Victor Amorim Rodrigues: “A 70% success rate among people who have previously experienced 100% failure is extraordinary.”

Victor Amorim Rodrigues, clinical director of The Clinic of Change, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, talks to us about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and The Clinic of Change’s therapeutic program.

Watch the video with the statements.

Please contact our doctors for a preliminary evaluation and diagnosis:
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geral@theclinicofchange.com

What is Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy?

Essentially, our primary focus is on psychotherapy, but a form of psychotherapy that is supported or facilitated by a medication—in this case, ketamine—which allows access to a range of psychological and psychic material, or psychic content, that can then be addressed in psychotherapy.

Although we also have all the antidepressant benefits of the medication, we are in fact committed to psychotherapy in order to sustain—in the long term, which is what we want—the therapeutic effects of this treatment.

There are other methods and settings where these dissociative and psychedelic effects of the substance are minimized as much as possible. Not only do we not minimize them—and this is indeed what sets us apart from other therapeutic uses of ketamine—but, on the contrary, we actually want these effects to occur. What is necessary, in fact, is to have trained psychotherapists—as is the case here—with many years of experience, so that they know how to work with this material.

How does The Clinic of Change program work?

What we have seen here are people who have been suffering greatly for many years—some for over 20 years, others since their teenage years—for whom traditional approaches to psychiatry and mental health in general have simply 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.

A 70% success rate among people who had previously failed 100% of the time with all other methods is truly remarkable and really makes you want to work in this field.

What led you, as a doctor, to take an interest in this type of therapy?

It was the opportunity to help people I couldn’t help in any other way. I am a psychiatrist with extensive experience, but I am also a psychotherapist, and so, whether from a psychopharmacological or a psychotherapeutic perspective, I know full well—as all clinicians in this field know—that there is a group of patients, one that is not as insignificant as one might think, for whom there are no effective treatments.

The fact that this opens up a window of opportunity to help a group of people who, until then, were, so to speak, left to their own suffering, left to their own mental illness, is very heartening; it’s extraordinary.

The biggest benefit I see is really the satisfaction of seeing people who, sometimes, are already smiling the very next day. People who hadn’t smiled in years, and who would come in crying, feeling weighed down. And the improvement from session to session, in some people, is very evident, and the people themselves get very excited, because they see that they are truly on a different level of mental, relational, and cognitive functioning.

What constitutes controlled treatment in a serious clinical setting, so to speak, is a revolution, because there haven’t been any major innovations. And actually being able to reach this group—because it’s very important to emphasize this—is a group of people who haven’t responded to traditional antidepressants. That really is a revolution, because these people can experience significant and lasting improvements.

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