Changing the Narrative: Why the MAPS Protocol Is Real Psychotherapy

The path to healing trauma and advancing mental health care through psychedelic therapies is often blocked by regulatory barriers, cultural stigma, and skepticism. While MDMA-assisted psychotherapy shows immense promise, therapists wonder how these treatments can be made widely accessible and trusted, especially across different cultures, age groups, and medical systems. What does it take to shift public perception and institutional acceptance?

Psychedelic researcher and therapy pioneer Rick Doblin combines rigorous clinical research, international therapist training, and grassroots cultural change to reduce the stigma surrounding psychedelic therapies. He has initiated humanitarian projects in high-trauma, low-resource regions like Ukraine and Rwanda and facilitated the FDA approval process through pilot studies and collaborative research. Rick emphasizes the importance of therapist training — including firsthand MDMA experience — and encourages public storytelling to destigmatize psychedelics and build broader support.

In today’s episode of Living Medicine, Dr. Sandy Newes welcomes Rick Doblin, PhD, Founder and President of MAPS, to discuss his pioneering research into MDMA and other psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies. Rick talks about group and family psychedelic therapy models, the relationship between mysticism and therapeutic outcomes during psychedelic sessions, and how to support natural emotions during vulnerable states. 

This episode is brought to you by the Living Medicine Institute.

LMI is a training, resource, and membership program educating providers about the legal and safe use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

To learn more or participate, visit https://livingmedicineinstitute.com.

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Living Medicine podcast where we talk about ethical medical use of psychedelic psychotherapy, teaching skills, examining the issues and interviewing interesting people. Now let’s start today’s show.

Dr. Sandy Newes 0:19

Great. Hello everyone. Well, I am both a little bit nervous, deeply honored, and super excited to be able to be here with Dr. Rick Doblin and just also we I’m from the Living Medicine Institute. I’m so nervous that I forgot my introduction. As I’m sure you all know, I am the co founder and the CEO of Living Medicine Institute, which is a business where we provide content, resources and training for clinical and medical professionals who are interested in either learning about psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, getting training to move into psychedelic assisted psychotherapy or launch a career, or stay current within that field. And for me, this particular moment is really exciting, because I have been following Rick for many, many years, including way back to Burning Man back in the day, but really been tracking this research since the early 90s. I know that you started in the 80s, but have really, actually been following it pretty closely since that time. And as I’ve said before in other interviews, I’m very mission driven. Like, I’m one of those people who, like, in like 1994 was like, I will do this work. I will stand with you in this work, kind of thing. I even remember when I made that pronouncement. So, so it’s really an honor. And as I’m sure everybody knows, but Rick is the founder and president of MAPS, multi disciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies. And for those of you who may be less familiar, that is the organization that has just created the bus, got everybody on the bus, and then, like, drove the bus through all the obstacles, and continues to do so in order to push forward the agenda, not just on MDMA, but on psychedelic medicine in general. And so,

Rick Doblin 2:05

yeah, we’re driving the bus to Denver. Yes, June 16 to the 20th. Awesome. This is going to be one of the largest conferences on psychedelics ever in the world. We’ve got the convention center. We had 1500 requests to speak for around 400

Dr. Sandy Newes 2:24

spots. That’s amazing.

Rick Doblin 2:27

Psychedelic science.org Right,

Dr. Sandy Newes 2:30

right. Well, and we are going to have a booth there, so you know, if anybody can find us in the exhibit hall, so we’ll be there. So it’s psychedelic science.org and we should all be there. So I’m glad that you put that right there. And if you want to stay cutting edge in this field, then that’s the place to be. So, so, and I know you as somebody, as I said, who’s just really changed my life. I’ve had the honor of having some other people on here really changed my life, but, but were it not for you? Well, that sounds stupid. Were it not for you? I wouldn’t be sitting here, obviously, but I wouldn’t be in this we, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do this work. So I’m really grateful. So thank you for that. That’s the best

