Dr. Jessica Eastman, a naturopathic doctor and psychedelic-assisted therapist, shares her integrative approach to trauma recovery and mental health. She emphasizes the significance of preparation and integration in psychedelic therapy, highlighting that healing occurs during the integration of insights gained. Dr. Eastman discusses the need for emotional readiness and a curious mindset and addresses the risks of poorly guided experiences. She advocates for a holistic, patient-centred approach and stresses the importance of foundational health and patient autonomy. She also announces her upcoming online trauma recovery program and offers ongoing support and education resources. Find her at: https://www.drjessicaeastman.com/ https://www.instagram.com/drjessicaeastman/ Chapters 0:34 Introduction to Psychedelics and Mental Health 1:23 Niche of Trauma Recovery Coaching 2:45 Exploring Safe Psychedelic Practices 6:55 The Importance of Preparation 8:37 Understanding Psychedelic Experiences 11:33 The Power of Perspective Shifts 14:06 Emotions and Connection 15:10 The Healing Process 20:11 Risks of Untrained Guidance 22:01 Managing Post-Psychedelic Dysregulation 25:12 The Complexity of Memory and Trauma 27:08 Navigating Expectations in Therapy 28:19 Organizing the Mental Closet 30:03 Gaining Control Over Emotions 32:29 Foundations of Healing 36:00 Integration of Psychedelic Experiences 40:23 Balancing Medication and Self-Care 43:47 Building a Therapeutic Relationship 46:01 The Role of Nutrition in Mental Health 48:58 Empowering Patient Agency 54:28 The Dynamics of Patient-Provider Relationships 57:29 Understanding Resistance in Healing 1:03:17 The Importance of Curiosity 1:06:34 Medication Misconceptions 1:10:56 The Art of Prescribing 1:13:32 The Role of SSRIs in Treatment 1:16:35 The Process of Learning 1:19:31 Alternatives to Medication 1:24:01 The Evolution of Medical Practice 1:29:52 Humility in Healthcare 1:33:39 Accessibility in Mental Health Services Transcript [0:01] All right welcome dr jessica eastman a fellow ccnm colleague and so we recently connected over um yeah well i guess like topics around psychedelics and mental health and uh some cult psychology and spiritual bypassing and um but i think what we want to talk about today is like mental health and maybe some psychedelics and trauma and because that's a big part of what you do and what your practice is in BC. [0:34] And yeah, maybe you could introduce yourself and tell me a little and tell the audience a little bit about your practice. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I am a naturopathic doctor licensed in British Columbia. I've been practicing there for almost 10 years. [0:49] And I also am a psychedelic assisted therapist and as I call it, a trauma recovery coach. Um, so I kind of mashed together, uh, integrative psychiatry and, um, integrative mental health work with trauma-informed primary care and, uh, some psychedelic, um, assisted therapy, like prep and integration work. I don't do the actual medicine sessions because it's not in my scope of practice, um, but. I could do that if I was like working [1:19] under another like field trip or a numinous or something like that. But I get a ton of value in doing like harm reduction discussion and prep and integration. And I have a little niche of people who come to see me when they've gone to do psychedelic assisted therapy, usually with an underground therapist who wasn't super well trained and they had a bad experience. [1:38] And then they are looking for somebody to like help them sort that out. Also because a lot of psychiatrists and psychotherapists and psychologists and medical doctors don't have a whole lot of training or understanding about psychedelics and so these people sometimes come to me they're like in inpatient psych and their psychiatrist is saying like you've broken your brain and there's nothing we can do to help you and then they call me kind of like as a last-ditch effort to be like hey is my brain really broken and I get to say like no it isn't actually we can heal this and we can work through this so that's a really fun little niche that um is is developing there's like more and more need for that um and then i do some trauma recovery coaching specifically both in my practice and separately um so i get to kind of weave a whole lot of mental stuff together that's really cool that's really really really interesting i know bc has a more expanded scope than ontario when it comes to um like i think i Dr. [2:37] Ray St. Arnall about ketamine therapy and like that's in scope or like legal for therapeutic use. But yeah, how did you get into the and what maybe you can describe some really interested kind of like what the prep would be like in a in a responsibly administered sort of psychedelic session, like what kind of prep is usually involved and what's the integration like afterwards if someone's really going about it in like a. [3:04] Yeah, totally. Yeah, safe way. Yeah, so the prep