☁️🍄 Issue No. 003: Therapy You Can Feel

Happy Sunday, and welcome back to Headlines, your weekly read on the latest happenings in the mental health world. This week, we’re diving into one of my long-standing theses👇👇

THERAPY YOU CAN FEEL

Take a second to stop what you’re doing and draw your attention to your body. 

What can you feel in your neck, shoulders, chest? Notice the way your breath pulls in and out of your lungs. Become aware of the space around you, the fabric of your atmosphere. 

This is what it means to tap into your soma, or your body.

Today, more and more therapists are incorporating somatic modalities in their work. By addressing core wounds where they began—in the body—they’re helping many embark on a path to healing. Let’s take a look. 

HEALTHY BODY, HEALTHY MIND

The mental health benefits of connecting with your body are backed by science:  

• Meditative movement exercises like tai chi and qigong are shown to bring about significant drops in salivary cortisol level and improvements in mood state. 

• Aerobic exercise has comparable efficacy to antidepressants in treatment for major depressive disorder. 

• Emphasizing the mind-body link, a consistent yoga practice has been associated with decreased rates of anxiety and depression. 

And there are myriad studies on the mental health benefits of breathwork, acupressure, nervous system work, and more. 

Unfortunately, mental health approaches today are often divorced from the body. 

BEHIND THE MOVEMENT 

To date, Western psychotherapies have focused mostly on the mind. This is useful; cognitive-based therapies help millions around the world. 

But for many people, talk therapy isn’t enough. This is particularly true when issues are rooted in psychological trauma — any experience or series of experiences that overwhelm our ability to cope. 

• Traumatic events push our nervous system outside of its ability to regulate itself, impacting our natural capacity to self-regulate emotions, thoughts, and feelings. 

• Brain scans after traumatic events show physiological changes to the very structure of our brains (enlarged amygdala, shrunken hippocampus). 

When we can’t adaptively digest trauma, unprocessed energy gets stored away in your body. If a similar experience happens again, even if it’s not dangerous, your system will once more be hijacked by fight-or-flight mode — a dated attempt to protect you. 

Once triggered, it can be near impossible to rationalize your way out. Even if we intellectually know that we are safe, our thinking brains are essentially offline. Many people suffering from trauma feel chronically unsafe inside their bodies — frozen, blocked, or numbed by terror.

People cope with this in various ways: overworking, substance abuse, or self-harm, to name a few. Others may narrow their window of tolerance, designing their lives to avoid triggers altogether. 

But without healing the core wound, this hijacking cycle can repeat ad infinitum. When there are too many/too often of these cycles at play, chronic anxiety, burnout, and depression may manifest.

STARTING FROM SOMA

Somatic psychotherapies aim to help release the body from this cycle. 

Approaches like the Hakomi method, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) cue both emotion and intellect to come online and work in tandem to heal holistically. 

An IFS session, for example, involves personifying and “talking to” younger versions of yourself, known as “parts” of you, by feeling where they arise in your body. IFS practitioners help patients create a sense of safety in the body to update parts that are frozen in the past, showing them that they can relax and exit chronic survival modes. 

A similar premise underlies Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which involves hand-tapping and bilateral stimuli to access the traumatic memory network. See also Emotional Freedom Tapping (EFT), which has shown to be highly effective in reducing symptom severity in veterans with PTSD. 

Today, mental health companies are slowly beginning to integrate more somatic methods. 

• Sero Health leverages Nintendo Joy-Con controllers as tappers for remote EMDR therapy sessions.

• WellSet’s new digital holistic studio includes unlimited access to breathwork, acupressure, EFT/Tapping, and other somatic classes for $20/month. 

• PanGenomic, which just acquired Mindleap Health, is expanding its programs to enable holistic mental wellness with tools like IFS, Non-sleep Deep Rest (NSDR), and Vagal Nerve Stimulation (VNS). 

• Integrating breathwork, community, and hot/cold therapies, Othership is building the groundwork for community-oriented somatic wellness. 

But modern mental health’s movement into somatic modalities is still nascent. The idea of working with the body is decades old, but years of cognitive-first approaches have fractured the mind from the body, both in philosophy and in practice.

As more folks try out somatic therapy, that’s starting to change. And psychedelic approaches, which can help quiet or soften the mind, seem to be accelerating the movement as well. In many ways, somatic and psychedelic therapy go hand in hand.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I’ve undergone years of talk therapy, but the first time I tried IFS, I remember walking out of my session with a peace I hadn’t felt in years. Dropping into my body has made my neuroses feel far more workable — for me, it was a near-immediate unlock.

Beyond helping those suffering from trauma or PTSD, tapping into the experience of your body can be a powerful tool for anyone to understand themselves more deeply. The mind is often the last to understand wisdoms that the body has long held.

