Whalley Wellness Center Explores Therapy’s Frontier

A team of clinicians and wellness instructors has opened a new mental health center in Westville, offering everything from psychotherapy to mind-body medicine to ketamine-assisted psychedelic therapies. 

This panoply of offerings is unified by their greater aim to create connection and community.

That new healthcare spot is called West Rock Wellness, located at 869 Whalley Ave.

The organization took its first patient in February and ​“began in earnest” in April, according to West Rock Wellness Co-Director Jordan Sloshower. A grand opening is planned for the end of July. They’re already up to a few dozen patients and have held community events and family consultations. 

One of the services offered by West Rock Wellness is therapy with ketamine, a ​“dissociative anesthetic” with some hallucinogenic properties. The clinic’s practitioners are also looking ahead to the potential legalization of the use of other psychedelics in therapeutic settings, like MDMA and psilocybin, to build out the type of care they offer.

“As psychedelic medicine continues to evolve, there are going to be a lot of new ways of doing things,” Sloshower said. West Rock Wellness hopes to be able to show ​“what works,” to aid other clinicians interested in what that kind of therapy can offer, and how it can be a part of a larger plan for helping patients.

The Philosophy

West Rock Wellness describes itself on its website as ​“an integrative, community-based, mental health and wellness center … grounded in interdisciplinary and holistic therapeutic approaches, including psychedelic-assisted therapies, trauma informed psychotherapy, integrative psychiatry and mind-body medicine.” It ​“also serves as a hub for community gatherings and wellness offerings, such as meditation, yoga, dance, ecotherapy and music therapy, which seek to build a community of healing and encourage creative self-expression.” 

This array of services is united under a general approach, a couple ​“big threads that inform the ethos of this place,” said Sloshower.

The first is an ​“integrative idea of wellness and healing,” and ​“bringing together a range of different modalities and practitioners and traditions to promote a holistic sense of wellness.” 

Related to that, Sloshower said, is ​“the emergence of psychedelic therapies, which all of us have a pretty deep interest in.” That interest is what brought the team of West Rock Wellness together professionally, united by a vision of ​“wanting to have a place where we’d be able to bring a holistic way of doing psychedelic therapy and medicine into being.” 

He added that psychedelic therapy, ​“when done well, has an integrative component” — as in, after the use of psychedelics, the patient can avail themselves of other physical and mental therapeutic services at West Rock Wellness to help ​“make changes in their day-to-day living.”

Those ideas then tie into the idea of ​“this being very much a community-based center, and us trying to build community here,” Sloshower said. West Rock Wellness isn’t designed to be open only to patients; it’s a ​“place for community to gather,” both in the sense of a community of therapeutic practitioners and in the sense of the community at large. ​“So often that’s a piece that’s lacking in therapy in general, but also this wave of psychedelic therapy, where you can go to a clinic, or go to another country to pursue it, and then you come back and you don’t have community to share that with, to continue your healing journey. We wanted to be able to offer a lot of that in house.”

Kilpatrick built on the idea of ​“being able to come back after having psychedelic assisted therapy in any place — to be able to find a space where you can continue to integrate and find community within that.” At West Rock Wellness, ​“the aim is to provide a safe environment to do that.”

“How do we integrate things that we learn in therapy or breakthroughs we have in our altered space, in ketamine-assisted therapy?” said Damian Paglia, West Rock Wellness’s integration director and community builder. ​“How do you actually apply that to your life? There isn’t a really good answer, so you have to build a culture around support.… All the things that we do here around gatherings or events or classes are aimed at creating a life around … building a meaningful life that is based on discovering your core values.”

West Rock Wellness also seeks to create ​“connection,” Sloshower said. Disconnection from self and community has ​“been such a theme behind the epidemics of depression and substance use that was only made more clear during the pandemic.” And one of the goals of psychedelic therapy, and therapy in general, ​“has been to find connection, within yourself, between people, between you and your broader environment.” Thus, said Paglia, a patient at West Rock Wellness might finish a clinical therapy session and then step into a yoga class, or hang out in West Rock Wellness’s art gallery, or go across the street for lunch. ​“A basic part of our design is to want to gather and connect with each other.”

