Speaker Bio
Metten Somers is a psychiatrist and Medical Director of the Mood and Psychosis Unit of the Department of Psychiatry at the UMC Utrecht. He was involved in the OPTiMISE trial as project manager and obtained his PhD on the relationship between language lateralization and left-handedness using psychiatric genetic and neuroimaging techniques. He holds an executive MBA degree from the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His clinical and research work focuses on treatment resistant mood and psychotic disorders. His interest in psychedelics in psychiatry resulted in his involvement as site-PI in the trial ‘Psilocybin in Treatment Resistant Depression’, the first international large scale multicenter randomized clinical trial investigating the effectiveness and safety of psilocybin in depression. He is currently involved in several psychedelic related research initiatives, including setting up the follow-up phase III trial on psilocybin in treatment resistant depression. He is a co-founder and coordinator of the Psychedelics in Psychiatry Platform of the Dutch Association for Psychiatry.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
How to deal with the unavailability of legal psychedelic assisted therapy in Europe
The ‘Psychedelics in Psychiatry Platform’ of the Dutch Psychiatric Association (‘Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychiatrie, NVvP’) was founded in 2023, to provide a forum for discussion and information within Dutch psychiatry. With this panel discussion the Platform is introduced to the ICPR and contributes with a debate regarding the following.
Currently, the FDA is reviewing the New Drug Application for 'MDMA-assisted psychotherapy', with a potential approval in the US by 2024. In Australia, certified psychiatrists can prescribe MDMA and psilocybin under stringent conditions. However, MDMA therapy may only be registered in Europe years after the US. Psilocybin treatment still requires phase III studies before any application for registration will be filed. This disparity may result in large discrepancies between public expectations, amplified by media, and actual legal accessibility of these treatments. The resulting uncertainty can confuse and frustrate patients that may seek treatment outside regular mental healthcare. Healthcare providers may increasingly face dilemmas, as, for example, psilocybin truffles are legally obtainable in the Netherlands.
This interdisciplinary panel aims to discuss how European psychiatrists and other mental health care workers can approach the absence of formal prescription opportunities in the context of the sometimes over-idealized therapeutic potential of psychedelics, by addressing questions as: What attitude to adopt towards patients? How to deal with a request to facilitate a psychedelic experience for a patient? What care and advice to provide to patients seeking treatment outside mental health care? The panel will explore various potentially useful answers to these issues.