Punchline: True and holistic healing aligns and integrates all parts of ourselves. Somatic psychotherapies nudge us to remember that our body is a key component of who we are, and should be a revered guide in any form of healing. 

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QUICK HITS

• Hippie flip. Optimi Health Corp submitted a clinical trial application to see how psilocybin and MDMA interact for psychedelic therapies.

• Boss blues. Survey shows that your manager impacts your mental health more than both your doctors or your therapist.

• Drug review. The FDA is evaluating Zuranolone, a 14-day rapid-acting treatment for major depressive disorder. 

• Open apps. Athenaeum, a psychedelic gathering space in NYC, is accepting membership applications.

NEWS & TRENDS

1) Go with your gut 

There’s a strong link between your stomach and your mental well-being. The gut produces over 90% of the body’s serotonin and is often referred to as the “second brain” due to how many nerve endings (100 million) are in your stomach. 

Now, metabolic psychiatry is gaining traction. More and more people are awakening to and investigating the link between gut health and mental disorders. And companies like Digbi Health, Vitract, and Holobiome are focused on delivering dietary interventions to treat mental health disorders. → Read more

2) Set it straight

In psychedelics, set and setting have a major impact on how your trip pans out — different environments can bring about vastly different experiences. Anecdotally, this is common knowledge among psychonauts but hasn’t been explored in depth in clinical settings. 

A new study is changing that. In a study on psilocybin for smoking cessation, researchers emphasized the importance of set and setting and investigated the impact of different therapeutics frameworks — nondrug factors from priming and expectancy to scented oil and patient personality traits. → Read more

DEALS & DEBUTS

🫂 firsthand, a serious mental illness (SMI) company, closed $28.1M from GV (fka Google Ventures). The platform uses a peer-support model, where specialists are trained to engage with patients at home, shelters, churches, or private residences.→ source 

🇮🇪 Spectrum.Life, an Irish mental health startup, raised €5M ($5.3M) in a round led by Act Venture Capital. The platform serves 4M+ users, providing mental health and well-being coaches, open-ended therapy, digital clinics, and more across the UK and Ireland. → source

👧🏻 Fort Health, a virtual children’s mental health clinic, launched this week with $4.5M from Blue Venture Fund. Created at Redesign Health, a company that launches healthcare startups, Fort aims to bridge the gap between primary care and behavioral health. → source  

💻 Syndi Health, an employee digital mental health platform, secured £1.7M ($2M) in pre-seed funding. The startup leverages AI to keep employees engaged and point them to the most appropriate well-being service.→ source

🔦 Beaming Health, an autism-focused pediatric therapy platform, secured $1.7M in pre-seed funding led by NextGen Venture Partners. The San Francisco-based startup operates an online directory of clinics to help match families to US providers. → source 

👋 HeyKiddo, a kids mental health app, raised a $1M seed round. The platform provides a set of tech-based tools for parents, caregivers, and teachers to assist kids with developing their leadership, social, and emotional skills.   → source

🏥 Choose Ketamine, an Austin-based virtual ketamine therapy platform, completed an undisclosed seed round led by Manifestations Capital. The company just expanded into 12 US states and will use the funds to continue growing its team of providers and guides. → source

💼 Unmind Health, a workplace wellbeing platform, acquired Frankie Health, an employee mental healthcare platform. The combined company’s new offering, Unmind Talk, provides employers with anonymized data about employee well-being. → source 

💊 Rootine, a next-gen supplements company, launched Rootine Precision Stress Program, including an at-home saliva cortisol level test and personalized interactive plans incorporating supplements, nutrition, and lifestyle recommendations. → source 

🎓 UC Davis, a public university, announced a new institute to study psychedelic medicines with $5M in funding from the college deans, vice chancellor, and Office of the Provost.→ source

WHAT I’M READING

• We said it last week and we’ll say it again. The youth mental health crisis needs dire attention. NYU social psychologist Jon Haidt posits that the epidemic emerged far before the pandemic—as early as 2012—and that it isn’t simply a “kids these days” moment. → After Babel

• What if your brain functions more like a guitar than a computer? Research from Portugal shows that the brain’s oscillatory patterns look like “a higher-dimensional analogue of resonance modes in musical instruments; they are akin to reverberations, to echoes inside the brain.” → Champalimaud Foundation

Okay, that’s all for today! Let me know what you think; my email’s always open for feedback, ideas, etc. And yes, last week I mistyped Issue No. 002 as 003. Good eye if you noticed. 

Appreciate you always for reading and I hope you have a peaceful week. If not, I hope it’s at least edifying. I, for one, was going through some edification of my own these last few days. 

Until next Sunday,

Mel

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