On August 1, 2026, the newspaper Público reported in an article by Amílcar Correia that the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) will adopt a treatment model for treatment-resistant depression based on a combination of ketamine and psychotherapy. According to the article, this marks the first time that such a large number of facilities within a European public health system have adopted this approach simultaneously —eight hospitals in the British NHS have joined forces to provide this therapy to their patients.
A project that began in Portugal
The model adopted by the NHS is based on the protocol developed and tested at the Júlio de Matos Hospital in Lisbon, which is already in use at five Portuguese hospitals. Pedro Castro Rodrigues, a psychiatrist and clinical researcher at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, emphasized to Público the significance of this approach: “The work we carried out at Júlio de Matos was very important because it was one of the places where this model was developed and tested in a real-world clinical setting, within a public mental health service.”
The Portuguese psychiatrist goes even further: “It wasn’t a trial at a private laboratory, nor was it at a luxury clinic; it took place within the Portuguese National Health Service, with real patients and with existing psychiatry and psychotherapy teams.”
The results of the Portuguese study, published in the scientific journal *General Hospital Psychiatry*, along with trials conducted in Canada and Norway, were instrumental in convincing British experts to adopt the model. The therapy will be administered at the CIPPRes Clinic, a research center focused on the study of psychedelic substances and experimental psychopharmacology, which serves as a link between the Central North West London NHS Trust (CNWL) and Imperial College London.
Psychotherapy is not optional
This decision carries with it the risk of seeing the psychotherapeutic component diluted in the aforementioned model. The pharmaceutical industry has been progressively reducing this component in clinical trials, simplifying the regulatory process and testing the substance as if it were a conventional drug. Pedro Castro Rodrigues is blunt about the consequences: “The problem is that patients should not have to pay the price for these strategic decisions. The evidence tells us that most trials involving psychedelics—especially academic trials—were conducted in conjunction with psychotherapy, because the window of neuroplasticity opened by the substance requires therapeutic guidance to produce lasting change.”
The NHS’s adoption of this model also opens up possibilities for the future: once experience with ketamine has been gained, healthcare facilities may expand their offerings to include other substances, such as psilocybin or MDMA. The British Parliament has already established the Feiding Commission specifically to develop a plan for integrating psychedelic-assisted therapy into the United Kingdom’s mental health system.
Portugal, a pioneer in Europe
In 2021, Beatriz Ângelo Hospital in Loures began treating its first patients with ketamine in a Portuguese public hospital—making Portugal the first EU country to do so. Today, the treatment has expanded to other public hospitals: in Lisbon, it is also administered at Júlio de Matos Hospital and the Janelas Verdes Clinical Center; in Porto, it is now available at Magalhães Lemos Hospital and São João Hospital.
Although Portugal was a pioneer in implementing this treatment in the public sector, it continues to treat ketamine-assisted psychotherapy as a conditional treatment, decided on a case-by-case basis and without universally guaranteed access—unlike the situation in other countries, notably Norway.
Since 2023, The Clinic of Change has been offering psychedelic-assisted therapies for the treatment of treatment-resistant depression in Lisbon, with more than a hundred success stories over the past two years. The model adopted—which combines ketamine and psychotherapy in a structured, scientifically validated protocol—is precisely what the British NHS is now set to implement on a large scale, confirming what Portuguese research and clinical practice had already demonstrated.
The article was originally published in Público on August 1, 2026. You can read the full article HERE.
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