• by Les Luchter , Yesterday

How do you define anxiety? Rather than just “persistent worry,” general anxiety disorder (GAD) may reflect “disregulated connections between key brain regions.”

That’s the message being disseminated to mental healthcare providers (HCPs) in an unbranded educational campaign titled “Wired for Worry” from Definium Therapeutics, the pharma company that’s developing a variation of LSD to treat both GAD and major depression. That drug, called DT120 in Definium’s pipeline, “is thought to increase connections between areas of the brain that aren’t normally connected,” the company says on its website.

“Wired for Worry,” Definium tells Marketing Daily, includes search, paid social and display ads. The agency is Synchrony Healthcare Communications.

The campaign is centered around a destination microsite, which includes a range of materials on GAD’s symptoms, assessment, lifelong impact, and underlying neurobiology.

“I worry something will happen,” says one “real patient” in a section headlined “GAD can disrupt daily life. This disruption extends across work, home, social functioning, and physical well-being.'

Definium says that around 26 million U.S. adults have GAD and that disregulated brain circuitry may contribute to chronic symptoms, functional impairment, high rates of treatment switching, and prolonged gaps in care. 

“The mental health providers who care for the millions of people living with GAD deserve more support,” Definium Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dan Karlin, said in a statement. “A deeper understanding of disease-related information, including tools and resources for GAD assessment and management, is essential to advancing our knowledge of this complex disorder.”

In addition to adding more GAD content to “Wired for Worry” in the future, Definium says it plans to extend the platform to other psychiatric disorders.

“Wired for Worry” follows by nearly six months Definium’s launch of another unbranded education campaign, “Rerouting Minds,” which is about “the clinical promise of LSD as a transformative therapeutic.”

Another product in Definium’s pipeline promises to use an LSD variation to combat autism.