Author: Joana Petiz
Sapo, July 1, 2024
Portugal is one of the countries with the highest prevalence of mental illness. But psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can be a way out for the most extreme cases. This is the story of Keise and Carolina, who grew up condemned by depression and anorexia, but whose stories have a happy ending.
"I was very lively, I liked being with friends, partying... and depression robbed me of that, it made me feel trapped, wanting to die." Keise's testimony is like a punch in the gut to those who still believe that depression is the preserve of those who have too much time on their hands - yes, there are still those who don't see mental illness as a reality that is just as damaging, if not more so, than a disease that affects the body and whose consequences are visible to the naked eye.
When she became a mother and left Brazil for Portugal, Keise's condition worsened like never before: "There were days when I stayed in bed, I had four episodes of attempted suicide, I had anxiety attacks, I didn't speak to anyone," she says, recalling how her mental illness began to have repercussions on her body (anemia, bleeding, chronic pain...). On the advice of her psychotherapist, the search for a way out seemed increasingly unlikely and led her to The Clinic of Change, at a time when she "couldn't even speak anymore", where she says she experienced a "miracle".
In a country where three out of ten people have been diagnosed with depression (33.6%), a situation that is even more common among teenagers, especially since the pandemic, with the number of children and young people showing symptoms of depression reaching 45% by 2023, according to the mental health promotion and suicide prevention program "Mais Contigo", Keise's first-person account can be a remarkable help for those who feel alone in this dead end. By sharing her testimony, but above all because it's a story with a happy ending. An ending that is common to Carolina's story.
"Obsessed with healthy eating" since the age of 11 and with serious sleep problems, she remembers avoiding meals in public, starting to "restrict my diet a lot and losing a lot of weight". "Food control and school grades became the center of my life," she says, recounting how the psychotherapy and psychiatry she began to adhere to, on their own, did little against a fierce anorexia, marked by constant anxiety and hypervigilance. "I lived focused on controlling everything and that just made me feel miserable," Carolina recalls.
Anorexia, which affects an overwhelming majority of women (95% of cases, with 4,500 confirmed hospitalizations, many of them repeated, and 25 deaths in Portugal between 2000 and 2014), didn't end in the worst way "by luck", says Carolina, admitting that "several times" she came close to death. Then she is vehement: "With this treatment, I began to feel" what she rationally knew to be true. "The learning was emotional, it was experiential, it was visceral, not just cognitive." That's what made the difference.
What do Keise and Carolina's leap have in common? Treatment using psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which has been gaining momentum in the ambition to treat, rather than manage, mental illness. In Portugal, The Clinic of Change specializes in this type of treatment using ketamine [or ketamine/ketamine], licensed by the ERS and Infarmed. The first partner of the British company Awakn (which specializes in psychedelic medicine and has scientific research protocols in this area with such prestigious institutions as Imperial College London, the University of Exeter and the British National Health Service) in the European Union, it opened its doors a year ago in Lisbon to change the panorama of a country which, among those in Europe, has the highest incidence of cases of anxiety and is in the top three for depression.
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Read the full article on Sapo.
Watch Keise's full video testimony here.
A The Clinic of Change é um prestador de cuidados de saúde com o n.º E166508, sediado na Rua das Picoas, 12 R/C, 1050-173 Lisboa, com licença de funcionamento n.º 22863/2023, inscrito na ERS com o n.º 39467.