The History

The team behind West Rock Wellness was years in the making. Paglia and Sasha Lehrer, West Rock Wellness’s wellness coordinator, grew up together in Westville. 

Kilpatrick arrived in New Haven as an intern at the Post Traumatic Stress Center; she was initially only going to stay for a year, but then ​“kept staying,” she said. Sloshower is from Canada and ended up at Yale to do psychiatric research. He and Lehrer met in 2013 at Bethany Music and Dance, a once-a-month party, music gathering, and dance that former general practitioner and current community organizer Bill Fischer held in his home. 

The next year, Sloshower got involved in psilocybin research, which is how he met Kilpatrick, who was involved as a clinician, and Jamila Hokanson, who worked on the research as a medical resident in Yale psychiatric program and is now co-director of West Rock Wellness. Hokanson joined the Yale Psychedelic Science Group, which Sloshower helped found. Then, ​“I met Damian in his parents’ kitchen,” Kilpatrick said. She’d met Paglia’s brother two weeks after moving to New Haven. ​“I’ve known Damian since 2015.” 

“We’re a group of friends. We trust each other,” and care about taking the time to make sure the dynamic among the members of the group is ​“in right relation,” Paglia said. Opening West Rock Wellness was the product of ​“years of meetings.”

Sloshower and Hokanson have also kept their connections with Yale; they’re instructors at Yale’s school of medicine and are currently researching psilocybin- and MDMA-assisted therapy in the treatment of a variety of mental disorders. Kilpatrick is clinical director at the Post Traumatic Stress Center, which has its own connections to the Yale School of Medicine. 

So while the team is developing West Rock Wellness as a model for more holistic therapy, they are ​“also interested in collecting outcomes on what we’re doing,” Sloshower said. ​“We can do the more rigorous clinical trials on the Yale side,” but part of the vision for West Rock Wellness is to be able to report on its progress, ​“as we hope to be innovators in the field and on the cutting edge” as practitioners of experiential therapy. 

Shifting Landscape

West Rock Wellness includes psychedelic therapy among its services because research being conducted at Yale and elsewhere suggests that the hallucinogenic aspects of ketamine — approved by the FDA five decades ago as an anesthetic — can aid in therapy for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. The off-label use of ketamine (that is, not strictly as anesthesia) is legal and has been practiced for years; in a psychiatric setting, it’s used at considerably lower doses than those prescribed for anesthesia. In 2013, the FDA approved ketamine as a ​“breakthrough therapy,” and in 2019, approved it as new treatment for depression.

Currently MDMA- and psilocybin-based therapies aren’t federally legal outside of a research context, but it’s possible MDMA will get approval ​“within the next year or so,” Sloshower said, and ​“psilocybin is a little farther out.” This movement is happening as several states, including Connecticut, move toward drug decriminalization. ​“The whole landscape is changing,” Sloshower said.

With that shift come questions. ​“How are these treatments actually going to be delivered once they’re approved?” Sloshower asked. And for clinicians interested in making psychedelics part of therapy, ​“what’s the optimal way to deliver those therapies?… How do we ideally want to deliver these therapies?” Those questions begin with more detailed questions about dosage and extend to the environment the doses are delivered in. 

At the moment, there’s a room in West Rock Wellness with a bed and a reclining chair in it, along with chairs for therapists to sit in, so that patients can get their doses in a calm, peaceful environment. The team is contemplating perhaps delivering it in a natural place, outside. It’s also interested in exploring the possibilities for group therapy sessions, and pairing it with various forms of traditional therapy.

“Another edge” in the research, said Hokanson, ​“is who to give this to.” Right now research is being conducted on people ages 18 and into adulthood. ​“The fringes of that are adolescents and the elderly. Is it safe for them to receive this treatment?” If the research shows that ​“it works well in adults, are we doing a disservice to adolescents by not allowing them to have access?” And on the flip side of that question, ​“if they do have access, will it even help them?” 

