“What was something amazing that happened to you this weekend,” Mindbloom’s CEO Dylan Beynon asked me, less than 30 seconds into our call. His bright eyes and relaxed demeanor radiated a deep peace and presence, paired with what seemed like a genuine care for the other person on the call — something that’s rare in an interview with a CEO. Sure, he was talking with a journalist to further Mindbloom’s mission, but he was modeling something that runs deep in the mental health startup’s DNA: being there for others.
Beynon built Mindbloom after finding deep healing for himself in psychedelic medicine. For him, the journey started a few years ago when he experienced a facilitated MDMA treatment. Apart from wanting more people to experience the radical healing powers of promising medicines that were chased underground as collateral damage to the war on drugs in the 1980s, Beynon has seen the mental health medical machine failing people very close to home.
“Mental health is the number one public health crisis, and depression is the number one cause of disability worldwide. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people 18 to 35 and the number three cause of death for people 35 to 55,” Beynon rattled off the statistics, before the words got stuck in his throat. “My sister and my mother became fentanyl overdose statistics last year and the year before. This is deeply personal and meaningful to me. And when you look at the root cause of why we’re losing the fight to the mental health crisis … our existing treatment options just aren’t getting the job done.”
Beynon’s sister and mother both had severe mental illnesses, Beynon said. Navigating the mental health options available to them was harder than finding more accessible relief in self-medicating with fentanyl.
“My family was obliterated by mental illness. My mother was schizophrenic and an addict. My sister was schizophrenic and an addict. For both of them, we tried the traditional treatments: antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, anti-psychotics, one-on-one therapy, group therapy, in-patient rehab, out-patient rehab … Unfortunately, none of them worked well enough,” Beynon said. “My mother ended up spending 15 years homeless because we weren’t able to help her. My sister would have been homeless if she wasn’t sheltered by my father. She died of a fentanyl overdose after getting out of rehab last year.”
Beynon had never heard of ketamine as a medicine for mental health until his doctor told him about it. He underwent a treatment and found it transformational but said that it was hard to experience these treatments in a clinical setting. It’s even harder to get access: In-patient infusion treatments can cost $1,000 per session on average and whether insurance covers these treatments at all is still murky.
“Psychedelic medicine has just been utterly transformational for me for over 16 years now. It radically transformed my mental health and my outlook, and the way I relate to others and the world,” Beynon said. “I don’t think I’d be who I am or had the opportunities to build the things I do if it wasn’t for these medicines. The broader acceptance and access to psychedelic therapies has literally been the change I most wanted to see in the world my whole adult life.”
His own experience with the treatment led him to wonder whether it was possible to make ketamine more universally available, far cheaper and easier to access.
Of course, some might be critical to how easy it has become to get accepted for treatment for the off-label use of a scheduled drug: scoring high enough on the depression and anxiety scale to be deemed suitable for Ketamine treatment seems like it’s very easy indeed. Mindbloom will claim that it has rigorous vetting in place, of course, but anecdotally, the intake process isn’t all that dissimilar from doctors “prescribing” medical marijuana in California when that became legal. I’m not saying that Mindbloom is admitting more patients that it should, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the company will be subject to deeper scrutiny at some point.
One thing that might fuel that scrutiny is the company’s extraordinary growth and, ironically, how it has been delivering on its goal of making the treatments more accessible.
“We have increased access by bringing the price down 80% from the average in-person provider,” Beynon said “We’ve been running for over three years, doing over 220,000 treatments.”
A broad clientele
Mindbloom has more clients in their 50s than in their 20s, the company told me.
“Our clientele surprises people because they see us having Instagram ads, and they believe maybe it’s for millennials,” Beynon said. “But these are people who have suffered from anxiety, depression and other mood disorders for five, 10, 20 years. They’ve tried a lot of different antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds and therapy. Nothing has really worked for them until they’ve tried ketamine therapy. The rate of adoption from patients who have really struggled [has gone up] a lot faster than anticipated.”
If at this point you are confused, and remember that ketamine is used as a horse tranquilizer, you are correct. It is. But it’s also used extensively on humans as an anesthetic. It was approved for use in the U.S. in 1970, and it has a few benefits over other anesthetics. For example, it is very hard to kill a patient by administering too much of it: It doesn’t repress breathing or heart function the same way morphine might. As a result, it’s used extensively in emergency and battlefield medicine.