Rick Doblin 3:09

reward for me, is to see other people taking it up and doing their part as well. Yeah,

Dr. Sandy Newes 3:14

well, and it’s, you know, it’s this, it’s this movement, right? It’s not just like, should we or shouldn’t we make psychedelics, you know, legal for therapeutic use, which is ultimately what we’re going to move into talking about. But it’s really, you know, kind of, it is a revolution in the way that we see mental health and how we see change. So, yeah, well, so I’m curious, as I’m sure everybody is, what’s your current focus, right? There’s been a lot of changes, right? That in in August, we all thought that MDMA was going to be approved. It wasn’t. There’s been a bunch of different changes with MAPS and Lycos and all kinds of stuff still going on with FDA and this conference coming up. And you know, where, where are you at these days? What is Rick Doblin up to and what’s the focus currently? Well,

Rick Doblin 4:02

we brought in some new investors to Lycos, so trying to reconfigure what Lycos will do and what their priorities will be, and try to go about obtaining FDA approval. Mm, hmm. Okay, so that that’s a big part, but mostly I’m just sort of on the sidelines for that with investors in the new management, but trying to make sure that public benefit and MAPS interests are still important priorities. Got big meetings with lawyers tomorrow, but what I’m assuming, and I think it’s correct, is that MDMA will eventually be made into a medicine approved by the FDA. Yeah, that’s sooner or later. We can’t really say. So what I’m doing with most of my time is looking around the world in terms of sort of global humanitarian projects. So I would sort of say that what we want to do is go to where the suffering is, but where there’s not a lot of. Money, high trauma, low resource areas, yeah, whereas the pharma company, with investors will probably go to high trauma, high resource areas. So what’s happening in just a few weeks is I’m heading off to Ukraine. We are training Ukrainian therapists, uh huh, Ukraine has been stuck for years now with terrible laws from Russia left over being a very repressive conservative society that you cannot do research with schedule one drugs. Oh, even if there been research in other places, you can only do research in Ukraine with medicines that are approved somewhere else. Yeah. Oh, interesting. It’s been really a big struggle, but the Ukrainian government is now willing to change that. So, Oh, interesting. That’s a huge thing legislation. So we’re going to be training the first training of 50, or 55 Ukrainian therapists in MDMA assisted therapy. And then once that’s done, there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to actually get permission for a project, and then we’d be fundraising for philanthropy to try to fund that going forward, I just had some incredible meetings with people from Rwanda, really thinking about Rwanda, we have a project in Somaliland of all, and sent to MDMA down there from Canada for the training of therapists. We’ve got the plans, basically, MAPS is doing these international therapist training programs, yeah, like the ones in Sarajevo

Dr. Sandy Newes 6:41

that we, Greg went. I was there last summer, yeah.

Rick Doblin 6:44

And so we’re going to do one in Poland in October, and Switzerland, I think, is in January. And so what I’m trying to do is do four or five different small pilot studies. Yeah. That goes beyond the training into actually working in different countries, different cultural contexts, and to see how MDMA assisted therapy can be delivered. And also to see who are sort of the local therapists, like in Rwanda there’s no purpose or psychiatrist, right? So bring MD of a there. So that’s kind of my bigger focus is working internationally in that way. Goal is in a couple years, let’s say three years, hopefully, to get like $100 million grant to expand it in major ways, or over the coming, coming years. Yeah, we’re also MAPS has some really interesting stuff that we’re doing in the US. We just started a project that we helped raise the funds for at Columbia University, and it’s interviewing underground MDMA therapy therapists about couples therapy with mv Oh, interesting. So the FDA has never made a drug into a medicine in psychiatry for something that isn’t in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, right? However, from what we’ve understood, there’s nothing in the law that would prevent the FDA from doing that, so traditional diagnosis, but I believe it will prove to be one of the best uses of MDMA. Yeah, so we’re going to be doing this interview study, and then move to actually design a clinical trial.

