
For the first 20 years of my career, I worked in finance – originally in Switzerland and then in New York. I eventually suffered a burnout which prompted me to rethink my approach to how I lived my life and how I took care of my mental health.
After my burnout, I tried a range of different psychotherapies – both pharmacological and non-pharmacological. The benefits they had for me were relatively limited.
And then I was introduced to traditional Ayahuasca ceremonies followed by a course of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP). The effect these medicines had on me was profound and I decided to get back to school to study clinical psychology.
On my path to becoming a clinician, I felt immediately that there was a clear need to expand access to potentially transformative psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies.
And so Journey Clinical was born.
What’s been the biggest challenge so far?
Since Journey was founded in 2020 during the pandemic, Myriam and I have encountered a raft of challenges that come with bringing a start-up from zero to one.
More specifically, given that Journey Clinical is an out-of-the box solution in an emerging industry, we always need to provide context before introducing the company.
It is important to highlight that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies are bringing about a paradigm shift in the way we approach mental health moving from a model of symptom reduction to healing the root causes of certain mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. We are in the early days of an S-curve adoption of these therapies by mental health professionals, and the field needs a delivery mechanism that empowers practitioners to deliver these treatments responsibly to mental health patients.
What excites you most?
The scale of the opportunity to improve clinical outcomes for millions of people. The pandemic has exacerbated a profound mental health crisis across the US and beyond. Empowering licensed mental health professionals to help patients access psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies is what gets me out of bed at 6 AM.
What is your biggest lesson learned when raising capital?
How to use the “No’s” as an opportunity to improve our pitch and reflect on our approach to get better results in the next meeting
Did you notice any type of investor differences while raising money?
The main difference I noticed was buy-in to the mass adoption of psychedelic therapies from investors. Given how early we are in the space investors are either believers or they are waiting to see how things will play out.
Describe your business model in 10 words or less
We empower psychotherapists to offer legal psychedelic therapies in their practice.
What tips would you give founders entering fundraising?
I will quote one of our investors and a personal mentor “you only need one” don’t give up, keep your head down, don’t take negative feedback personally, and keep going!
We’d like to thank Journey Clinical for being a part of the Psychedelic Groundbreaker series. Stay tuned for more profiles on leaders in the psychedelic industry, and click here to learn more about Journey Clinical.
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