Parsing Peer Review Literature on Psychedelics With Dr Rakesh Jain

Rakesh Jain, MD, MPH, clinical professor, Texas Tech University School of Medicine, Austin, gives a few clinical pearls from his Thursday Sana Symposium session that offered practical strategies to clinicians seeking to stay up to date in the field of psychedelic medicine.

"[Psychedelic therapies] are going to be one of the more important tools in our toolkit in terms of helping our patients. I think in particular with depressive disorders, with anxiety disorders, and addictions," says Dr Jain in the interview with Psych Congress Network Associate Digital Editor Brionna Mendoza. In this video, Dr Jain offers a few resources to stay up to date, how to identify quality information, and shares where he believes the field is heading.

To watch the entire session, register for Sana Symposium for online access to all live virtual sessions over the 3-day conference, plus on-demand access to all sessions for 3 months after the conference concludes.

Rakesh Jain, MD, MPH, attended medical school at the University of Calcutta in India. He then attended graduate school at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston, where he was awarded a “National Institute/Center for Disease Control Competitive Traineeship”. His research thesis focused on the impact of substance abuse. He graduated from the School of Public Health in 1987 with a Masters of Public Health (MPH) degree.

Dr Jain served a 3-year residency in Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. He followed that by obtaining further specialty training, by undergoing a 2-year fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. In addition, Dr Jain completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Research Psychiatry at the University of Texas Mental Sciences Institute, in Houston. He was awarded the “National Research Service Award” for the support of this postdoctoral fellowship.

Read the transcript:

Brionna Mendoza, Psych Congress Network: Good morning everyone, I'm here with the one and only Dr Rakesh Jain, and today we're going to be asking Dr Jain some questions about the sessions that he is presenting at this year's Sana Symposium. Dr Jain, could you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience?

Dr Rakesh Jain: Of course. It's good to be with you, and hello, dear colleagues. This is Rakesh Jain, and I am a professor, a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Texas Tech University School of Medicine and Permian Basin. And very importantly, I'm very proud to be a member of the Psych Congress Steering Committee as well as Sana. I'm really excited to be talking with you.

Mendoza: Wonderful. Well, we're so excited, as always, to have you here, thank you for taking the time today to talk with us in advance of the meeting. Let's dive right in. The first question we have for you today is: what should clinicians be aware of when looking for updated information on psychedelics, both in academic journals and reputable psychedelics websites?

Dr Jain: My goodness, it feels like there's a gush of information coming our way, isn't it? It comes from every angle. It comes from, if you will, the lay press, it's coming from the scientific press, and it's no surprise that a professional can feel very overwhelmed. My presentation at Sana is to bring some order to this chaos that we feel. 

There are a few journals in particular that I will highlight during my Sana presentation that are particularly reputable and are in particular interested in offering us high-quality evidence on what is happening. But having said that, there are many other websites that offer cutting-edge information.

For example, the MAPS website that I will highlight during my Sana presentation or the John Hopkins University Psychedelic Research Center's website. It's a matter of collecting just the best resources, collecting the best information from them so that we can be better informed and motivated to make changes.

Mendoza: Wonderful. Continuing from there, in your session, you discussed the 5 strategies to better connect with lay press and peer-reviewed literature. You discussed newsletters, academic journals, podcasts, listservs, and attending conferences such as Sana Symposium. What are the top listservs, journals, websites, and other resources that you would recommend to clinicians and why?

Dr Jain: This is a pretty prominent part of my presentation at Sana, but I'll give you a quick peek view of what I'm going to be recommending. Obviously Sana has a regular newsletter, that's a good way to stay in touch with what's happening. There are certain other podcasts in particular that I really enjoy, Psychedelic Times in particular. There's also Tim Ferriss' podcast, in fact, just today he came out with a long podcast on ketamine, both as a medicine and as a psychedelic. And there are a number of other resources that I offer for a colleague to think about. There are very many, so what I've done is I've collated my top favorites and my suggestion to you, dear learner, is to check it out. Maybe pick 1 podcast, maybe 1 academic journal, maybe a couple of newsletters. And by doing just that, I have no doubt within a month or 2, you are very much in the know as to what's happening in the psychedelic community.