Dr. Sandy Newes 8:41

So is that the purpose of that to kind of get by, you know, I mean, because what I witnessed is that it’s almost like the FDA just simply did not address psychotherapy outcome research methodology, because there, we’re not psychotherapy people, we’re drug people. And that was kind of a, you know, what I witnessed is that was sort of a reason to just dismiss that and throw that to the side, even though that whole literature exists, you know, and is well validated, and people have spent their careers looking at that. I mean, is that kind of like an effort to sort of get past that, like FDA only does drugs kind of piece Well,

Rick Doblin 9:16

the F No, no, I wouldn’t say that the the FDA works on devices. And so there are both devices, and then there’s instructions for how do you install devices, like knee replacements, things like that. The FDA doesn’t really regulate the instructions to the surgeons. They regulate device. So in this case, the endemic is like a device is like the instructions. So the FDA doesn’t regulate the content of therapy, but they are fully aware that MDMA is not the treatment in and of itself, that the treatment a therapeutic context within which MDMA is administered. Mm. Yeah. I think what really happened is that we had the misfortune, I would say, of having more traditional pharmaceutical people running the pharma company, yeah, didn’t really want to be associated with the therapy, because all they knew was the drug, yeah, when we would have criticisms of our therapeutic method, particularly if there was one in March 2023, in JAMA, psychiatry was not responded to. Lycos didn’t want to respond. No, not only that, but they blocked me and MAPS from responding. And so they had through the MAPS board and the Lycos board and just dynamics like that. So I think there’s a misunderstanding, or at least these criticisms of the therapeutic method were not really addressed by Lycos, and so yeah, created this confusion of you know whether our data was reliable or not, this idea that this further negotiations will take place with the FDA. It’s to really address this question of, is our data reliable? The other part about this psychotherapy, the aspects of it is that the FDA doesn’t regulate the practice of medicine. So what that means is, once a drug is made into a medicine by the FDA. Doctors can prescribe it off label means for something else other than so. Similarly, once a therapy is used in combination with a drug to demonstrate safety and efficacy, once the FDA gives its approval, they don’t regulate the kind of therapy that will take purpose. Can modify it, but what I think the FDA can and likely will regulate is say somebody with these credentials needs to be in the room for these many hours. Yeah,

Dr. Sandy Newes 11:57

which makes sense to me, right? I mean, it’s not a perfect solution, but that that that does make sense,

Rick Doblin 12:02

yeah? And I’m not, I wish that they would say something like, all the therapists that want to be working with this need to have a minimum amount of specialized training, yeah? But I don’t think that’s going to happen. So I think that when you just imagine a lot of like cognitive behavioral therapy, right? That’s people that that have delivered cognitive behavioral therapy can sometimes really help patients quite a bit, but it’s kind of a formula, almost, of how you work with people, and it’s very different than this emotional flow that comes up this when you do a psychedelic, totally. A lot of what we’re trying to do is actually untrain therapists. Oh, interesting now, and open them up to this different approach. So that a good way to say it, I think, is that, that when you take a psychedelic, it’s like dreaming, but you can’t wake up, right? But when you have these dreams that are scary nightmares, or whatever you you know, or even somehow you’re about to die in a dream, or stuff, people wake up, but with psychedelics, you can’t wake up. You have to work through it. Yeah, I think that’s that’s the essence of this therapeutic approach is that we support people as they work through things, but we’re not actually like in a cognitive behavior or in prolonged exposure, where you work on your quote index trauma, the worst trauma that you’ve ever had, and you go over and over and over that to Try to desensitize yourself to it. We don’t do anything like that. We support what’s emerging. So Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote the book The Body Keeps the Score, was our principal investigator of the Boston site. So things will, things, emotions, memories, traumas often come in terms of pain in the body. Sometimes you know that there, there, it takes a while for people to be able to address them directly. That’s the whole thing about post traumatic stress disorder, that it never seems to go away. It always feels overwhelming the memories of the trauma. It’s always about to happen or seems to be happening this kind of sense. And so what we do is, when people are under the influence of MDMA or other substances, other psychedelics, there’s a flow. We’ve kind of spoken about it as the inner healing intelligence, right? So the concept is, really, we all know that that happens with our body that sort of tries to restore order. And you know, you get a cut it deals. So that’s this theory behind this idea that when you take a psychedelic and stuff comes we’re not the guide. We don’t use the word guide. We support what’s emerging, whether it comes in a pain in the body, or it comes in a memory, or it comes in just. A pure emotion without link to a story, whatever that happens to be, we encourage its expression. Groff has this really great expression. They’re saying that the full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion. I love that. Yeah, that once you can fully grieve, then then things move on, or you can fully feel stuck, and you accept that, then that becomes a part rather than the whole.

