Subscribe
Never miss out on new content from Dr. Hartman.
I see many patients trapped in the trauma cycle.
They’ve tried everything. Pills. Therapy. Nothing seems to work.
If you have anxiety, depression, or trauma that won’t go away with regular treatments, I want to share some new research that might offer hope.
With one journey, I experienced the equivalent of two years of therapy.
But first, let’s tackle why some very old practices offer new hope…
Medical Blind Spots: What We’re Missing in Mental Health Treatment
I’ve learned eye-opening lessons from Dr. Marty Makary’s book Blind Spots. The medical community hasn’t always gotten it right … far from it. We overlooked smoking’s cancer connection for decades. In the 1800s, physician Ignaz Semmelweis was ridiculed and fired for the now-obvious suggestion that doctors should wash their hands between patients.
These historical missteps raise an urgent question: what blind spots are we missing in mental health treatment today?
Trauma Brain is Now Epidemic
How Modern Life Rewires Your Nervous System
Trauma has reached epidemic levels in our society. The statistics are heartbreaking: 50% of women and 30% of men have been sexually abused. Then there’s medical trauma… stress from the pandemic… deep political divisions… conflicting sources of truth and value…
These painful experiences don’t just hurt emotionally—they change your brain.
The limbic portion of your brain—where emotions live—gets stuck in constant “fight-or-flight” mode. This is what I call “trauma brain.”
When your brain gets trapped in trauma mode, you might experience:
- Relentless anxiety attacks that ambush you without warning
- A strange disconnect, as if you’re watching your life from outside your body
- Stubborn depression that shrugs off medication
- Vivid flashbacks and nightmares that drag you back to painful moments
- Nights spent staring at the ceiling, unable to find rest
- Mysterious physical symptoms that leave medical tests showing “everything looks normal”
Why Traditional Treatments Hit a Wall with Trauma
Today’s mental health treatments—pills and talk therapy—focus mainly on managing symptoms. These approaches help many people, but they often miss something crucial: the deeply embedded brain patterns that trauma burns into your nervous system.
For people with complex trauma, brain communication networks—especially your brain’s “self reflection system” (technically called the Default Mode Network)—become locked in harmful loops that standard treatments simply can’t break through.
Consider how dramatically our understanding of allergies has shifted: for decades, doctors warned parents to keep children away from peanuts to prevent allergies. We now know this advice was completely backward—early peanut exposure actually protects children from developing allergies. This medical reversal makes me wonder: are we approaching trauma treatment with similar well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed thinking?
Challenging Mental Health Dogma
The most powerful lesson from healthcare history isn’t just that we make mistakes—it’s how long we cling to those mistakes. It took an astounding 7,000 research studies and 50 years before the U.S. Surgeon General finally acknowledged the smoking–cancer connection. How many lives were needlessly lost in those decades of denial?
We must bring this same critical eye to mental health treatment. While pills and talk therapy create healing paths for many, they leave others wandering in the wilderness. For these patients—perhaps you or someone you love—we need breakthrough approaches that repair the brain’s damaged foundations, not just manage symptoms.
This doesn’t mean throwing out current treatments. It means adding new tools to our toolbox. Just like we learned that exposing kids to peanuts early can prevent allergies (the opposite of what we thought before), we might find that treatments like psychedelic therapy offer benefits that challenge what we currently believe.
Understanding Psychedelics
Before exploring their potential healing applications, I want to clarify what “psychedelics” actually means in a medical context. These substances have long histories in traditional medicine systems across cultures, though they’re often misunderstood today.
What Are Psychedelics?
Psychedelics are natural or synthesized compounds that temporarily change perception, mood, and thought patterns. They create distinct alterations in consciousness that can range from subtle to profound.
Key Psychedelics in Mental Health Research
Scientists are investigating several compounds for their potential in mental health treatment:
Classical Psychedelics
- Psilocybin (sil-oh-SY-bin): The active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” used in traditional healing across continents for thousands of years. Current research focuses on its potential for depression, end-of-life anxiety, and addiction.
