What competencies should every psychedelic therapy team have?
As psychedelic therapies move closer to broader clinical use, we have to prepare the behavioral health workforce for what comes next. We’re bringing together leading voices from academia, government, clinical practice, provider organizations, and patient advocacy to develop interdisciplinary Core Competencies for Psychedelic Therapy.
We’ve extracted 875 distinct competency statements from 66 unique source documents, and identified areas of concordance, where the sources align, and discordance, where approaches vary across the field.
Our consensus-driven workgroup began meeting this summer and is using this as a starting point to develop its recommendations across 12 domains. The workgroup will deliberate and vote on a competency framework that can support training consistency, workforce development, and safe care across disciplines.
Meet the experts helping shape the Core Competencies, see how the work is being developed, and follow what comes next.
Major mental health organizations are coming together to join the broader discussion about the future of behavioral healthcare and the workforce training needed for the safe implementation of psychedelics.
This kind of coordination is central to BrainFutures’ approach: bringing organizations together around common ground and turning that agreement into practical policy recommendations that reflect a broad view of the behavioral health system.
Together, we submitted collaborative recommendations to the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA’s) Request for Information. The recommendations are built on the foundational resources developed by each organization, including our Professional Practice Guidelines, parity resources, and CPT/HCPCS coding guide.
The letter calls for an interdisciplinary, competency-based approach to training, with standards strong enough to support quality and safety without creating unnecessary barriers to access. It also recommends a role for community-based and non-academic organizations that bring direct knowledge of patients' needs.
That same approach is driving our consensus-driven interdisciplinary core competencies workgroup. We need to connect policy, practice, training, and implementation before the workforce is asked to respond at scale.
There is real urgency to make room for better care for patients with treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, anxiety, and other serious mental health conditions.
In our collaborative comments to HRSA, we referenced our Professional Practice Guidelines, which recommend that providers create a comfortable, confidential setting that is secure enough to prevent interruption but allows access to emergency services if needed.
Treatment rooms can vary widely across settings, disciplines, and models of care. So, we want to see what practitioners across the field are doing to prepare for psychedelic therapy. Show us your treatment room and tell us about your design process.
What decisions have you made around seating, lighting, artwork, greenery, sound, privacy, safety, and comfort with the patient experience in mind?
As BrainFutures develops tools that support safe, evidence-based implementation, we are looking for imagery that reflects the future of real-world psychedelic therapy care settings.
With your permission, we may feature submitted images in future BrainFutures content.
Help us show what "room for better care" looks like across the field. Send us your photos, without anyone in them, using the Google Form below. If you don't have a Google Account, send them to us at info@brainfutures.org with the subject line "Room for Better Care."
Seema Patel, Definium; Jazz Glastra, BrainFutures; Julie Garner, Definium; Peter Hendricks, University of Alabama at Birmingham; and John Eaton, Wounded Warriors Project
What Behavioral Health Systems Need
From REMS to reimbursement, the questions shaping workforce readiness
When the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program came up during a session at the Florida Behavioral Health Conference, only one person in the room raised their hand to say they were familiar with it.
The moment underscored a larger challenge: many behavioral health professionals have not had to navigate the regulatory and operational requirements that could accompany psychedelic therapies.
The discussion expanded to other questions the field will need to address, including training and competencies, the role of peers, reimbursement and access, treatment retention, and how long psychedelic benefits may last.
These are exactly the kinds of questions shaping BrainFutures’ work right now, from state-level policy to our core competencies workgroup.
The conference emphasized the urgent need to ensure behavioral health systems are ready to integrate these therapies into clinical care and that providers already have many of the skills they need to support implementation of psychedelic therapies. BrainFutures and our partners are also working hard to develop infrastructure that will drive safe, high-quality access to these treatments.
A Federal Conversation the Field Has Been Preparing For
As psychedelic therapies move closer to potential clinical use, federal leaders are increasingly asking the field to help shape what comes next.
On September 14, the FDA will bring the field together for a public hearing focused on safely delivering psychedelic therapies. The hearing will bring many of the questions the field has been working through into sharper public focus.
BrainFutures has been helping advance psychedelic therapies by collaborating with congressional leaders; convening experts across policy, research, clinical practice, and provider and patient organizations; submitting comments to federal agencies; and developing practical guidance to bridge the gap between research and practice.
We'll be listening closely and will be submitting comments. We've also requested an opportunity to speak at the hearing.