work is actually done from, you know, anywhere from one to multiple, like three or four, you know, up to like six months worth of sessions before you do the actual medicine sessions. [3:25] And what's involved in prep work is really variable from person to person. The kind of universal things that are involved in prep work is having a discussion with the client or the patient about what they are expecting. And a big part of the prep work is helping them to get clear on what their goals are and helping to work away from a bunch of expectations and toward like intentions and an opening to the possibility of whatever the medicine is going to take you into. Um as a lot of people go into these sessions understandably like hoping that they're gonna you know be a cure-all because they've been struggling with you know depression or PTSD or OCD or whatever it is for a long time and um, psychedelic medicine is a unpredictable in certain ways and so it doesn't it's not linear in the way that like when you give this dose of a of an ssri we generally have this response and when we increase the dose we have an increased response and so psychedelics are a more unpredictable, world they kind of um work often by teaching you how to surrender and and exposing you to, feelings and or stuff that you want to work through or that you maybe need to work through. [4:47] But going in the most likely things that are going to create a bad time or a bad trip is if you go in with a whole bunch of expectations or you go in with the expectation that you're going to be able to control the experience. And so like a classic example is like people who come And they say, OK, I want to go into this session to heal my relationship with my father. And that sets you up for a challenging session, potentially, because there's a whole bunch of expectations built into that concept. And so what we often work that into is something more open ended is like I my intention for this session is to be curious and to understand more about my relationship with my father because we don't put expectations on like healing or outcome necessarily because a the medicine doesn't do that for you. It illuminates things and helps you to do that work on your own and be surrendering or being able to like relinquish control to the experience is a big part of how the medicine works and how it helps you to allow for neuroplastic change and perspective updating. [6:01] So, yeah, that's a big part of kind of like universal prep work with anybody who's doing it well. And then there are some other things that some people need more support in than others. Like some of the things that I personally would, you know, like more or less require would say like this is a prerequisite to being able to do this work is... Decent amount of experience and tools in being able to manage uncomfortable emotion and knowing that you understand like how to know where your edge is in terms of like I can handle this and this is where my overwhelmed edge is and when I need to ask for help and then also having the skill set of being able to ask for help when you need it because like I said sometimes these sessions are unpredictable and sometimes they're very chill and gentle and like lovely and warm and you you know feel love for the whole time and other times they like you know open doors to old emotions [6:51] or memories or stuff that like can be a flood of discomfort. And it's important that people are not going to be super dysregulated after and not then know how to handle that or get the support that they need. [7:06] So that's a component of it. And so, you know, if people come with years of psychotherapy experience, then they're probably full up on all of those tools. And if they've never done any of that work before, then we do some of that work first. Yeah, that's really useful. It's like, what are your intentions that are kind of reasonable? And then, yeah, maybe looking at, because one of the things it does, it kind of drops defenses. And sometimes those defenses are there for very important reasons that once they're gone, you know, what do you, you know, how might you respond or, you know, how might you find stability? [7:50] Yeah. Like, you know, if there's some things that have been compartmentalized for good reason and now they're blasting open or you're in touch with them or, you know. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think that's probably the most misunderstood part of psychedelic-assisted therapy and all that kind of work is that people think that the medicine is the thing that heals them or is that the thing that fixes their brain, so to speak. And it's actually like it reveals a bunch of stuff to you and it puts your brain into a particularly like flexible and malleable state where you have the potential to have neuroplastic change and build new neural [8:34] connections in the like, you know, a few days and weeks right after your session. So you are more changeable in that period