Sloshower also pointed out that there has been very little diversity, socioeconomically or racially, in clinical trials thus far; most trial participants have been white and upper middle class. ​“We have a strong commitment toward equity and accessibility as we look to continue to develop our work here,” Sloshower said. ​“How do we reach broader communities in these offerings and make them not only affordable and accessible, but deliver them in culturally attuned and culturally appropriate ways?” 

As a new practice — and like many more established psychiatric offices in the New Haven area — West Rock Wellness currently doesn’t take insurance. But they are working on ways to balance the various costs of their services and events to make them more affordable, ​“to keep our mission the way we want it to be, offering treatment to a broad range of people,” Hokanson said. They are also looking into the various ways they could be reimbursed by both private and state insurance, which is the plan ​“a lot of people who don’t have access to this kind of health” are on. There’s also the possibility of finding donors who are interested in supporting a center like West Rock Wellness, Sloshower said. The goal, Hokanson said, ​“is to be able to offer it to people who can’t afford it” otherwise. 

“That’s actually what we’re aiming to do anyway,” Kilpatrick said,” in offering ​“therapy of different sorts,” rather than being known as a ​“ketamine clinic.… We have different concentrations. So if people call in and they have significant history of trauma, I would most likely be the person that they would meet with. If they’re adolescents, Jamila would be more likely to meet with them. If they’re looking for medication management, it’s Jordan or Jamila. If they’re looking for other type of wellness, like somatic experiencing, Sasha would be the person to offer that. And other services like yoga, or coaching, Damian would be the person you would see.”

“In psychiatry, I think one weakness is only having one or two tools” to help patients, Sloshower said. ​“Twenty years ago, everyone got Prozac. Before that, everyone got psychoanalysis. And there are places popping up that are just ketamine centers. That’s what they offer you. You walk in, and that’s what you get.” But ​“suffering is a complicated issue.”

“We do a lot of cross-collaboration among us,” Hokanson said. A patient isn’t ​“my patient, or Jordan’s patient. They’re our patient. If there’s expertise that can be drawn on from the group, we put them with different people.”

The Next Steps

Sloshower mentioned that it would have been easier for each clinician to have their own private practice, but ​“we knew that we could create something better together,” he said. ​“We’re still in our infancy. This is an experiment in a lot of ways” in ​“how we take our ideals and put them in the real world.”

“The level of care goes through the roof when we dialogue about our patients,” Paglia said. And ​“we really do intentionally try to create this space so people can unfold naturally on their own. This is a place where people can emote and share our stories and share the things we’re going through.”

“And ripen when we’re ready,” Lehrer said. ​“Any person’s individual healing process is not a linear trajectory. It’s not like one day you’re just going to be healed. It’s more of a circular mystery. So I think our experiment here is also of that nature, too. We’re going to keep uncovering different layers of the journey, and different layers of the work here, just like an individual would come back around to different parts of themselves and their own healing process.… opening to the greater mystery of life.”

The West Rock Wellness team hopes to see the integration in their services made manifest by their space being filled with action. ​“In those moments where we have a little buzz of activity, and some music playing here, and a little dancing happening, it feels really good,” Sloshower said. ​“There’s certain energy” that makes him think ​“this is why we created this place. That’s the direction we’re headed. We’re getting there. And it’s going to feel really nice when it’s the day-to-day.”

“I definitely see this place hustling and bustling,” Paglia said, ​“really integrating all the different practices we have, and gathering research.” 

The team also sees itself as possibly helping to create a model for others. ​“We want to collaborate with other people, around the country and the world,” Paglia said. Lehrer and Kilpatrick said a few people have already approached them with the idea of replicating West Rock Wellness elsewhere. Sloshower pointed out that he, Kilpatrick, and Hokanson are already trained in the clinical use of psilocybin and MDMA, and Sloshower is involved in setting standards and policies for those therapies. ​“We’ll be able to hit the ground running in offering it in a community-based, integrative kind of way,” he said, when MDMA and psilocybin become available for clinical use. West Rock Wellness might be able to offer trainings to other psychiatrists and residents looking to integrate those therapies into their own practices.

But that element of their services, all the team members emphasized, is part of a greater whole that involves everything from physical health to art and music to simply creating community. ​“Your life is the community and the community becomes your life,” Paglia said.