Can Ketamine Change Crisis Care?

Emergency Rooms (ERs) often serve as the frontline for patients, where life-threatening trauma and routine injuries collide in chaos. They’re also where countless individuals experiencing mental health crises end up when there’s nowhere else to turn.

According to Abrams and Mignot, the project originated from semi-underground nomadic bliss: “We once threw a secret party on a beach called ‘Public’ on the island of St. Barts. We were inspired by our humble beginnings to create ‘Secret Sessions,’ where the locations are revealed only a few hours before the event begins. We now travel the world, driven by a passion for bringing people together, bringing you a sonic atlas of rhythms encountered globally.”

Boosts mental clarity and emotional resilience.
Taking time for self-care — whether through mindfulness, journaling, or simply stepping back from the chaos — allows us to process our emotions and thoughts more effectively. When we prioritize our mental well-being, we’re better equipped to handle stress, make clearer decisions, and navigate challenges with greater emotional resilience.

Before long, I realized I was doing exactly what I had set out to do — just not through a job I had applied for, but through a business I built. That’s how Beyond Consulting was born — a firm designed to support visionary organizations in psychedelics, plant medicine, and wellness with research, strategy, and operational solutions.

This interplay of experimentation, openness, and intention underscores the profound synergy between music and altered states of consciousness, creating not just entertainment, but deeply transformative experiences.

While kanna is a psychoactive, it’s not psychedelic, so you won’t experience hallucinations. And it’s not neurotoxic, which Stephanie Karzon Abrams, a neuropharmacologist and the founder of Beyond Consulting (a group that provides research to organizations and clinics working with plant medicines), says is huge. “If you take a big dose, the most that could probably happen to you is that you’ll feel nauseous, you’ll probably get a headache,” Abrams says. Kanna has been known to induce a nauseated or a tingly feeling in the stomach, even in small amounts, because “of the serotonin signaling in both gut and brain", she explains. For some, this can also induce an appetite-suppressing effect. And taking kanna if you’re already on prescription SSRIs is generally considered a no-no. “That’s a lot of serotonin flowing through your body, and that can be a lot to handle,” says Abrams.

Magic moment: The growing market for microdosing psilocybin—still classified as a Schedule 1 substance—raises safety and quality concerns.

Stephanie Karzon Abrams, research and science advisor for the Microdosing Collective, a California-based nonprofit, working to advance and protect the right to microdose, advocates for a regulatory model granting “independence and sover-eignty around microdosing.” While safety measures may be needed because “it’s a medicinal plant and not without risk,” she emphasizes education is key. “Years and years ago, people traditionally communed with these plants, and there were medicine keepers, or shamans. At a very young age, kids were taught about the power and the reverence and respect this medicine is owed,” Karzon Abrams says. “That’s not our norm, and people are approaching higher doses without education and without preparation, so the risk is tenfold.”

The boundaries between science and creativity, healing and expression, often feel impenetrable—until you meet someone who bridges them seamlessly. Stephanie Karzon Abrams is that person. Her journey from Montreal’s ICU wards to the forefront of psychedelics and creativity isn’t just a career trajectory; it’s a testament to what happens when curiosity and courage intersect.

This piece does not seek to promote self-experimentation but rather to acknowledge that the human drive for self-exploration through altered states has been, and will always be, a fundamental part of our story. Instead of shrouding these practices in stigma, we should aim to cultivate a culture of intention and understanding—one that values education, prioritizes safety, and respects the choices individuals make in pursuit of connection and healing.

Stephanie Karzon Abrams is the epitome of “get you a girl who can do both”… hard science and the arts, of course. As the founder of a music label and a psychedelic-centric research consultancy, she just wants to help people find deeper connection to themselves and others.

We talked to Steph about how psychedelics can foster intimacy in relationships, what kind of music is working best in psychedelic therapy, and why all plant medicine brands should run studies on their products.

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