Hannah McLane MD, MA, MPH
PHYSICIAN · RESEARCHER · MEDICAL ETHICS WRITER · HEALTHCARE INNOVATORMedicine, ethics, and expanding access to care
Hannah C. McLane is an American physician, researcher, medical ethics writer, and founder of SoundMind, a Philadelphia-based organization focused on psychedelic-assisted mental healthcare, professional education, and healthcare innovation.
Her work spans global neurology, health economics, medical ethics, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, workforce development, and public policy.
Across these fields, McLane has focused on a recurring question: how can medical systems deliver more effective and equitable care when resources, professional expertise, and access to treatment are limited?
Her research has examined the affordability of neurological diagnostic technologies across 37 countries. Her writing has challenged conventional approaches to allocating scarce medical resources and explored ethical dilemmas involving patient autonomy during altered states of consciousness.
Through SoundMind, she has developed clinical programs, comprehensive psychedelic facilitator education, and peer-support initiatives intended to expand access to emerging mental healthcare treatments.
Her work has also included participation in state and federal psychedelic policy reform efforts.
About Dr. Hannah
Early Life: Brazil, Tibet, and the Path to Medicine
McLane’s interest in poverty, inequality, and access to essential services began during adolescence.
At age 15, she spent a year in Brazil, where she observed significant disparities in wealth, living conditions, and access to resources. The experience influenced her interest in understanding how economic and political systems shape people’s opportunities and wellbeing.
In 1999, at approximately 18 years old, McLane traveled to Tibet, where she met Sabriye Tenberken, the German educator and disability rights advocate who established educational opportunities for blind children.
During the visit, Tenberken described how children at the school had lost their sight because treatable infections had gone without adequate medical care.
Tenberken, who is herself blind, told McLane that if she had her vision and could begin her life again, she would become a physician.
She encouraged McLane to attend medical school.
For McLane, the encounter demonstrated how the absence of basic medical services could turn treatable conditions into permanent disabilities.
The experience helped redirect her interest in inequality and development toward medicine and healthcare access.
Education and Intellectual Development
McLane attended McGill University in Montreal, where she studied Mandarin, international development, and economics.
Her academic work included a thesis examining privatization in Brazil and its relationship to poverty and economic inequality. The thesis explored how economic policies intended to improve efficiency and development could also deepen existing disparities.
She subsequently studied communication sciences at Temple University before pursuing a medical degree at Brown University and a Master of Public Health at Harvard University.
McLane also undertook clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her education brought together economics, international development, public health, and clinical medicine.
Across these disciplines, she developed an interest in how institutions distribute limited resources, how policies affect vulnerable populations, and how systems can be redesigned to improve both efficiency and equity.
These questions would later inform her research on neurological diagnostic access, her writing on medical resource allocation, and her work developing psychedelic-assisted clinical and educational programs.
Shaping the Field Since 2019
Hannah began developing SoundMind’s psychedelic training model in 2019, before regulated psychedelic facilitator licensing existed in the United States and before most of today’s psychedelic-training infrastructure had been established.
Since then, SoundMind has:
Trained 500+ clinicians, facilitators, and students
Opened the Philadelphia region’s first psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy center, initially offering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy while preparing for emerging MDMA and psilocybin treatments. Philadelphia Magazine documented the center’s opening in 2021.
Led dozens of legal psychedelic retreats, clinical intensives, and facilitator practicums in the U.S. and internationally
Developed years of clinical protocols, teaching material, patient experience, and real-world outcomes
Built one of the earliest comprehensive long-form psychedelic facilitator training programs
Developed clinical and educational experience across multiple psychedelic modalities, including ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA-related training, and Huachuma/mescaline traditions
Participated in emerging psychedelic policy and regulatory discussions
Built independently, without traditional venture-capital or pharmaceutical ownership during SoundMind’s formative years
SoundMind’s independence allowed the organization to develop clinical and educational models around the needs of patients and practitioners rather than around a single commercial pharmaceutical asset.
After years of bootstrapped development, Hannah is now exploring how research partnerships, technology, and strategic investment could accelerate the next phase of the work.
Clinical Innovation
Hannah’s work has consistently focused on areas that were underdeveloped when she entered them.
Rather than approaching psychedelics simply as medications, her work examines the entire therapeutic system surrounding them: patient selection, preparation, psychotherapy, safety, difficult experiences, integration, neurodiversity, trauma, informed consent, touch, contemplative practice, and the interpersonal dynamics that emerge in altered states.
SoundMind has deliberately operated across multiple psychedelic modalities and settings, giving Hannah experience that spans both conventional clinical psychedelic care and legal ceremonial and retreat environments.
Years of this work have produced a substantial body of clinical protocols, patient outcomes, teaching materials, case discussions, recorded clinical education, and real-world experience.
SoundMind is now working to organize and expand those accumulated clinical assets into a larger and more reproducible platform for psychedelic care.
Huachuma, Mescaline & Traditional Psychedelic Practice
Hannah has spent years working at the intersection of Western psychedelic medicine and traditional or ceremonial psychedelic practice.
Her international work has included legal Huachuma/mescaline retreats and training environments in South America, with particular attention to preparation, safety, therapeutic process, ethics, integration, and the relationship between traditional psychedelic practices and emerging Western clinical models.
She is particularly interested in what modern psychedelic medicine can learn from long-standing ceremonial traditions — as well as the risks that arise when traditional medicines are rapidly medicalized, commercialized, or removed from their original cultural context.
Her broader work asks how psychedelic medicine can retain depth, relationality, ethical accountability, and respect for traditional knowledge while developing systems that are safe and accessible to contemporary patients.
Background & Training
Hannah attended McGill University and holds graduate degrees from:
Temple University — MA, Communication Sciences / Speech-Language Pathology
Brown University — MD, with a concentration in Contemplative Studies
Harvard School of Public Health — MPH, Global Health and Bioethics
Her postgraduate medical training included Internal Medicine, Neurology, and Occupational & Environmental Medicine, including residency training at the University of Pennsylvania.
She completed an Interprofessional Fellowship in Patient Safety at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and a five-year program in relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy through the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.
Her additional psychedelic training includes MAPS MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy training and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy training.
Her interdisciplinary background across medicine, neuroscience, public health, psychoanalysis, contemplative studies, environmental medicine, and psychedelic therapy informs SoundMind’s approach to complex mental-health care. Her published CV documents this training history.
Areas of Work
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
Psilocybin facilitator training
Clinical outcomes and emerging models of psychedelic care
Buddhism, meditation, and psychedelics
Huachuma / mescaline and traditional psychedelic practice
Psychedelic policy and regulation
Ethics, power, narcissism, and cult dynamics in psychedelic communities
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy
Psychedelics and ADHD / neurodiversity
Trauma and PTSD
Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychedelic therapy
Informed consent and touch in altered states