Mindbloom

“Ketamine is the only prescribable psychedelic medicine available today.”

– Dylan Beynon

Ketamine is a schedule 3 substance, making it the only psychedelic that can be legally prescribed in the United States today. Meanwhile, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and MDMA are schedule 1 substances, meaning they are not prescribable since the DEA defines them as having no medical use and being highly addictive. This, however, is slowly changing.

Mindbloom is a mental health and well-being company. They currently offer Ketamine assisted therapy to treat anxiety and depression. Ketamine historically has been used in medicine as an anesthetic, but more recently, the mental health community is finding it has a few significant therapeutic benefits:

1. It can be a fast-acting antidepressant.
2. It is a dissociative when administered at a higher dose which means you temporarily lose your sense of self and surroundings.
3. Ketamine creates new neural pathways in the brain and opens the neural plastic window that makes your thinking more malleable.

So when combined with psychotherapy, where you are talking with a therapist, these conditions appear to be a really effective way to change your perspective to overcome anxiety and depression.
Many psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, primarily act upon serotonin – the neurotransmitter that contributes to feeling well-being and happiness. Ketamine primarily modifies the activity of glutamate, a neurotransmitter in the brain that makes neurons more active and more likely to form new connections. And so often, it can feel very dreamlike.

From a business model perspective, Mindbloom is a platform that services medical practices that are independently owned and operated. Mindbloom also plans to leverage technology that can bring the cost of the treatment down over time. 

Dylan Beynon, the founder and CEO of Mindbloom, attributes starting the company because many of his family members suffer from mental illness. He lost his mother through suicide due to acute addiction and schizophrenia growing up.

At Mindbloom, the clinician´s protocol is a four-session program, generally every 1-2 weeks for an initial program. If somebody does one of the subsequent programs, that happens every 2-4 weeks per session. Mindbloom has brought down the cost of Ketamine, which usually ranges from 800-1200$ per session to 250$ per session. During the pandemic, they even provided virtual Ketamine-assisted therapy, where Ketamine was delivered to people in pill form at home.

Beynon claims that “a big reason that it is four sessions (which is backed by medical literature) is that it is helping people really leverage this 3-14 day neuro plastic window where they are able to more readily build synaptic connections and build new neural pathways. With Mindbloom´s programs, every session is built on the last and is accretive throughout this four-session program.”

Text is taken from this Business Trip podcast with Mindbloom´s founder and CEO, Dylan Beynon: