Enosis Therapeutics, a medical technology and psychedelic research company that leverages virtual reality (VR) to optimize the psychotherapeutic experience for both the patient and the therapist, provided an update today on its offer to Australian therapists in response to the the recent announcement from the Therapeutic Goods Administration, and it’s plans to participate and present at SXSW 2023.
Therapeutic Goods Administration Update
Following the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration’s declaration to legalize the prescription of psilocybin and MDMA to treat certain mental health conditions, Enosis Therapeutics, a Melbourne-based company, plans to offer its flagship AnchoringVR™, which acts as a standardized therapeutic framework for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, for free to Australian therapist looking to bring psychedelic therapy into their practice.
“Working with psychedelic experiences can be a significant departure from traditional models of mental health care delivery. We hope to ease this transition for prospective prescribers as Australia prepares to embrace psychedelic therapy into its health care system.”
Dr Prashanth Puspanathan, Co-Founder of Enosis Therapeutics
The VR scenario offered by Enosis acts as a container for the entire psychotherapy process and provides a therapeutic framework for therapists to follow as they guide patients through the psychotherapeutic journey of integrating their psychedelic experience. The Virtual Reality environment is able to serve multiple functions; it creates an optimal setting for the patient, provides appropriate stimulus and a range of expression tools and feeds back to the therapist, real time feedback on the progress and success of treatment. Crucially, this method of multisensory expression creates a permanent record of therapy progress for the patient, so they can preserve as much of the insights they have gleaned during their psychedelic experience as possible.
The company is also pleased to announce that it has been selected to participate in a panel focused on the application of psychedelic therapy at this year’s SXSW conference in Austin, Texas.
On March 10, 2023 at 11:30am at the Austin Convention Center, Room 9AB, co-founder Agnieszka Sekula will join Walter Greenleaf from Stanford University, Skip Rizzo from University of Southern California, and Murat Yucel from Monash University for a panel discussion on “VR in Psychedelic Therapy – A Friend or A Foe“. The panel will focus on experiential parallels in treatments that use psychedelics and VR, what this combination can teach us about consciousness and the potential applications of VR in PP.
Panelists will critically explore how experience design can improve treatment efficacy and enable a more efficient allocation of resources thus lowering the cost of care. The panel will discuss major roadblocks and limitations of VR and the next steps in exploring the potential of technology in strengthening the psychedelic frameworks.
About Enosis Therapeutics
Enosis Therapeutics Pty Ltd. is a med-tech start-up founded by Agnieszka D. Sekula, a psychedelic researcher at Swinburne University, and Dr. Prashanth Puspanathan, a Melbourne based medical doctor and long-time psychedelic advocate. Enosis was formed to optimize real world adoption of psychedelic treatments by leveraging virtual reality’s unique, state-altering properties.
Enosis sits at the intersection of research and industry, providing carefully designed virtual reality scenarios and clinical protocols that employ them at specific points of psychotherapy to improve the quality of the patient experience and increase therapist efficiency.
Founders aim to empower patients to take leadership in their own healing journey by using VR to break away from the constraints of the analog system. Their therapeutic approach promotes non-cognitive, experiential, emotional, and embodied aspects of treatment.