- Twice-named Canada’s Top Female Entrepreneur, Kelsey Ramsden is the CEO and President of Mind Cure
- Mind Cure is a Canadian mental health and wellness company that aims to identify and develop products that ease suffering, increase productivity, and enhance mental health and wellness
- Ramsden speaks to Truffle Report about the importance of integration, Mind Cure’s focuses, and iSTRYM platform
Kelsey Ramsden has spent her entire career founding, building, and scaling businesses. She was named Canada’s Top Female Entrepreneur for two consecutive years and has been recognized globally for building and leading multimillion-dollar companies. Now, Ramsden is looking into the psychedelic space.
“I’ve been a patient of psychedelic therapy for three years, and what drove me to it was this idea that very rarely in a capitalist life cycle are we able to both do well and do good. You rarely get an opportunity to build into a brand-new market, not that psychedelics are new, but that this market for them is. I came to it because of the transformation that happened to me in my life,” said Ramsden. “We get one little ride on the blue marble up here in space, and if I’m going to use it well, I think this is probably the best use of my time and my ability. That’s what brought me to it, and that’s what keeps me going in it. I’m fortunate to be a small part of a much bigger movement.”
On Psychedelic Experience, Integration, and Moving the Culture
“I’m a 44-year-old mother of three children. The more 44-year-old mothers that have three children, who have degrees, who are well-considered, solid individuals, and who are able to come forward and speak to the positive net benefit of psychedelic medicine, the more again we generate the stories that move the culture,” said Ramsden “I have colleagues who are CEOs in our space who will not talk about their experiences, but I am not one of them. How is it that I would ask anyone else to do something I’m unwilling to do or to talk about? Real leadership comes when people are willing to tell their true story and stand in front of all and say, ‘We’re here, and we have a mission, and I am a part of that mission through my own experience.” I get a little charged up about that because it does the whole movement a disservice when people aren’t willing to talk about their own experiences openly.”
Ramsden stressed that a therapist “has to be armed to understand where their patients are when they’re within the psychedelic experience” to assist them better not only during the session, but in the integration process as well.
“Something no one seems to be talking about, which is nuts when you talk about people who’ve been doing psychedelic work for a long time, is the integration piece. So many people go into psychedelic experiences and whether they experience oneness with the universe or come to some deep enriched understanding about themselves, they then have to come back into Tuesday afternoon, regular life. They go home to their partner and their partner asks how it went, and it’s ineffable to explain being one with the universe. This piece is about integrating your psychedelic understanding, what you witnessed, saw, experienced, understood into your daily life — that’s where the real change happens,” she explained.
“Psychedelic medicine is not a silver bullet. You don’t come out the other side and say, ‘Well, cured, done.’ I think so much more conversation should be happening about how therapists help their patients, and how we as a community help each other integrate back into the common world. The therapist should experience psychedelic medicine, so they understand what it’s like to leave the door and go back to their partners and friends, and try and explain what happened for themselves. It’s a really important part of the work,” said Ramsden.
On Mind Cure’s Primary Focuses and iSTRYM
According to Ramsden, the core of Mind Cure’s work is taking people from “despair and dependency, to hope and healing.” In order to do this, Mind Cure focuses on scientific research and data accumulation through its digital therapeutics’ platform, iSTRYM.
“We arm therapists with the information and the services to get the best psychedelic patient outcomes. And we arm patients or clients with the opportunity to optimize their minds. We like the idea of supporting those people in integrating back into the common world afterwards in a more positive way. We also like the idea of everything being driven by data and science. Our digital therapeutics platform is super exciting to us because it’s going to help train therapists, arm therapists with what they need to know, and arm clients with the ability to optimize their minds. Ultimately, it acts like Netflix, it up bumps the best psychedelic protocols and up bumps the best integration protocols. On the other side is our research and what we’re doing with psychedelic medicines to help move the science. I always say, data moves science and story moves culture. The digital therapeutics will capture all sorts of stories and will be able to help move the culture with all these positive outcomes, but data pieces are important on the science side, so we can move these medicines through regulatory processes,” said Ramsden.
iSTRYM is a data-driven centralized system for psychedelic research that supports the therapist in identifying the best medical protocols for the patient, provides support to the patient and therapist during the psychedelic session, and supports the patient and the therapist afterwards to ensure that patient concludes their psychedelic assisted therapeutic session and gets the most out of the experience.
“iSTRYM gives us a huge data set, and data is insight. When we get to scale across all the medicines, we can see which medicines are working how, for what populations and where. We can also identify the best therapists that have the best outcomes,” explained Ramsden.
“The music is very important to the journey. We wanted to find folks who are best at that kind of bleeding edge of music and technology with roots in science. The folks we identified, have developed music programs that with the help of wearable can target different emotive sets. The AI is able to determine what kind of music is going to get you to the place that your therapist wants you to get to to do the work that you’re there to do. We’re the only folks who are going to be allowing that in-session kind of adaptation,” she continued.
The app is still in the development process, with the beta version scheduled for release at the end of July.
On Signing Mind Cure’s Agreement with ATMA Journey Centers
“The way that I look at this market is in how we can support the people who are doing clinical rollouts in a way that we think is the most cost-effective. As a capitalist, it’s important that we make money, but as a pragmatist, it’s important that we work with people who understand the care of the patient. ATMA was exactly that. They have an awesome medicine man, David Harder, who is brilliant. They have great people on the capital side,” explained Ramsden. “Our investment into them was twofold. One, we can take part in the revenue side of their business as they scale out their journey centers in Canada and Costa Rica and plans yet TBD that aren’t announced yet. Two, allowing our digital therapeutics a place to live. All of these ATMA locations will be utilizing iSTRYM to help their patients and to help their therapists get the best outcomes and measure them and prove them. Our partnership with ATMA is a dream come true for us because they’re working across medicines and continents.”
