Founder Stories

I first fell in love with New Orleans in 2004, having been assigned as a professor at the Tulane Naval ROTC unit. I was still recovering from a 10-month deployment to the Persian Gulf at the start of the Iraq war, unsure what to make of our purpose there. Right after I left, our squadron lost four young men in a senseless plane crash at sea. My long-term relationship had just ended. I knew I did not want to fly anymore, was a career change to medicine the right call? The city embraced me and held me during this challenging life transition. She taught me the importance of coming together around food, music, dancing, even football, and she showed me how to celebrate life, no matter what life throws your way.

Then, Hurricane Katrina hit. I lost nearly everything, my home near Memorial Hospital flooded about 3 feet, then burned to the waterline in a neighborhood fire. A picture of that fire made the cover of Time Magazine. I escaped town with just two guitars, my class ring from the U.S. Naval Academy, and my buddy's dog. The response of the community was overwhelming: "We are not going to let this city's traditions die." That post-Katrina recovery effort served as the ultimate lesson in resilience, camaraderie, community healing, and for lack of any better word: love. I moved away to start medical school in 2007, but a piece of my heart remained behind.

Fast forward to 2023, when I was finally able to move back to the Crescent City and settle back in after retiring from military service. While on sabbatical, I noticed that psychedelic research was making a comeback, with possible FDA approval looming for MDMA. I completed training in psychedelic facilitation at UC Berkeley, which culminated in my first experience with ketamine therapy. Right away I recognized the therapeutic potential of this medicine for a large swath of people just like me: veterans, healthcare workers, survivors of childhood abuse, and those traumatized by natural disasters.

Thankfully I met Star, Kennedi and Michael, due to our shared passion for expanding access to integrative ketamine therapy, with an emphasis on proper preparation and integration. We bonded over our healthy respect for group work, where individual healing becomes synergistic with others. Finally, we could all appreciate the local and national momentum building toward approval of additional medicines in the near future: including MDMA, psilocybin, ibogaine, and others.

Ultimately, we're determined to grow a network of practitioners who will help expand access to psychedelic assisted therapy with integrity and humility. Ready to join us? We'd love to hear from you.

— Josh P.

This wasn't the path I imagined for myself. But looking back, it was always where I was headed.

I started my career as a public health nurse in Columbia, Missouri, after graduating in 2018. It was a time that rooted me. I found myself immersed in a community that valued a slower, more connected way of living. People gathered around food they grew themselves, shared space for meditation and movement, and spent long stretches of time outside, on the trails, in the quiet. Time in nature, whether hiking or on the river, became its own kind of medicine.

That season marked the beginning of a deeper exploration into alternative ways of understanding and practicing medicine. I was drawn to acupuncture, TCM, tai chi, and mindfulness, weaving them into my everyday life as I learned. But just as importantly, I was experiencing what it meant to be held in community. I found my way into ecstatic dance and 5Rhythms, where I began to understand the body as its own kind of medicine. Movement became a way of listening, a way of returning to myself.

What that chapter gave me was simple, but it changed everything. I learned how to slow down. How to listen. How to trust that the answers we're searching for aren't somewhere out there, but already within us, waiting for the space to be heard. And even then, I knew what kind of provider I wanted to be. Not the one directing people through their healing, but the one beside them. The ally in the room. That instinct has been the thread running through everything since.

And then, as life tends to do, things got complicated.

A health crisis that conventional medicine couldn't explain. A pandemic. The slow unraveling of a relationship that had been home for five years. The community I had built my life around quietly dissolving. All of it arriving at once, none of it asking permission. Those years were heavy. But they were also the ones that taught me the most, which I've come to understand is how it usually works. The hard seasons rarely feel like growth while you're in them. They just feel like survival. And then one day you look back and realize they were the making of you.

It was in the tender uncertainty of that time that I first experienced ketamine therapy. I almost didn't go. I had more resistance than curiosity. But something in me said yes anyway. What happened in that room is something I still reach for words to describe. The closest I can get is this. I remembered myself. Not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, cellular way. Like something wound very tight finally exhaled.

A few months later I found myself at a gathering in the mountains of North Carolina, one of those places where the right people have a way of finding each other. That's where I met my fiancé Michael, a therapist who had spent years working at the intersection of psychedelic medicine and healing. In one conversation, something clicked. The clinical world I had been building and the healing world I had been quietly living in were never two separate things. They never had to be. I moved to New Orleans that August and never looked back.

Since 2023 I've been fully immersed in the ketamine therapy space, facilitating group ceremonies and retreats, IV and IM infusions, and Spravato across clinics in New Orleans and Michigan. I've sat with hundreds of people in some of the most tender, unguarded moments of their lives. And every time, I am reminded of why this work chose me.

What I've witnessed over and over is this. The hard experiences, the ones that feel like too much, are often the ones that carry the most. In ketamine therapy and in life, the difficult moments are rarely dead ends. They are almost always doorways. My own story taught me that. And it's what I hold for every person who sits across from me.

This medicine creates space that our everyday lives rarely offer. Space to slow down, to feel, to remember who you are underneath all the roles you carry. It asks for your participation, your presence, your willingness to show up for yourself. That is not a small ask. But what waits on the other side of that willingness is profound.

Althea NOLA was born from many roads converging at the right time. Josh, Star, Michael, and I each arrived here carrying years of lived experience, personal healing, and a shared belief that medicine can and should look different. What makes this team rare is that we have all sat with this medicine ourselves. We know what it feels like to be on the other side of the room. That changes everything about how we show up.

We believe in taking our time with people. In honoring the full arc of the experience, from the very first conversation to long after your last session. We have seen what becomes possible when this work is done with intention, with reverence, with real human presence.

New Orleans has always known how to hold people. How to gather them, feed them, celebrate them, carry them through. It felt like exactly the right home for this work. And this team felt like exactly the right people to do it.

If something brought you here, I trust that. You are welcome here, exactly as you are.

— Kennedi