Bernadette Guthrie

Background

About Bernadette Guthrie

I am currently employed as a Staff Nurse in a private mental health facility in London, and I am awaiting a place for training as a ‘Psilocybin Therapist’. My interest in training as a therapist in psilocybin therapy stems from both my nursing career and my related academic study. As a Registered Mental and General Nurse with 25 years’ experience in the field of mental health, I have cared for many patients whose depression was not alleviated by conventional treatments for depression. In an effort to understand ‘treatment-resistant depression’ I chose it as the focus of my masters project on depression (November 2018 - September 2019), the third year of my MSc in Mental Health Science. Learning that COMPASS Pathways had received ‘’Breakthrough Therapy’’ designation from the FDA for psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression inspired to focus my masters project primarily on psilocybin. My project was titled ‘Psilocybin Therapy: A novel therapeutic model for treatment-resistant depression?’ The year 2019 proved to be an incredible year of learning, during which I envisaged a turning point in my career. My intention is to train as a psilocybin therapist. Like those who are directly involved in this research, I am optimistic that psilocybin-assisted therapy may prove to be a transdiagnostic therapeutic tool with the potential to help individuals with mental health challenges to begin their personal journeys of recovery. ‘Mental Health: Hope on the horizon for patients with treatment-resistant depression’ was the title of my entry for the ‘Student Nursing Times Awards 2020’ in the ‘Learner of the Year: Post-registration’ category, in which I was one of the six shortlisted. Since completing my masters project I have kept up to date with developments in the field of psychedelic research. I am very excited about the probability of a much needed new paradigm shift in psychiatry, and I hope to be able to play a part in it.