Draft:Phil Wolfson

• Comment: There are still huge chunks of this with no obvious source. Can you provide footnotes for this information? asilvering (talk) 03:31, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: See WP:BLP. All statements, starting with the date of birth, need to be sourced or removed. Greenman (talk) 20:06, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

• Comment: Please don't cite Wikipedia, YouTube or other unreliable sources. Best, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 09:12, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

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Phil Wolfson
Born	1943
Nationality	United States of America
Alma mater	Brandeis University, BA; New York University School of Medicine, MD
Organization	The Ketamine Research Foundation And The Center For Transformational Psychotherapy
Known for	Psychedelic Psychotherapy, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, Consciousness And Spirituality, and Social Justice Activism
Children	2, 1 Surviving
Website	ketamineresearchfoundation.org; theketaminetrainingcenter.com; philwolfsonmd.com

Phil Wolfson MD, (born 1943), is a pioneer in the use of the medicine ketamine as an alternative to conventional psychotherapy, creating the novel ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP) process. Wolfson’s work with MDMA and other psychedelic medicines as powerful tools to emotional, spiritual health and wellbeing within ethical psychotherapeutic methodologies has been central to his career since the 1980s.Wolfson is a psychotherapist, psychiatrist, psychedelic therapy pioneer, writer, entrepreneur, and social activist. He has authored two books: The Ketamine Papers, playing an important role in the development of the field-- as well as numerous articles on psychedelic medicine and psychotherapy. He is the Founder and CEO of the non-profit Ketamine Research Foundation which is the main clinical research and training organization exploring and teaching KAP.

Wolfson graduated from Brandeis University in 1964 and went on to study at the New York University School of Medicine, receiving his medical doctorate in 1968. He was licensed to practice medicine in New York, California and Washington, DC. Wolfson began practicing psychotherapy in 1966, psychiatry in 1972 and has since become a keen researcher and advocate of the nature of mind, spirit and mental health. This unwavering focus on consciousness, community, social justice, and the spirit has been the hallmark of his presence in the psychedelic world for the entirety of his career.

Early Life and Social Justice

Wolfson has had an unwavering focus on psychotherapy, consciousness, community, social justice, and the spirit as the hallmark of his presence in the psychiatric world for the entirety of his career. Wolfson’s activism began at Brandeis University in the early 1960s where he created a lecture program that included Martin Luther King and Malcom X. At New York University School of Medicine,  in collaboration  with Nobel Prize winner Dickinson W. Richards, and his Hartford Foundation, Wolfson produced the first formal lecture series on community medicine. This series emphasized the racism, sexism, and classist nature of healthcare, and was supported by the New York Academy of Medicine. While studying medicine, he was a principal organizer of the New York Medical Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the National Student Mobilization Committee, and part of the anti-racist, social justice organization, the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

Wolfson’s advocacy for social justice and the right to equal health care included his leadership in the development of the Student Health Programs which promoted education and novel programs in community medicine and equalization of access to health care - with nursing, dental, and medical student organizations forming at many schools nationwide.

Wolfson was born in 1943 in the worst year of  World War II, and as a human and a person of Jewish identity, was from his first moments of consciousness sensitized to the slaughter of innocents and destructive prejudice and intolerance. He grew up in Queens, in New York City with parents who had suffered greatly during the Great Depression. The breakout from the suppression of the McCarthy years was for him and many of his peers what came to be known as the freedom of the Sixties and opened floodgates to personal and social growth. Of great impact was his first experience of psychotherapy at age 17 at college which moved him to a decision to become a psychotherapist and psychiatrist always within a psychosocial context.

Alice Wolfson (nee Jacoby) became his wife in 1968 and they worked closely together organizing for women’s health, Pro Choice, and social justice. The couple had two children Noah (deceased) and Eric – aka Helix Eric Wolfson.

Career

Completing his tour of duty in the U.S. Public Health Service, Wolfson began working as a psychiatrist in the DC area in 1971, attending programs at the Washington School of Psychiatry including three years of group therapy training. He went on to work as a psychiatrist for four years at the Woodburn Mental Health Center in Annandale, Virginia, ending in 1977. In 1977, Wolfson moved to San Francisco and started working as a psychiatrist first in Richmond and then as Director of I Ward in the Contra Costa County Hospital Mental Health System. I Ward treated patients in their first psychotic breaks with low, or no-dose medication, viewing psychosis as a process that contained amidst its difficulties the possibility of deep change and realization—a la RD Laing, and others. This was deeply influenced by the emerging family and systems approaches to therapy of which Wolfson had been  part of since the early 1970s. I Ward had an explicit focus on the family as the container of the process. It was one of a handful of demonstration programs in the Bay Area (Diabasis, Soteria, Emanon) that sought to heal severe mental illness through process work, rather than suppression. As part of an emerging global network, Wolfson participated in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, that embraced social, anti-repressive, and cultural aspects of human lives with regards to psychotherapy.

Starting in 1984, Wolfson entered private practice, was on the psychiatric staff of Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California and taught at UCSF Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, and was on faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the former JFK University’s Graduate School of Psychology.

The tragic loss of  Wolfson’s son Noah, at age sixteen, due to a four year struggle with leukemia, deepened his personal understanding of loss, PTSD, grief, and mental illness. His book, Noe-a Father/son Song of Love, Life, Sickness, and Death, (2011) documented his experience with loss that would shape his subsequent work in helping others deal with prolonged illness, its impact on family, grief and the effects of profound loss. In the aftermath, in his practice and life, he would devote himself to serving families and individuals suffering with impending death, loss, grief, and survival. For many years, he served as a facilitator for Jerry Jampolsky’s Center for Attitudinal Healing.

