Why did Awakn and Mind Medicine Australia have such abysmal PR responses to Sessa facing medical tribunal?
Note: This post covers sexual abuse, medical abuse and a related post mentions suicide. If you have experienced harm from psychedelics, you may want to look at support options from https://shinesupport.org/
The first half of this post discusses Awakn and MMA’s PR responses to Sessa facing a tribunal hearing. The second half discusses Awakn as an organisation and the people behind it.
On Feb 6, 2024, Awakn posted this statement on their website:
At first, I thought Awakn’s response was good and I was glad to see them say anything — the bar is low for decent PR responses from psychedelic organisations. Any response seemed better than no response.
I also really wanted to believe Awakn had no prior knowledge about the investigation. It would be really foolish and disappointing to lie about this.
As I thought about Awakn’s response to the Sessa allegations more, I started to realise it’s missing some key points for me.
First, I wish Awakn had said something to affirm support for victim-survivors. Just one clear, firm sentence — as symbolic or even performative as it might be — is important. It could send a message to everyone watching that Awakn welcomes this investigation and stands by people coming forward if they have been harmed. (Note: I’m aware it may not be the case that the patient in Sessa’s case ever made a complaint — it’s possible investigation happened after they died).
Does supporting victim-survivors align with Awakn’s values? I’ve seen no information to suggest that is the case — but I can still have hope that they want to do better.
Any organisation who previously employed potentially abusive clinicians should, without question, welcome an investigation. Instead, Awakn said they will assist the investigation “when requested”. Complying when requested is their legal obligation so this isn’t much of a demonstration of support for the process.
This leads into my next concern: what is Awakn doing now to investigate Sessa’s practice from his time at Awakn? Reviewing Sessa’s practice at Awakn should be done immediately, not pending the outcome of this investigation.
Sessa’s former patients from his time at Awakn could be impacted by the announcement of the trial, not just the outcome.
It’s likely that many patients deeply trusted Sessa. Many of them would be patients with past experience of abuse. Sessa used psychedelics and ketamine with patients — substances that increase openness and vulnerability. He encouraged them to “let go” and trust him.
For many people — including myself — who have experienced egregious ethics violations from the medical system, finding out about the investigation could be destabilising.
Imagine what kind of impact hearing news of Sessa’s gross misconduct investigation could have on his former patients’ (or anyone’s) trust.
A recent study published in Nature Reports highlights experiences of patients in a psilocybin trial. Prominent themes included “general distrust in mental health care” and being able to “trust in study therapists”
Awakn’s PR response also doesn’t mention support options for patients who might be feeling destabilised by this announcement. Similarly, there’s no information on how Awakn patients could reach out if they experienced misconduct in their interactions with Sessa. Why?
Awakn’s response absolutely should have made it clear to (former) patients how they can get support if they have been harmed by Sessa or any of Awakn’s therapists. From looking at their website, I found no information specific to patients at all. Even the “about addiction” section of Awakn’s website is geared towards investors with a section on the business potential: “The global addiction treatment market is valued at more than $100 billion per annum, yet severely lacks efficacy and innovation”. Not a single sentence is directed towards people actually experiencing addiction.
To pre-empt any response along the lines of “patients who are engaged with Awakn already know how to get in contact if they have a complaint” — great, then it will be no harm to remind them.
At least one patient has already complained about ketamine therapy with Sessa. You can see that detailed here in Sasha’s reporting. Sasha also sent this patient’s feedback directly to the CEO months ago. He did not respond.
It seems like Awakn is trying to distance themselves as much as possible from the investigation into Sessa’s conduct. It’s like they want to put their fingers in their ears and shout la-la-la in the corner while this all goes down.
Ben Sessa was a former co-founder of Awakn (did you know co-founders can be erased?). He was completely removed from the organisations (seemingly on his doing) around April 2023. Apparently, no one had any idea about the allegations at this point.
The CEO and co-founder of Awakn is Anthony Tennyson, “an experienced financial services industry executive with 10 years in international strategy, commercial leadership roles with Aon plc, and 5 years with Merrill Lynch and Bank of Ireland”. The other co-founder, George Scorsis, was formerly President of Red Bull Canada. Knowing this, the Awakn website makes a lot more sense.
Awakn’s management and corporate board:
The Awakn clinical advisory board has some familiar faces:
Before looking at this case, I didn’t know the Mithoefer’s were clinical advisors to Awakn. The Mithoefer’s also work with MAPS. I have to wonder how exactly advisors have time to do all of their advising.
Michael Mithoefer’s profile on the Awakn website states that he “conducted two of the six MAPS-sponsored Phase 2 clinical trials testing MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD”. I’m surprised by the audacity of listing this as part of his qualifications, without qualification.
What Awakn doesn’t mention is that while Michael was the medical monitor for the Vancouver Phase 2 trial, the trial therapists abused (at least) one patient, on camera. Under his monitoring. He was responsible for patient safety and he failed to prevent entirely preventable abuse.
Richard Yensen and Donna Dryer were filmed spooning and pinning down the patient in recorded dosing sessions. The patient then moved to a remote island with the couple after the trial. The island is home to others with close ties MAPS including Rick Ingrasci, former physician who resigned his medical license after sexually abusing patients. MAPS Canada hosts events at the wellness center co-founded by Ingrasci. But apparently no one knew…
Any half-serious review of the public information available about the abuse in the Phase II study shows that it was preventable. It is farcical to suggest, as many have, that it was “inevitable”. It was not inevitable. It happened because Mithoefer and others at MAPS set up a system that allowed it to happen under their watch. They failed to act when there were blazing red flags being recorded right in front of them.
To the senior researcher who told myself and others that “there’s a lot more to the story…the patient should have never been in the trial” —please stop saying this. There is no scenario in which the patients’ mental health is relevant in discussions on therapists abusing patients.
We confer the title of doctor with the understanding that they will uphold a strict code of ethics. Doctors are the only ones responsible for upholding their code of ethics. This is why doctors have power, status and (relatively) good salaries. We trust them and hold them to higher standards because of that. Of course, all if this is ‘in theory’…
Mind Medicine Australia
Apparently, MMA only found out about the allegations on 11/02/2024, the day I tweeted them asking why they had not responded.
The media release is not posted on the “media releases” page. Instead, the most recent post, 12/02/2024 celebrates their 5 year anniversary.
Here’s all they have to say about Sessa (I can’t actually find the original post for this now — did they delete it?). Ben Sessa to Step Aside. The euphemistic title makes this even worse than the Awakn response. All of the same issues of the Awakn response apply here. It’s cold and devoid of any recognition of how this could impact people who have trust Sessa in their programs.
With Awakn, I can appreciate their release was timely. For that reason, it makes a bit more sense that it was so brief. It still demonstrates they had no plan in place for how they would handle allegations of misconduct.
But for Mind Medicine Australia, I have a hard time seeing how they were not aware of the allegations, given it had been public for days. Perhaps that is that case. But again, they clearly had no plan in place for how to respond to allegations.
So, here we are, another top leading expert with serious allegations against them with very close ties to MAPS and the Mithoefers.
When will we get serious about studying and preventing harms to make this field safer? When will be get serious about having any sort of quality control over who has power in this space?
