Victor Amorim Rodrigues: "70% success in people who have already had 100% failure is extraordinary."

Victor Amorim Rodrigues, clinical director of The Clinic of Change, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, talks to us about Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy and The Clinic of Change's therapeutic program.

Watch the video with the statements.

Consult our doctors for prior assessment and diagnosis:
218 071 715
geral@theclinicofchange.com

What is Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy?

Fundamentally, our main emphasis is on psychotherapy, but psychotherapy that is assisted or facilitated by a drug, in this case ketamine, which will allow access to a set of psychological and psychic material, psychic contents, which in turn can be worked on in psychotherapy.

Although we also have all the antidepressant benefits of the drug, we really want psychotherapeutic work in order to prolong the therapeutic effects of this treatment in the long term - that's what we want, in the long term.

There are other ways and other places where these dissociative and psychedelic effects of the substance are avoided as much as possible. Not only do we not avoid them, and this is in fact distinctive in relation to other ways of using ketamine as a therapy, not only do we not avoid these effects but, on the contrary, we want them to occur. What is needed is trained psychotherapists, as we have here, with many years of experience, to be able to work with this material.

How does The Clinic of Change program work?

What we have had here are people who have been suffering for many years, some for more than 20 years, others since they were teenagers, where what have in fact been the traditional methods of psychiatry and mental health in general have not worked.

We have a validated program that has been researched and implemented by Awakn, Awakn Life Sciences, an international organization based in London, which has been developing this program in various clinics for a long time.

What we're seeing is that, in this program we're implementing, we have a certain confidence that people, as long as they follow the program's instructions, have a very high percentage of success.

70% success in people who have already had 100% failure with all the previous techniques is extraordinary and really makes you want to work in this area.

What made you, as a doctor, interested in this type of therapy?

It was the chance to help people I couldn't help otherwise. I'm a psychiatrist with a lot of experience, but I'm also a psychotherapist, and so, both from a more psychopharmacological aspect and from a psychotherapeutic aspect, I know perfectly well, as all clinicians in this field know, that there is a group of patients, which is not so negligible as that, who don't have effective responses.

Opening a window of opportunity here to help a group of people who until then were, shall we say, left to their own suffering, left to their own mental pathology, is very comforting, it's extraordinary.

The great advantage I see is the satisfaction of seeing people who, sometimes, are already smiling the next day. People who haven't smiled for years and who came in crying, sluggish. And the improvement from session to session in some people is very evident, and the people themselves are very enthusiastic, because they see that they are really at another level of mental, relational and cerebral functioning.

What is controlled treatment in serious clinical terms, let's say, ah, it's a revolution, because there haven't been any major innovations. And to actually have the possibility of reaching this group... because it's very important to insist on this, it's a group of people who haven't responded to traditional antidepressants. This really is a revolution, because these people can have frank and lasting improvements.

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