Will Van Derveer

I would add that we don't have a great track record speaking from the perspective of a prescriber, of a psychiatrist, that's me, in terms of getting people through the mental health system and then out the door and putting psychiatry behind them.

What's exciting about this new interventional approach is that you're seeing people getting exposed to a drug, as Keith said, one time, three times, five times with a durable

long lasting benefit.

And we're talking about a huge market here of treatment resistant conditions.

So, for example, when you look at just treatment resistant depression globally, you're looking at 100 million people who are suffering from that condition, which is one third of the total people dealing with depression on the planet.

So it's a big segment of the group of people who are dealing with depression who don't respond to the currently available, currently approved treatments.

Yeah, and another dimension of it on the neuroscience level of it is that we are opening up a person's unconscious mind in a way that ordinary therapy doesn't do and ordinary medications doesn't do.

And we're firm believers in the view just based on the results that are coming out in these FDA trials is that the keys to the healing often

reside inside this unconscious mind that's hard to access, whether it's in therapy or with medications.

So another way to say that is that we're approaching the root cause of the condition by evoking what's inside of you, as opposed to the current approach and how I was trained to medicate depression or PTSD, for example,

is that you use these conventional medications you take every day to suppress your symptoms and that might help you a lot so there's nothing wrong with that but when you stop taking the medications typically sooner or later the symptoms come back so you haven't actually dealt with the root cause that's underneath the symptoms

I mean, one of the big...

issues that we see is the rates of suicide in veterans.

So when you talk about how do we get to a tipping point, it's a hard argument to make to get on a soapbox and say, we're taking good care of our veterans.

It's hard to argue that because of how much those people are suffering when they get back from combat typically.

We see, for example, in one VA study over the period of time from 2001 to 2014,

30,000 suicides amongst veterans, while during that time we were at war and only 7,000 people were killed in active duty.

So when you have suicide rates that exceed four times what's happening in terms of combat deaths, that gets people's attention.

And it goes to show you that we're not treating these conditions well enough.

So at that point, it becomes an imperative to take, you could say more risk, to take the risk of going outside of the dominant paradigm or the conventional mindset about how to work with these conditions.