I used psychedelics to treat my PTSD after other treatments failed. My experience using these medicines with therapy led me to found my own company.

• Various psychedelics are being developed to treat mental illnesses.
• Jonathan Sabbagh started a psychedelics company after receiving treatments he said helped his PTSD.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Jonathan Sabbagh, the cofounder and CEO of Journey Clinical, a platform that connects therapists to ketamine prescribers. Journey calls itself a "decentralized clinic model" that helps licensed mental health practitioners offer ketamine to their patients by connecting them to their in-house prescribers and educational resources. He said that psychedelics and ketamine-assisted therapy successfully treated his PTSD and other mental health issues and that his experience led him to start Journey Clinical with Myriam Barthes, his wife. He experienced psychedelics after moving to the US from Switzerland, where he grew up. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

One day I woke up in the morning and just couldn't go anywhere. I couldn't do anything but lay in my bed and feel really suicidal and just completely incapacitated. I was struggling with depression and substance abuse. I didn't understand where all this was coming from.

What saved my life in that moment was finding a great psychiatrist who put me on a lot of medication. I discovered the strength in working with somebody helpful.

He got me through that. But I still had unresolved issues.

Eventually I moved to the US, and after a while I kind of went back on a downward spiral. I'm sure this is not a unique experience, but not knowing why you're behaving a certain way and why you're not able to overcome it is terrible.

At some point my best friend was like, "Look, you should try ayahuasca." I was just kind of at the end of my path. I was ready for whatever.

Trying ayahuasca was a game changer for a couple of years

The ceremony was in upstate New York. The experience was hard. It didn't so much dissolve my ego as deconstructed my image of myself. I saw a lot of the inner struggle I think I was dealing with for all these years.

I did it, like, seven times in two weeks. In hindsight, it was a lot. Nothing had worked for me for years. So when I found something that offered an opportunity for me to change my life, it was a complete game changer. My substance-abuse problem just vanished.

It's very corny to say this, but psychedelics did change my life.

I was working with ayahuasca for two years. What started to happen was I wasn't really able to process anymore. Through no fault of the medicine or the facilitators, I was kind of stuck. I was in a loop. I needed help.

Working with a therapist helped me work through trauma

That's when I started to work with a therapist and do ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. I started to have the ability to process these experiences.

Psychedelics are not a panacea. These medicines are a tool. They're not always for everybody. Being able to work with an experienced therapist using ketamine as an adjunct, psychedelics as an adjunct, is really what helped me accept that I was traumatized and work through that trauma. This was years of work.

If you're just getting a shit ton of medication or if you're just getting psychedelics and not working with someone to help you process your experiences and get better, I think it's an incomplete perspective.

We built Journey to give more mental-health professionals access to psychedelic-assisted therapy

There's a handoff that's going on: A doctor will send the patient to a ketamine therapist, or to a clinic, or to a platform that sends the person the ketamine and they do it alone.

You're being asked to go do something very personal with someone you never met, and then you have to bring that back to this therapist who doesn't necessarily have the experience of working with these treatments. It doesn't make sense.

That's why we built Journey. Our understanding is that in order to enable mainstream adoption of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, we have to empower licensed mental-health professionals to incorporate them in their practice as an adjunct.

What we're building is the necessary infrastructure for this to happen. That's what I believe sincerely is the most efficacious way of doing this.