Dr. Sandy Newes 15:29

Well. And I see that, you know, I know ketamine is not the same, but, but it is a legal psychedelic. And I do do trauma work with it, and I do it a lot like I do multiple sessions a week. And, you know, for somebody to kind of run the full arc of that experience, while also having that capacity to be both in it and then to witness it, and then to have that happen in the construct, in the container of an attuned relationship with somebody who is just with you, is fundamentally different, you know, than going in and Like, reliving and re talking and reliving and re talking and like driving towards that index trauma there. I mean, I live that too, like there can be a time and a place for that if it naturally emerges. But do we really need to make people go there? And is there benefit in doing so? And I can see why critics who are unfamiliar with that type of approach would just kind of leverage that as like, they’re not doing anything, they’re not doing anything, they’re not doing anything, they’re not doing anything.

Rick Doblin 16:24

Yeah, well, of the eight hour MDMA session around and it’s it’s different for everybody, but people who have eyes shades on, they are listening to music and headphones around half the time. People are inner, focused, dinner, and the therapists are like meditating quietly, but paying attention person. They’re there. It’s not that they’re doing nothing. They’re they’re actually really creating this safe, supportive context and encouraging people to explore whatever is happening the other more or less half the time, in no particular order, they’re talking with the therapist, right? So there is this tendency of therapists to think, unless they’re doing something, they’re doing nothing, right, you know? And so the one of the things that Michael Mithoefer has taught is called wait. And means is, why am I talking? Am I talking? Yeah. And this also relates to one of the other more, on the one hand, obvious, but the other controversial aspects of the training of therapists is for them to try the drug that they’re giving to their patients, right? And we, we’ve had two FDA approved protocols for that. And the people that have been through that have really learned an enormous amount from that. That’s what they say. Yeah. So this idea though that that should always be optional, never be required, but once you’ve done that, you know how much is going on when people are not saying anything, right?

Dr. Sandy Newes 18:03

Well, and it’s so important, like we do that in our training program, like in our level one, we have people actually do seven ketamine sessions at different routes of administration. And sometimes people are like, Oh my gosh. How can you make people do that? I’m like, Well, that would be why they would choose our program. That’s different than requiring them to utilize that. But you know, for people who are paying attention, also, again, the therapeutic use of a medicine experience and one that’s outside of a clinical setting. You know, I hate to say recreational, because it can be with a great deal of intention, but it is not the same as being like guided and supported with preparation and having somebody be right with you in an intentional fashion, like people. I believe people do need to experience that in order to really understand the power of the medicine, the arc, the experience, the attunement, the felt sense of being with another.

Rick Doblin 18:55

Yeah, I think that the only challenge, why it makes it controversial, is that when you learn prolonged exposure, or you learn cognitive behavior therapy, you practice it, right? But with MDMA, because it’s a controlled substance that can only happen legally inside a protocol, right? We have to justify getting the protocol approved and all of that, and then it’s expensive and but otherwise it’s not controversial. I mean, Freud had it where, if you want to be an analyst, you had to go through your own analysis totally, you know, who I’ve never heard of, an Ayahuasca shaman that’s never done ayahuasca, right? You know. So this has become, though, one of the more controversial aspects of training therapists is talking about their own self experience, right?

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