Mendoza: Related to that, you mentioned that some psychedelics resources are frothy or overly exuberant. Why do you draw attention to this and how can clinicians be sure to stick to evidence-based medicine when treating patients with psychedelics?

Dr Jain: Like any new field of thought or research in our society, we tend to have the pendulum effect. Sometimes we are too ‘anti’ this, sometimes we are too ‘pro’ this. And the psychedelic sciences world is no different at all. There is a great deal of frothiness, almost excessive exuberance. Some of the websites I think are literally that. So, I'm cautioning the learner to be careful about that, not to avoid it, but be careful.

The best way to perhaps balance it out is to get your learnings from both, I would say “frothy websites,” but also get it from perhaps somewhat boring academic journals. When you combine them, you end up with the ideal balance of both knowledge and passion. That'll be one thing I will be addressing quite intensively during my Sana presentation.

Mendoza: Thank you for sharing that. To transition topics just a little bit, where do you see the future of psychedelics and psychiatry going over the next year, the next 5 years, the next 10 years? What do you think?

Dr Jain: Psychedelic therapies have been part of human healing for perhaps the last 5 to 10,000 years already. This isn't a new discovery by us in this particular century, but we are at perhaps our third renaissance in terms of reawakening to the potential of these interventions, these medications, these psychotherapies.

Where do I see us going? I actually think psychedelic practices, psychedelic therapies, are going to be one of the more important tools in our toolkit in terms of helping our patients and I think in particular with depressive disorders, with anxiety disorders, and addictions.

The 3 issues that I just mentioned are probably the top 3 reasons why patients come to see us. 

Psychedelic therapies will be, without a doubt, in the next 5 years, a prominent player in helping us address the needs of perhaps hundreds of thousands of patients. I'm actually really excited for the future of psychedelics, but at the same time, I don't want us to make the same mistakes we made perhaps in the 1960s and 1970s where there was an overexuberance, there wasn't that much attention paid to the science behind psychedelics. My thinking is, if we do this right, the future is very bright.

Mendoza: Helping to direct us towards that bright future as a Steering Committee member for the Sana's Symposium, what clinical pearls do you hope that people take away from the symposium and all of its wonderful sessions that will impact clinical practice?

Dr Jain: Really well said. Sana Symposium is actually quite comprehensive. We have to discuss everything, we have to discuss our historical roots, we have to think about the indigenous users of these medications and these therapies and how they affect us. But by the same token, we have to take advantage of the profound explosion and knowledge base about the neurobiology of how do these substances actually help us even when they're not there months later, how can a patient possibly be benefited from that? We also need to know about the cultural landscape and the legal landscape. 

Sana doesn't pick sides, it offers the learner all of the above. Our goal is to offer all of the above in a fair balanced, enthusiastic manner, but firmly rooted in science and respect for indigenous users of these medications too.

Perhaps that's the reason why I think Sana is and will be easily the most important national meeting in the world of psychedelic sciences for the practicing psychiatrist, the practicing psychotherapist, the practicing nurse practitioner or the physician assistant. We take a big tent approach to approaching this issue of psychedelic practices.

Mendoza: Thank you so much for spending time with us today, telling us more about your thoughts on psychedelics as you prep for the Sana Symposium. Before we wrap up, are there any final insights you'd like to share with the Psych Congress Network family?

Dr Jain: Yeah, I think the Psych Congress family, as you eloquently said, is a bunch of clinicians who really care. That describes us as well. We really care. And we are also quite acutely aware that the current interventions we have are very good, but we're in need of more, and that's where psychedelic medicine and psychedelic sciences come in. 

What I would like to share with folks is, let's get excited. Let's get enthusiastic about accepting this new knowledge base about psychedelic medicine. But at the same token, let's not make the mistakes made decades ago.

Perhaps the best way to do that is to be extremely knowledgeable, to be fair balanced, and you have my word as a member of the Steering Committee member at Sana, we will do our very best to offer you comprehensive and very fair balanced information.

Mendoza: Great. Thank you again for your time today.

Dr Jain: Oh, thank you very much, I enjoyed our conversation.