Rythmia Publishes Outcome Data From 24,000 Guests. The Question Is What It Means.

The World Health Organization estimates that suicide claims roughly 727,000 lives globally each year. In the United States alone, 14.3 million adults reported serious thoughts of suicide in 2024, according to the SAMHSA National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Nearly half of the 61.5 million U.S. adults who experienced a mental health condition that year received no treatment. These are not marginal gaps. They are central failures of a model that, for millions, manages symptoms without altering the underlying condition.

Plant medicine retreats have been absorbing some of that pressure for years, often operating at the edge of the conversation. Rythmia Life Advancement Center in Guanacaste, Costa Rica occupies a more formalized position. The center offers structured ayahuasca ceremonies within a program that also includes breathwork, meditation, yoga and personal development work. It calls itself a life advancement center, not a rehab or a psychiatric facility, and it has now published outcome data from post-retreat surveys completed six months after guests finished the program.

The figures come from more than 24,000 respondents. According to Rythmia, guests reported a 73 percent reduction in suicidal ideation, a 70 percent reduction in trauma and PTSD, a 63 percent reduction in addiction and a 56 percent reduction in anxiety and depression. These are self-reported numbers, collected by the center itself, and they will rightly be examined through that lens. But the data arrives at a moment when roughly 30 percent of people diagnosed with major depressive disorder are classified as treatment-resistant, per Johns Hopkins Medicine. The gap between managing and healing is no longer theoretical for a huge number of people. It is the daily reality.

Rythmia’s results do not resolve the larger debate about psychedelic-adjacent treatments, and they are not meant to. They do put something concrete on the table in a conversation that has tended toward anecdote and advocacy. Whether the numbers hold up to independent scrutiny will determine how seriously they are taken. For now, the surveys mark another step in the slow, uneven push to understand why some people find in plant medicine what they could not find in a prescription.