The Psychedelic Revolution in Mental Healthcare

On this episode of Motley Fool Money, Motley Fool analyst Sanmeet Deo talks with Dr. Will Van Derveer and Keith Kurlander, founders of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, about the shift from using psychedelics as a counterculture fringe movement to an FDA-backed clinical model, Big Pharma's strategy, and why the real investing opportunity lies in a $20,000 service.

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This podcast was recorded on April 12, 2026.

Keith Kurlander: That landscape is different in terms of what you're investing in. You're not investing in a drug that people are going to be taking every day in their life. You're investing in a drug that will hopefully help somebody get unstuck from resistant forms of mental health conditions and then get to start moving on with their life.

Mac Greer: That was Keith Kurlander, co-author of the new book, Psychedelic Therapy: A Revolutionary Approach to Restoring Mental Health and Reclaiming Your Life. I'm Motley Fool producer Mac Greer. Motley Fool Analyst Sanmeet Deo recently talked with Kurlander and co-author Dr. Will Van Derveer about that psychedelic revolution and the investing opportunities ahead. Enjoy.

Sanmeet Deo: Hey Fools, today we're zooming out to look at a massive paradigm shift happening in the health sector, one that has profound implications for a culture, or well-being, and the broader economic landscape. For decades, traditional mental health system has relied heavily on managing symptoms. But there's a growing movement back by serious clinical research and FDA trials, pointing toward a totally different model. It's moving fast. Just recently, Compass Pathways, which is probably traded tickers CMPS saw its stock jump over 23% after announcing that it's Phase 3 trials for COMP 360, the Psilocybin treatment, demonstrate a well-tolerated safety profile, and now they're getting around for the FDA. As psychedelic stocks rise on the news, my guests today argue that it's not a hype trade, but rather kind of the birth of a brand-new health care category. Today, I have Dr. Will Van Derveer and Keith Kurlander, founders of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, and authors of the new book, Psychedelic Therapy: A Revolutionary Approach to Restoring Mental Health and Reclaiming Your Life. Well, Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Kurlander: Thanks. Good to be here. Great to be with you.

Sanmeet Deo: Start right at the foundation, you argue at the recent surge in stocks like Compass Pathways, it isn't just a hype trade, but the birth of a brand-new health care category. What belief about psychedelic therapy do most people and most investors get completely wrong? Why does this misunderstanding matter?

Keith Kurlander: Well, I would say that one thing investors may not know is psychedelic therapy is an interventional approach, much different than traditional psychopharm interventions, where it's not a daily intervention. This is more similar to something like TMS to treat depression, where it's like 1-6 or whatever amount of times. Most investors wouldn't understand that unless they went and really dove in a little bit. That landscape is different in terms of what you're investing in. You're not investing in a drug that people are going to be taking every day their life. You're investing in a drug that will hopefully help somebody get unstuck from resistant forms of mental health conditions and then get to start moving on with their life. In that sense, you need to know what you're looking at, in terms of if you want to look at things that mimic how these might work in terms of investing in it.

Will Van Derveer: I would add that we don't have a great track record, speaking from the perspective of a psychiatrist. That's me. In terms of getting people through the mental health system and then out the door and putting psychiatry behind them. What's exciting about this new interventional approach is that you're seeing people getting exposed to a drug, as Keith said, one time, three times, five times, with a durable, long-lasting benefit. We're talking about a huge market here of treatment-resistant conditions. For example, when you look at just treatment-resistant depression, globally, you're looking at 100 million people who are suffering from that condition. Which is one third of the total people dealing with depression on the planet. It's a big segment of the group of people who are dealing with depression who don't respond to the currently available, currently approved treatments.

Sanmeet Deo: Now, taking a step back because as we're talking about this, I want to make sure that the viewers and our members understand what exactly is psychedelic therapy? What is it replacing? Then what is it doing? Is it a drug? Is it a therapy sessions? What does it involve if, let's say, they're to undergo these treatments?

Keith Kurlander: Well, what it's not is taking, LSD in your backyard and staring at the sky for six hours and playing Grateful Dead. Not knocking that. Many of us have been there, but it's not that. It's a little different. What it is is you're combining certain medicines that are being studied, psychedelic medicines that are being studied, with therapy. That looks like the therapy has stages. You're doing therapy prior to doing the medicine. You're preparing for this in many different ways, and then you have sessions typically with a therapist in the room during the sessions on the medicine.

Then you're doing work after these medicines are both amplifying a therapeutic process the person is going through. Then also the medicines are actually working on your brain, too, biologically, and doing things there. You get a two-for-one with this treatment. Whereas, let's say antidepressants, which we'll mention really briefly. Are working on your brain, you're not pairing them with therapy in the sense where that's enhancing the therapy. This is very unique in that way.

