Meet NANA, The Digital Platform Guiding & Integrating Psychedelic Therapies By Argentina's Flor Bollini

Original story by Lara Goldstein for El Planteo.

Florencia Bollini is the founder and CEO of NANA, a digital platform offering a pioneering solution in mental health: education on psychedelic integration and wellness guides aimed at helping people take care of and heal themselves.

To date, NANA has raised $1.6 million in financing. Farid Chaouki. the co-founder of mental health unicorn Talk Space, is leading the platform's development supported in-lab by his design and innovation studio, NoNameYet.

In conversation with El Planteo, the Argentinian nicknamed "entrepreneurial shaman" by Forbes told us that she chose the name for several reasons. One, and perhaps the most spontaneous association, is that in many cultures "nana" is the word for grandmothers. A mother figure who brings an aspect of care, affection and ancestral wisdom, Bollini says.

Nana is also the name of a priestess and one of the most powerful African deities, the degree in which Bollini was initiated in order to serve therapy with psychedelics.

As a nurturing figure, she and her team seek to accompany people through their psychoactive experiences and help them heal gently with maternal energy. This, she says, is directly related to the use of scaling doses.

Shamanism’s misogynistic turn in the last few hundred years is not only "non-representative of how it all started," it also brought to the fore a tendency to provide "heroic doses" with which people often have negative experiences, due to the difficulty of processing what arises, and thus producing the opposite effect of what they sought.

Despite that, she says women tend to need lower doses as it is best to facilitate personalized medicine. "You can't generalize anything with psychoactives," Bollini says.

Adding Scale And Accessibility To Care

In the last ten years, Bollini has accompanied affluent people in their psychoactive experiences, working especially with 5-MeO-DMT (bufotenin,) "the strongest and most difficult to serve molecule."

It is for this particular psychedelic that she originally developed the platform and its solutions, in that it produces "a very disruptive experience in the belief system" and is therefore very difficult to integrate.

"I no longer work serving medicine, but am taking my proposal to scale and at once enabling access to people who may not be able to afford professional care or going on a retreat to a guide for self-healing and communal support," Bollini explained.

Combining ancestral life practices, community and AI, NANA seeks to empower people "to be their own healer," in a process in which the person is encouraged to create their personal protocol from available information on body, mind, soul, and spirit.

She has named this proposal Psychedelic-Initiated Transformative Medicine, or PTM.

More On The Platform

The system is personalized and standardized. Depending on which area requires the greatest healing process, the platform suggests life practices to start integrating, but the person ultimately chooses what to include in their protocol.

Once put together, sharing it with other people is empowering, Bollini said. "Seeing what life practices worked for someone with a similar problem to you... It's turning to the group power," part of NANA's founding proposal.

The app has a monthly membership and suggests understanding this as a life process: "Once you start the path of transforming yourself and try psychoactives, you no longer qualify for the diagnosis you once had," Bollini said. After this, the idea is to keep following the protocol, modifying it, to continue the process of personal evolution from the new stage.

Unlike modern Western medicine, which is resorted to "when you are already broken" and in which knowledge is accessed in a paternalistic way, the psychoactive gives direct insight to the person. This is precisely where the platform offers information on related life practices –meditation, nutrition, sexuality and counseling. When the person needs an extra push, they do another psychedelic session.

The focus is on people being able to take charge of their own process, of which the psychoactive accounts for only 20%.

"We educate so that people understand. For example: within fungi, species differ greatly from each other; what is a microdose, what to take alone or when a facilitator is needed. Also, how to create a conducive environment in people’s homes, how to use breathing, what happens if something is scary, how different compounds work for different conditions," she explained.

It also includes information on sexual healing. "If you want to generate mental health cures, you can't avoid talking about sexuality," Bollini says, considering that "a possibly forgotten sexual trauma returns when you ingest the psychoactive."

Taking sexuality from ancestral practices as a way to connect with God and a way to heal, NANA proposes to introduce it as a field of medicine within the integration with psychedelics.

What is disruptive about NANA is just that: taking care outside of the clinic and inserting it into the community and culture by embedding it into a movement while supporting the clinic by teaching it what has been learned in underground practices.

In this sense, the platform also offers functionalities for facilitators, educating on scaling doses and how to reduce the risk of bad experiences. It also focuses on the need to establish communication and congruence protocols between each patient’s evaluation and preparation.

"It's a way of life and there's no rush, you don't need to go from 0 to 100 the first time," Bollini concluded.

Spanish and English versions of the platform are due next!

Photo courtesy of Flor Bollini.