- LSD: Discovered in 1938, this powerful compound is being studied for its ability to help with anxiety, depression, and breaking addiction patterns.
- DMT: One of nature’s most widespread psychedelics, found in numerous plants and animals—including the human brain.
- Ayahuasca (eye-uh-WAS-kuh): An Amazonian plant-medicine brew containing DMT. Indigenous healers have used this powerful medicine in ceremonial contexts for centuries. The 4–6-hour experience often creates profound self-examination. Western researchers are exploring its applications for depression, addiction, and PTSD.
- Mescaline (MES-kuh-lin): Found in cacti like peyote and San Pedro, this compound has been central to Native-American healing traditions for generations.
Empathogenic Compounds
- MDMA: Often called a “heart-opening medicine,” MDMA creates feelings of emotional connection and safety. Though not technically a classical psychedelic, it’s in final-stage clinical trials for PTSD treatment, showing remarkable success rates for previously treatment-resistant cases.
Dissociative Medicines
- Ketamine: Originally developed as an anesthetic, ketamine creates a temporary dissociative state that appears to “reset” depression circuits in the brain. It’s currently the only legally available psychedelic-like treatment for depression in the United States.
- Ibogaine (ih-BOH-guh-een): Derived from a West-African shrub, this powerful compound shows promise for addiction treatment—particularly opioid dependence. However, it requires careful medical screening due to potential heart risks.
How These Medicines Reshape Brain Communication
What makes these compounds remarkable is their unique interaction with brain receptors—particularly serotonin receptors. Imagine these receptors as specialized locks throughout your brain. While serotonin is the natural key, psychedelics act like master keys that unlock these receptors in distinctive ways.
Unlike conventional psychiatric medications that simply adjust chemical levels (like turning a volume knob up or down), psychedelics temporarily rewire communication highways between brain regions. Think of it as rerouting traffic patterns in a congested city—suddenly allowing communication between neighborhoods that rarely interact, creating opportunities for new connections and perspectives.
Resetting the Brain… Beyond Symptom Management
Psychedelic medicine represents a fundamentally different approach to mental health treatment. Rather than simply managing symptoms day by day, these therapies appear to achieve something more profound—a comprehensive reset of the brain’s entrenched neural networks.
The impact can be remarkable. As one of my patients described his experience: “With one journey, I experienced the equivalent of two years of therapy.”
Breaking the Trauma Loop: Brain Mechanisms
Research reveals that psychedelics temporarily quiet the brain’s Default Mode Network—the integration center that maintains your sense of self. Like rebooting a frozen computer, this neural reset can:
- Disrupt rigid thought patterns that have trapped you for years
- Forge fresh neural pathways where old trauma loops once dominated
- Unlock previously walled-off memories that need processing
- Create a window of emotional openness to face and release painful feelings
- Recalibrate your body’s overactive stress-response system
Current Research & Treatment Possibilities
The research landscape for psychedelic medicine is expanding rapidly:
Psilocybin Therapy
Psilocybin has shown remarkable results in clinical trials for depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Research centers like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London have documented significant improvements, often after just 1–2 supervised sessions. Some practitioners are also exploring “microdosing” (sub-perceptual amounts)—particularly when integrated with complementary approaches like BrainTap technology.
Ketamine Treatment
Ketamine stands alone as the only legally available psychedelic-like therapy in the United States. Through its unique mechanism, ketamine creates a temporary dissociative state that appears to “reboot” neural pathways. In my practice, I’ve seen patients achieve breakthrough results through specialized ketamine clinics offering IV treatments when other approaches failed completely.
Emerging Options
Compounds like Ayahuasca and Ibogaine show promising potential for profound healing but carry more significant risks and complexity. These powerful medicines demand exceptional caution, proper screening, and experienced guidance within appropriate settings.
Critical Safety Considerations for Psychedelic Healing
I cannot emphasize these safety considerations strongly enough:
- Professional Guidance is Non-Negotiable: Working with properly trained clinicians in appropriate settings is absolutely essential. I’ve witnessed cases where unsupervised experiences significantly worsened trauma, creating new psychological challenges.