In addition to its use as an anesthetic, however, it started seeing some promise as a treatment for depression and has been studied for its off-label use as a treatment for drug-resistant depression for more than 20 years. Today, Mindbloom prescribes tablets that patients hold under the tongue, which means there are no needles or IV bags involved in the treatment.
“When I started the company in 2018, there were hundreds of ketamine clinics, and a number of providers were even doing at-home ketamine therapy. Their clients got great results. At the time, it still felt like this was a sort of specialized, emerging treatment. Today, if you go to any psychiatric conference, you’re going to find that ketamine is widely discussed as one of the most exciting treatments in behavioral health,” Beynon said. “I think one of the things I’m really excited about is seeing that the rate of provider adoption has already moved from sort of specialty provider to something many psychiatric providers are adding on to their practice.”
One of the big growth opportunities for Mindbloom as a company is to extend its content and protocols to other medical providers. “On a longer time scale, I’m excited about seeing primary care physicians, who historically might have prescribed antidepressants, one day be able to begin adding on ketamine therapy into their practice,” Beynon said.
Finding quicker treatments
Ketamine can offer instant relief to people who are under this type of treatment. That isn’t the case for existing drugs. Mindbloom points out that more than 40 million Americans are prescribed antidepressants like Lexapro and Prozac. The efficacy is mixed: Some studies show that 50% to 70% of patients have a clinically significant quality of life improvement, but the medicine typically takes four to eight weeks to start working. The medicines can also have significant side effects.
Mindbloom wants to make the treatments accessible to more people. Ketamine infusion clinics are typically only found in urban areas, and cost is a huge barrier to entry. Telehealth may make accessibility easier, and tackling the pricing will be the next frontier.
“My father was a mailman and a city bus driver. Even if this were available 20 years ago for my mother, and 10 years ago for my sister, at $1,000 a session, there’s no world in which my family could have afforded this,” Beynon said.
The company is also closely linked to a peer-reviewed clinical study in progress with researchers at MAPS (Mindbloom’s Science Director Dr. Casey Paleos is a principal investigator on MAPS’ MDMA trials, although the company itself isn’t directly involved with the trials) and is keeping a very close eye on the clinical trials done with novel psychedelic treatment modalities.
“We’re not called ketabloom for a reason,” Beynon said. “If you ask me, MDMA is the most exciting psychedelic medicine out there … When MDMA is FDA approved and goes through new drug approval next year, we will be amongst the first to eagerly help people access it and get the most out of these treatments. It’s going to change the world.”
Mindbloom’s breathless support for its medicines as a cure-all for mental health ailments is understandable — that is the business it is in — and it’s not unreasonable to see what illnesses respond well to ketamine and other novel treatment modalities
… and beyond
Mindbloom isn’t planning to stop there, however: psilocybin (“shrooms,” if you will) is also coming down the regulatory pipe. It’s now in phase two clinical trials, which means it could potentially become available two to three years after MDMA-assisted therapy is FDA approved.
“Both MDMA and psilocybin have been designated breakthrough therapies by the FDA,” Beynon said. “They’re rare designations to fast-track treatments. The Biden administration even put out a statement saying that they’re going to make sure that these medicines get to people, especially veterans and mental health populations, as quickly as we can because we’re losing the fight to the mental health crisis.”
There are many other medicines that are currently being studied: mescaline, nn-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, LSD, Ibogaine and more experimental, novel compounds are making their way across the desks and labs of researchers. The newer compounds could be especially interesting; while LSD may have a powerful healing effect, it is also an eight- to 12-hour commitment. If the same effect can be had in two or three hours, that might make treatments more accessible to people who cannot — or do not want — to take several days out of their lives for a treatment.
“I haven’t met a single person since I started Mindbloom who doesn’t have a first degree of separation — themselves or a close family member or a friend of a friend — with a serious mental health issue. We need more treatments and we need better treatments because what we have today is not fixing the problem,” Beynon said, outlining the broader vision of a society with better mental health treatment options. “When you look at the science, the peer-reviewed clinical research on ketamine therapy and soon to be other psychedelic medicines, you see something that looks like a 10x better treatment that is going to help millions of people. When we help those people, it will help their friends, their family and their communities.”