Nuno Torres: "Patients look like different people, who live life and have dreams."

Nuno Torres, clinical psychologist at The Clinic of Change, researcher and professor at ISPA - Instituto Universitário, talks about Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy and our therapeutic program.

Watch the video with the statements.

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geral@theclinicofchange.com

What is Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy?

It's the help of an innovative medicine, although it's been around for many decades, a help to raise people's problems, and contents that are not normally accessible in a normal waking state, which are then worked on by psychotherapy in a very direct way.

It is above all a psychedelic effect, which is also associated with an antidepressant effect. The role [of ketamine] is to allow an experience, a kind of waking dream where the person sees their life, the issues that torment them, in a completely different way.

Psychotherapy serves as a support to help interpret it, to talk about it with a trained professional and to better understand your own mind. Psychotherapy will allow you to be guided, to help you make the most of this effect of plasticity, in other words, neuronal renewal, towards more positive behaviors and attitudes that allow you to be happier and feel better. So, change.

How does The Clinic of Change program work?

What characterizes it in a very specific way is that it was developed by what are perhaps the world's leading experts in psychiatry and psychotherapy in this area. It's a program that has been tested in clinical trials several times and is highly manualized in that sense, in other words, it has manualized procedures that are very detailed, very specific and very targeted for this intervention.

There is a support network that is based on research at the highest level, with Imperial College London, the University of Exeter, also in the UK, and we benefit from frequent meetings with these colleagues here.

It's a demanding program, which isn't for everyone, in which there is rigorous screening, and it also involves a great deal of dedication, in order to get the best results and for the person to have the greatest possible benefits.

What led you, as a psychologist, to become interested in this type of therapy?

Consistently, in the scientific literature, high-quality results were being published in the best scientific journals in psychiatry and psychotherapy, consistently very positive results in problems where orthodox therapies were not normally working. This immediately fascinated me, because I had always worked with difficult cases, with addictions, with problems of resistant depression, family problems, etc. It struck me that there was hope here.

What really surprises me the most, and also makes me very happy and content, is that, in most cases, we see the patient, the sick person arriving already very tired, already very exhausted from their own illness, their problems, often loaded down with medication and so on; and after a few sessions, in most people it's surprising how quickly changes are possible. Sometimes in the session itself, the first or second session, the well-being with which the person leaves the session the next day, the speed of action is really impressive.

Sometimes they seem like different people who have changed dimensions. People who used to be tormented by the smallest... sometimes the most mundane things, and then you see them and they seem to have changed movies. They've gone from one movie to another, and they're doing things as they please, living their lives, having dreams - which they didn't have before, or had already given up on. Dreaming up new projects.

The great revolution is that the means of action, the way in which psychedelic therapy acts on the brain and on mental illness, is very different from all the other more traditional medications.

There is a very interesting overall effect on the body and mind, which gives a completely different perspective on people's mental suffering.

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