Alternative Medicines and the Psychedelic

Beginning in the 1983, Wolfson closely collaborated with Alexander Shulgin, the foremost American psychopharmacologist, and author to research the potential of psychedelic psychotherapy largely based on work with MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) assisted psychedelic psychotherapy. Wolfson published the first paper on MDMA and family treatment with psychosis.

Working with couples suffering from conditions such as depression or trauma, they led a dedicated group of psychotherapists and psychiatrists with the support and hosting of Richard Price, co-owner of the Esalen Institute and the psychologist Leo Zeff, among many others. ARUPA, the Association for the Responsible Use of Psychedelic Agents formed to further psychedelic research, and clinical development primarily focused on MDMA work.  This was an informal and ever-expanding group which came together to explore the potential forms of therapy these medicines could provide. When the DEA put these substances into Schedule I in 1986, making them illegal and unavailable for clinical or research work, Wolfson and his colleagues mounted a campaign to keep MDMA legal. The DEA overruled their own Administrative Law Judge, who had found that the medical utility of MDMA would have enabled continued exploration of viable treatments. This legal outcome plus the Analog Drug Act made further open exploration and research of alternative substances impossible and illegal.

Clinical research with MDMA resumed in 1999 with first publication in 2011. Contributing to this, in 2019, Wolfson completed a Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) sponsored  FDA Phase 2 study of subjects with the anxiety and trauma of having life-threatening illnesses utilizing intensive MDMA psychotherapy. Given the millions of survivors of life threatening illnesses, and the impacts on them , Wolfson has continued to argue publicly for the need for an extension of the DSM-V diagnosis of PTSD  to PTSD-Life Threatening Illnesses to enable recognition, support and psychotherapy. The 2019 study data demonstrated the success  of this provision of care.

Ketamine and KAP

Wolfson’s first exposure to the power of the ketamine molecule took place in 1990, but it was a decade later that his full exploration of ketamine’s potential as a psychotherapeutic medicine began. In 2014, he opened a clinic in Marin County, California, dedicated to the application of ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP). This practice has been elaborated in numerous publications including The Ketamine Papers in 2016 with Glenn Hartelius.

Throughout his work, Wolfson has continually emphasized the necessity for practitioners of ketamine and alternative medicines to know these powerful substances personally before administering them to patients. Similarly, he emphasized the importance of doing so within the embrace of psychotherapies that are being methodologically developed for these medicines. This was emphasized in the first paper on the clinical use of KAP --reporting on 235 patients in three practices.

In 2017, Wolfson founded and became the CEO of the non-profit Ketamine Research Foundation (KRF). The organization is dedicated to training, education, and research with ketamine and especially in its therapeutic format—Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) as the first legally available psychedelic medicine for prescription of a psychoactive and psychedelic psychotherapy. Its subsidiary, the Ketamine Training Center (KTC) has been the leading organization in training practitioners in Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) with, as of 2024, over nine hundred practitioners participating in its international trainings. The Ketamine Psychotherapy Associates membership organization continues the educational and collaborative basis for KAP’s development worldwide.

Wolfson has recently (2023) published  through KRF the first paper on working with adolescents and ketamine. In KRF, he has conducted research on the concentration of ketamine in breast milk enabling women to make a decision to use this medicine for treatment of depression and  postpartum depression with minimal disruption of the mother-child relationship. In 2024, publication of  a comprehensive paper on ketamine and KAP emphasized the dissociative-psychedelic effects of the medicine as primary and inseparable effects and not side effects. His recent work for a mass audience  has focused on the value of the clinical use of ketamine and the causes and problems attendant on its misuse.

Business affiliations

Wolfson has embarked on several different corporate ventures. The first was in 1988 as Founder and Director of Fiberstars, later Energy Focus, Inc (EFOI) formerly the largest developer and manufacturer of fiberoptic lighting to promote energy efficient lighting solutions. The company went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1994, with Wolfson leaving the Board of Directors in 2011.

Between 1988 and 1993, alongside Alexander Shulgin, he founded and was a director of Neurobiological Technologies, Inc, a biotechnology development corporation, that also went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1994, and was one of the developers of what became the anti-Alzheimer drug, Namenda (memantine).

In 1999, Wolfson and Shulgin founded a nutraceutical company, Phytos Inc, to potentially manufacture MDMA, should it have become available legally. The company also aimed to research new plant medicines.

As part of his decades of work, Wolfson authored and was the originator of nine patents for nutraceuticals and ketamine that included an herbal smoking cessation product, and a patent for Scutellaria lateraflora-Skullcap - as a high concentration anxiolytic and sedative. Wolfson published a paper describing its scientific study in Alternative Medicine.

Recognizing the unique potential of low dose ketamine for women’s health and well-being and the potential for unique applications of ketamine, in 2017, Wolfson founded Progressive Therapeutics Inc (PTI). With CEO Dawn McCullough, PTI has patented its products and is moving into the process of FDA approvals.

In addition to his publications, Wolfson’s work has attracted attention from the media, first in 2018 with Wired Magazine, then the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. He has also contributed numerous articles to Tikkun magazine on spirituality, consciousness and psychedelics; and on secular Buddhism.

Books and Publications

• Wolfson, P. 2011. Noe – A Father/Son Song of Love, Life, Illness and Death. North Atlantic Books.
• Wolfson P and Hartelius G. 2016. The Ketamine Papers. MAPS Santa Cruz.