Will Van Derveer: Yeah. Another dimension of it on the neuroscience level of it is that we are opening up a person's unconscious mind in a way that ordinary therapy doesn't do and ordinary medications doesn't do. We're firm believers in the view just based on the results that are coming out in these FDA trials, is that the keys to the healing often reside inside this unconscious mind, that's hard to access, whether it's in therapy or with medications. Another way to say that is that we're approaching the root cause of the condition by evoking what's inside of you, as opposed to the current approach and how I was trained to medicate depression or PTSD, for example, is that you use these conventional medications you take every day to suppress your symptoms. That might help you a lot. There's nothing wrong with that. But when you stop taking the medications, typically, sooner or later, the symptoms come back. You haven't actually dealt with the root cause that's underneath the symptoms.

Sanmeet Deo: You described earlier, psychedelics is not taking LSD out in our lawn, listening to Grateful Dead. How do we get from that fringe counter culture of the '60s, to what was viewed psychedelics, LSD, mushrooms, all those to where we are today, where we're clearing Phase 3 FDA trials, what's the tipping point that the medical establishment said, all right, this is actually a serious therapy.

Will Van Derveer: One of the big issues that we see is the rates of suicide in veterans. When you talk about how do we get to a tipping point, it's a hard argument to make to get on a soapbox and say, we're taking good care of our veterans. It's hard to argue that because of how much those people are suffering when they get back from combat typically. We see, for example, in one VA study over the period of time 2001-2014, 30,000 suicides amongst veterans, while during that time, we were at war, and only 7,000 people were killed in active duty. When you have suicide rates that exceed four times what's happening in terms of combat deaths, that gets people's attention, and it goes to show you that we're not treating these conditions well enough. At that point, it becomes an imperative to take, you could say more risk, to take the risk of going outside of the dominant paradigm or the conventional mindset about how to work with these conditions.

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Sanmeet Deo: Whenever we get an industry breakthrough like this, investors tend to flood in. It's the next hot thing, the next big thing. This arguably so can become a very big thing. You stated some of the market potential there. When you look at the suitability as an investment in this industry right now, what are the red flags individual investors should be watching for? I'll kick that to you Keith.

Keith Kurlander: Well, there's different places you could be investing. Obviously, you can invest in the biopharm companies that are putting up the drugs. That's the most straightforward thing to be investing in. I think one thing is, if you're not a Biopharm investor, a lot of drugs don't get through their application in Phase 3, and that's just a reality. There's that you have to look out for that.

We had a rejection for MDMA in 2024. Now, I think the positive thing that Compass has going for them is that they did their study in a very different way than the previous study was done on MDMA. The MDMA study had one component to it that is a little challenging for the FDA to understand, which is the therapy. It was a very embedded part of the actual research, whereas they really tried to look at the drug effect more, so isolated in the Psilocybin studies, and not look at the therapy as much. They call it psychological support. That's a very positive thing to be aware of. It's like, there's something that the FDA is going to be able to wrap their head around a little easier for this particular medicine.

Then also thinking about a lot of these interventional tools, it's like, where's the service happening? There's going to be a bit of a service flourishing happening in pockets. That is an investment. If you can get into the places that really proliferate this in the beginning, some of the healthcare systems and things, that can go well too. A lot of the money to be made might be there where the service actually cost the money. The real revenue is the $10,000, $20,000 treatment versus the 5 or $800 drug. That's something to consider.

Sanmeet Deo: It's interesting you mentioned that because, when we look at companies, we look for a mote. A competitive advantage that these companies have traditional biopharm they have patents, and then those last for a very long time. No one else can produce them. In this industry, can you touched on it briefly, where do you think some of those mots or competitive advantages will be? Will it be like synthetic patents, like COMP360, the clinics, the therapy protocols? Where do you think That advantage will be? Take it to you Will.

Will Van Derveer: Well, it's an interesting moment because as we've been talking about Compass Pathways is ahead of the pack in terms of their trajectory toward the end of Phase 3 with FDA. We all know that getting first to market is a huge advantage competitively. But on the other hand, and this is an interesting irony to keep thinking about and looking into is that Psilocybin whether it's synthetic or the plant based one, as a product as an intervention, is a relatively long experience for the patient and the service center, the clinic to wrap their head around. We're talking about a five or six hour experience. For a patient and for a clinic staffing setup, it's an all day experience, essentially, for the patient to get that intervention. You compare that with some of the other products that are in the pipeline.

Sanmeet Deo: I want to help ground it for listeners. What's a real world story that captures the very heart of your argument that you make in your book?

Will Van Derveer: What comes to mind right off the bat is a young combat veteran that we treated in one of our studies. I'll call him Charles. That's the name I gave him in the book. It's not his real name. I think he was 24 when I met him, and he had done a tour in Iraq, and he had a condition that we see a lot in veterans called moral injury, where it's a very specific type of trauma where the rules of conduct in the combat theater are not followed. You bear witness to that. You see your commanding officer doing things that are inhumane or could even be considered war crimes, for example.

Your psyche doesn't know what to do with that because you joined the armed forces for the reasons that most people do, which is because you care about your country, and you are there to defend and protect something that you believe in that stands behind you, not because you have any desire to go out and kill people. But when children are carrying IEDs or luring soldiers into situations, and children get killed, there can be a lasting traumatic impact from t