- Environment Shapes Outcomes: The physical setting, emotional atmosphere, and support system during treatment profoundly influence safety and effectiveness.
- Legal Boundaries: With the exception of ketamine, psychedelic treatments are not FDA-approved for mental health conditions. Current regulations restrict their use to authorized research settings.
- Regulatory Reality: These compounds remain controlled substances with serious legal consequences. While I present this information for educational purposes, I maintain the importance of working within established legal frameworks.
- Substance Integrity: Outside medical channels, there’s significant risk of contamination, misidentification, or dangerous adulterants that can cause serious harm.
- Personalized Response: Each person’s neurochemistry is unique—what proves transformative for one individual may be ineffective or problematic for another.
The history of healthcare blind spots teaches us two key lessons: be careful, but keep an open mind.
Most people don’t know that medical errors kill more Americans than almost anything except heart disease and cancer. The medical world has been wrong many times before. This doesn’t mean we should take unnecessary risks, but it does mean we should look hard at our current treatments and be open to well-researched alternatives.
The Future of Mental Health Treatment
My research revealed something striking: psychedelic approaches often outperform conventional treatments for PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, and severe anxiety disorders. As I explained in my video, “we don’t have drugs that work as well for PTSD as psilocybin and ketamine.”
The research is accelerating at a remarkable pace. Major medical organizations—including the American Academy of Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine—now offer professional training in psychedelic medicine. This shift signals growing acceptance within certain medical communities. While working within current regulations, forward-thinking clinicians are watching these developments with intense interest.
I believe we stand at the edge of a transformation in mental health care, where these powerful healing tools will increasingly become standard treatment options as science advances and regulatory frameworks evolve.
Finding Your Path to Whole-Person Health
If you’re battling mental health challenges that haven’t responded to conventional treatments, I want you to know that groundbreaking approaches are on the horizon. At Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine, we constantly monitor emerging research while offering proven solutions to restore both your health and your hope.
We operate within established medical guidelines while believing you deserve complete knowledge about all potential healing paths. Together, we can explore both traditional treatments and promising innovations that address the root causes of your condition—not just mask symptoms.
The landscape is changing rapidly. In the coming years, we’ll likely see FDA-approved psychedelic treatments become available. Until then, we can leverage the many evidence-based approaches we already have while keeping a watchful eye on this promising frontier.
Immediate Solutions
- Nutrition: Many patients find significant relief through nutritional interventions that address the biological foundations of anxiety (Calming Anxiety with Food).
- Breathwork: Specialized breathwork techniques directly regulate the nervous system (Breathwork for Stress Relief).
These approaches complement conventional treatments and can be implemented immediately as part of your comprehensive healing plan.
Keep Looking Forward
We must continue questioning our assumptions about mental health care. What current practices will future generations look back on with disbelief? By remaining vigilant about potential blind spots in our healthcare system, we can make wiser, more personalized decisions about your care.
Remember: You were made for health. You don’t have to navigate this journey alone. Let us be your health advocate, helping you understand all your options and creating a clear roadmap to genuine whole-person wellness.
Join the Mental Health Revolution
Medicine got it wrong for 50 years about smoking. Wrong about frontal lobotomies. Wrong about nutrition.
What if they’re wrong about mental health treatment too?
Join Dr. Hartman’s Functional Medicine Insider and discover breakthrough approaches to trauma, PTSD, and treatment-resistant conditions that conventional medicine is still catching up to.
Each week, our 17,400+ subscribers receive:
- Cutting-edge research conventional doctors aren’t discussing
- Real patient transformation stories that defy “incurable” diagnoses
- Practical steps to optimize your brain-body connection
- Early access to our most in-demand practitioner interviews
JOIN THE INSIDER COMMUNITY
Your privacy matters to us. Unsubscribe anytime with one click.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider before considering any new treatment approach. Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine does not provide psychedelic-assisted therapy but offers personalized guidance to help you understand all available evidence-based treatment options for mental health conditions.