Learn about our psychedelic congressional briefing and explore the impact on student performance with an executive function skill-building program in Maryland.
BrainFutures hosted a congressional briefing with the bipartisan Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus to advance innovative and effective treatments like psychedelic therapy for mental health and substance use disorders. BrainFutures' Executive Director, Sarah Norman, moderated the discussion with pioneering experts from Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"We need to focus on research...but ultimately on building the clinical infrastructure necessary to bring this to every American who can benefit from it after FDA approval. At the end of the day, we know it’s not if, but when, the FDA approves psychedelic therapies. And to do that, we have to start getting ready now.” - Sarah Norman
Provider Roundtable: Psychedelic Therapies Across Care Models
During our second Provider Roundtable, the panel of experts talked about shared solutions for integrating psychedelic therapy across care models following FDA approval. BrainFutures' Senior Medical Advisor, Dr. Jonathan Book, moderated the discussion with Dr. Adriana Manygoats de Julio of Aurora Mental Health and Recovery and Heather Honstein of Bloom Health Centers.
"As we think about moving forward into the oncoming psychedelic tsunami, it’s not a matter of if anymore, it’s really a matter of when. So thinking about how to prepare clinics, in the meantime, so they can be ready to hit the ground running when these treatments are approved, I think is very important.
One size fits all is definitely not going to work. We need to look at individual needs for clinics and where those gaps are. The goal here is always to make this kind of therapy accessible, most importantly safe, and then also effective in these diverse clinical environments.”
-Heather Honstein, PMHNP-BC, MS-N Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, Bloom Health Centers
Read about solutions for diverse care settings in our recap of the Provider Roundtable.
The early results are in, and the evidence-based executive function skill-building program we used in Howard County boosted student performance. Parents and teachers report improved confidence, behavior, focus, and academic performance.T
Students who started with a deficit in executive function skills improved their scores on validated measures of working memory by 88%.
The ACTIVATE™ digital cognitive training program trains students on all executive function skills and intensely focuses on the student's weakest skill—working memory, attention, or self-control. As a result, students made the most significant gains in those skills that were weakest.
Working memory increased by 20% among all students, but students who started the program with the weakest working memory skills increased their scores by 88%.
We're inspired by these improvements in executive function. Student behavioral and academic performance data are still coming in, but we're already hearing stories of success from educators and parents.
ACTIVATE 2.0 Launching Soon
We're excited to bring our insights from the first year of implementing ACTIVATE™ to another Maryland School district this fall. BrainFutures was awarded a grant from the Maryland Consortium on Coordinated Community Supports to bring the executive function skills-building program to 1,200 Title 1 students in Baltimore County Public Schools. We'll partner with the school district and the Baltimore County Bureau of Behavioral Health.
We can all make a difference for our youth when we work together to fund innovative programs that promote mental health and well-being for students, parents, and teachers. Let's collaborate to bring executive function training to more schools.
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