David / Joy
David with his Harvard diploma, 1976.
Lisa Perry Hellerstein & David in 1976.
Lisa and David on the Weeks Footbridge, 2018.
Joy’s Facebook picture, 1971.
David Hellerstein talks with classmate and fellow Clevelander Joy Horowitz about his wild ride as a psychedelic maven—how his practice in psychiatry has radically evolved over the past 40 years from psychoanalysis to brain imaging to personalized therapeutics.
Psychiatrist David Hellerstein runs the Depression Evaluation Service at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University in New York City, and in recent years his research has focused on the use of psychedelics for treatment-resistant depression. Not that David has ever partaken himself.
“To do good studies, you should be dispassionate about what you’re studying and not wearing a second hat or trying to be a guru,” he says now.
Still, in a nod to the traditions of the Passover seder, he loves asking The Four Questions: How are these drugs different from all other drugs? From the use of a synthesized version of the venom from the Sonoran Desert Toad to psilocybin, David remains intrigued by what’s possible for his patients with PTSD or anorexia. How does a 15-minute trip feel like it lasts hours, days or a lifetime? And why do so many study subjects uniformly say they’re exploring the universe, talking to God or seeing the beginning and end of time?
“It’s an odd thing as a clinical psychiatrist and a sort of cold-blooded researcher to say, ‘Well, we want our patients to have a mystical and spiritual experience,’” he says. “Who would have guessed when we finished college in the mid-70s that these drugs that were banned and ostracized and scheduled as drugs that were dangerous with no legitimate medical use, that they would be at the cutting edge of what we’d be researching several decades later?”
In his spare time, David also managed to publish a fascinating memoir, “The Couch, The Clinic, and the Scanner: Stories From Three Revolutionary Eras of the Mind” (Columbia University Press, 2023)—a tribute to the fun of reinventing oneself, professionally and personally, over time.