Joseph Prever LICSW | Brookline, MA

Welcome.

I'm a therapist in Brookline, MA. I work with a variety of adults (21+) who experience a variety of mental health difficulties. I see people both in-person and online, with a strong preference for in-person work.

I'm especially interested in working with people with difficult family dynamics, people concerned with meaning and spirituality, people who have experienced emotional and spiritual abuse, and people working through issues of gender and sexuality. I also offer couples therapy.

My training is largely in the psychodynamic / psychoanalytic tradition. For me, this means that I pay close attention to the dynamics that exist between the client and myself, as well as the dynamics operating inside the client: their desires, defenses, values, fears, and wounds.

I believe that the best way to grow is not to expunge any part of the human person, but to come to a better understanding of how and why each part of the person does what it does.

I also offer Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) both as a standalone short-term treatment and as an adjunctive treatment for clients with whom I have an ongoing therapeutic relationship. KAP is a legal form of psychedelic-assisted therapy that I believe offers great promise in helping people move past entrenched, limiting patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.

If you are interested in working with me, please contact me via my profile on Psychology Today.

Psychedelic Therapy

Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is a legal form of psychedelic-assisted therapy. It is a relatively new treatment that offers promise both for short-term and long-term relief of mental health symptoms and underlying conflicts. While the effectiveness of KAP for various conditions is still being studied, results so far have been promising. For more information about the research available on KAP, I recommend the Kriya Institute's reading list on the subject.

For new clients, a course of KAP treatment might look like this:

We meet briefly by phone to discuss the possibility of KAP treatment.
I connect you with a medical professional who can perform a health screening and provide you with a prescription for sublingual ketamine, i.e. tablets that dissolve under the tongue.
We meet for a standard 50-minute talk therapy session to discuss your history, explore what you hope for from the treatment, and answer any lingering questions.
We meet for a 3-4 hour session, during which you ingest the ketamine and I am there for support and discussion during and after the experience.
Soon after the KAP session, we meet one more time for an "integration" session -- another 50-minute talk therapyy session where we discuss the experience, begin to make meaning out of it, and consider how you might integrate what you learned from the experience into your everyday life.

In most cases, I will recommend multiple KAP sessions, spaced relatively closely together. This is partly because the effect of ketamine can be cumulative, partly because it can take some time to find the correct dose, and partly because working in an altered state of consciousness takes a bit of getting used to.

If you are interested in pursuing KAP with me, please contact me via my Psychology Today profile.