COMPASS Pathways announces publication in Frontiers in Psychiatry of paper on therapist training programme for psilocybin therapy

COMPASS Pathways announces publication in Frontiers in Psychiatry
of paper on therapist training programme for psilocybin therapy

Formal and scalable methodology for psychological support in psilocybin therapy

London, UK – 3 February 2021

COMPASS Pathways plc (Nasdaq: CMPS) (“COMPASS”), a mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health, has shared details of its comprehensive and rigorous therapist training programme for psilocybin therapy, in a paper jointly written with a group of academic researchers, and published in Frontiers in Psychiatry today. The programme sets out a formal and scalable methodology for psychological support in psilocybin therapy. It is currently being used to train therapists taking part in COMPASS’s phase IIb clinical trial of COMP360 psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression, as approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as part of COMPASS’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application.

In psilocybin therapy, patients are given a dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic substance, in conjunction with psychological support from specially trained therapists. COMPASS developed the therapist training programme alongside leading experts in mental health and psychedelic research, including William A Richards (Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, US), Elizabeth Nielson (NYS Psychiatric Institute, NYU School of Medicine, US), Riikka Ajantaival (Clinical Research Institute, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland), Peter Gasser (private practice, Switzerland), Sara J Tai (University of Manchester, UK), Brian D Richards (Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, and Aquilino Cancer Center, US), and Frederick Reinholdt (King’s College London, UK). The programme uses a new and manualised approach drawing from evidence-based psychotherapeutic approaches, and currently comprises four components: an online learning platform; in-person training; applied clinical training; and ongoing individual mentoring and professional development.

In previous psilocybin studies, the approach to psychological support often varied between research sites, making it difficult to replicate and distinguish the specific effects of psilocybin from concurrent therapeutic interventions. Equally, training in the provision of psychological support had not been defined and evaluated. This manualised training programme begins to address this gap and is the start of a process that will continue to be refined and adapted as clinical trials of psilocybin therapy progress.