Are Veterans And Psychedelics A Match? New Data Partnership Looks To Find Out

Two organizations are partnering up to learn more about how can psychedelic drugs improve the mental health of veterans.

Heroic Hearts Project and Maya PBC have teamed up with the goal of aggregating clinical evidence for health outcomes achieved in psychedelic treatments provided to the veteran community. 

Along with increasing federal attempts to approach the question, several othernot-for-profit organizations are undergoing efforts to bring information about treatments with psychedelics for diverse conditions (such as PTSD and addiction) closer to communities as well as to provide more accurate reports on how veterans are being benefited in their quality of life by this type of therapy.

For this particular project, Heroic Hearts, the organization funding veterans’ legal access to psychedelics-assisted mental health treatments, will invite all its participants to track their wellness journeys using Maya's software platform to establish a body of evidence for clinically-valid outcomes data.

Currently, Heroic Hearts is funding treatment for 100 veterans annually. While the organization’s sponsored programs mainly involve ayahuasca, some also work with ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, psilocybin and ketamine, and all are paired with professional preparation, integration-coaching sessions, and ongoing peer support. 

The Maya platform will capture data from these outcomes while simultaneously being deployed with related organizations, like The Mission Within, Heroic Path to Light and The Hope Project, to generate a large-scale structured dataset informing on psychedelic therapy’s health outcomes for veterans and their family members, to be used as proof of efficacy and as part of veteran's integration process. 

Maya PBC aims at bringing together psychedelic researchers, providers and patients to collaboratively draw on psychedelic treatments’ best practices. To that end, the software platform includes a companion app for individuals, a measurement-based care platform for providers, plus a real world data platform for academic and commercial researchers.

On behalf of Maya, CEO David Champion explained: "We believe that the only way to accelerate safe and effective, legal, psychedelic practices is to look beyond controlled studies and to the growing landscape of real-world psychedelic practices."

"By inviting participants to contribute their journeys to a well-structured, anonymized, and secure dataset, we hope to support amazing organizations like Heroic Hearts Project, to create the body of evidence needed to establish credibility for these treatments, to inform sensible legislation, and to garner greater funding for their communities," he concluded.

Heroic Hearts COO Zach Riggle added: "Data tells stories and Maya's platform will enable us to tell our story in a way that will help save lives by educating veterans, providers, and legislators on the therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicines."

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash