Ketamine, EMDR and psychic readings to treat mental health

From ketamine to psychic readings, employers are thinking outside the box on mental health

October 17, 2023 8:25 AM

When Amanda Rieger works with clients through her business, Soul Pathology, her goal is to help them uncover their most authentic selves. But Rieger takes a more unconventional approach.

"I'm a psychic medium and an intuitive, and I've had those gifts since I was very young," she says. "It's me communicating for your soul, your higher self, every version of you that ever was or ever will be. I ask, 'What are your challenges?' And I can see what's going on at a very deep fundamental level."

Like traditional therapy, meditation and other practices that support mental wellness, Rieger helps her clients process trauma in order to find an optimal state of well-being. While her approach may seem radical, it may be the fix to addressing the increasingly dire state of mental health in the U.S.

"COVID was a collective trauma — we all experienced it and we still have not seen the fallout yet, because it's unfolding in real time," Rieger says. "But the beauty of it is that it's created a different demand from employees around what they need in order to thrive and be successful and to be well in their life."

The shocking increase in mental health issues during the pandemic has exposed just how much help is needed: In 2023, a third of adults reported symptoms of anxiety and depression, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and 90% of Americans believe there's a mental health crisis in the U.S. In the workplace, 62% of missed work is due to a mental health condition, and half of all employees have quit their job because of their mental health. For Gen Z, that figure is a shocking 81%, according to KFF.

While 78% of organizations offer a mental health resource, according to the Society of Human Resource Management, utilization remains low, and accessibility issues have prevented many people from receiving the care they need. The average wait time for behavioral health services is six weeks, according to the National Council of Mental Wellbeing.

While challenging for employees, this can create an opportunity for organizations to get creative with their mental health benefits, says Rebecca Kase, founder of Kase and Co., which trains therapists in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, a form of therapy that's used to treat complex trauma and PTSD, among other mental health conditions.

"I have never really met someone that was like, 'Oh my gosh, as soon as I got access to this app, my whole life changed,'" Kase says. "We're looking for the magic bullet, for what's going to be the least costly, but that's just the wrong way to look at it. When we can really give people the services and support they need, with qualified professionals over a span of time, you're going to see cost savings and a better work environment."

For these practitioners, thinking outside the box can help shift the conversation around mental health and make an impact on well-being. Rieger, Kase and Sherry Rais, CEO and co-founder of Enthea, a ketamine-assisted therapy benefit provider, share their views on the ever-expanding definition of mental health care, and how their unconventional solutions can better support employees today.

Ketamine assisted therapy

Sherry Rais, CEO and co-founder of Enthea

What it is: "Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic that blocks the transmission of pain signals in the brain. When you do ketamine therapy and you have a dissociative experience, you might have a hallucination, you will have an altered sense of perception. But that will lead to increased introspection and increase neuroplasticity in the brain. After an initial assessment, you will outline what your intentions and goals are for the experience. And then post-ketamine, there's a therapy component while your brain is still in this active neuroplastic state. You can create new connections in the brain post-experience, and that's where the learning happens."

Who it's for: "Ketamine is useful for a variety of conditions: depression, anxiety, social adjustment disorder, and also substance abuse. We saw in our own patient data that 87% of people with PTSD had a reduction in their symptoms from a few ketamine sessions."

Read more:

Could ketamine psychotherapy be the next big mental health benefit?

Why it can make an impact: "Traditional approaches to mental health, like taking an antidepressant, don't get to the root cause of our trauma or our depression. After taking ketamine or under psychedelics, there are so many connections happening. And those connections, although we don't fully understand it, allow us to get to the source of our trauma and talk to a therapist about what's been causing us pain, suffering, causing us to be sad, and then come out of the experience with a new approach to life.

There's a legal obligation that employers have to take care of their employees and provide a safe and healthy work environment. But there's a moral obligation as well, and we don't want to be doing the bare minimum. We want to be setting the stage of actually creating a healthy community population."

EMDR

Rebecca Kase, founder of Kase and Co.

What it is: "EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and it focuses on the storage of memory. When we go through overwhelming, traumatic, highly stressful experiences, those experiences can sometimes get stuck in our memory networks and cause us a lot of distressing symptoms. The therapist is going to ask you to think about that memory, and as you're thinking, they add what's called bilateral stimulation, which may look like waving their fingers in front of your face and you following their fingers with your eye. Or it may be that you listen to these tones that feed back and forth in your ears. Or you may hold these buzzers that buzz back and forth in your hands. Research shows that when we tax our memory, you distract yourself and it breaks the memory, causing it to lose its emotional intensity."

Read more:

Employees are struggling with pandemic PTSD

Who it's for: "EMDR is an evidence-based therapy for PTSD. There's some research indicating its effectiveness with chronic pain, for addictions, anxiety and depression — all things that are very highly relevant for those who are struggling with complex trauma symptoms."

Why it can make an impact: "If you really help people address their mental health issues, it's going to reduce turnover, it will reduce HR-related issues, people are going to miss less work. You're going to save money as a company if you're really supporting people in a more robust way with their mental health needs. Giving somebody 10 sessions through an EAP platform is fantastic and is a great place to start. But usually people are coming for stuff that's been percolating for a long period of time and is not something that you can wrap up and fix in a couple of weeks."

Psychic readings

Amanda Rieger, psychic medium and founder of Soul Pathology

What it is: "When I do a reading, I drop into an altered state of consciousness. When someone comes to me, they can either share what they're going through, or I can actually read into what they're going through and start answering the questions they have. Downloads of information start coming through and I've learned to interpret it in a very clear, direct, practical way. So it's like if you had a USB port and you plugged it into a computer, that's what happens. I just start getting downloads of information, and tools and resources and information that's very conscious and applicable and unique to whoever the audiences are."

Who it's for: "[My clients] have been seeing a therapist, they've maybe even been dabbling in alternative healing modalities, whether it's ketamine therapy or Reiki. They've done a little bit of searching, but they're looking for something bigger around their meaning and purpose."

Why it can make an impact: "Some employers are recognizing the value of holistic well-being to create resilience, to cut costs, to enhance productivity, to attract the ideal talent that they need. Looking at how we incorporate wellness will not only start to create new solutions, new opportunities, it will up-level the consciousness of an organization, which will ultimately impact the organization's longevity. The old solutions are starting to become outdated. So getting curious about solutions that extend beyond the box is where you're going to see your success stories. I am attracting more and more people who want to find peace, happiness, joy, be productive, be successful, and enjoy life. It's not simple, but it can be extremely invaluable and enriching when it comes to our optimal health and well-being."