She’s raising eyebrows.
In a surprising development, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) utilized nearly $19,000 of campaign funds last year to engage the services of a therapist known for administering ketamine therapy, a treatment that has sparked debate in medical circles.
The progressive congresswoman enlisted Dr. Brian Boyle from Boston, who serves as the chief psychiatric officer at Stella, a network of mental health clinics that offers “novel” treatments, which have garnered attention among Hollywood elites and Wall Street professionals alike.
According to records from the Federal Election Commission, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign disbursed $11,550 to Boyle in March 2025, followed by $2,800 in May, and $4,375 in October, totaling $18,725. These disbursements were categorized under “leadership training and consulting.”
Details regarding the content of the sessions or the participants involved remain undisclosed. Efforts to obtain a comment from Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign have so far been unsuccessful.
It’s unclear what the sessions consisted of or who participated. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Boyle, a Harvard-trained doctor, calls himself an “interventional psychiatrist” and specializes in unorthodox methods for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD and anxiety.
He’s considered a “leading authority” on ketamine, the controversial horse tranquilizer given to “Friends” star Matthew Perry in the month leading up to his tragic death.
“I just saw the incredible power of what these treatments could do,” Boyle said during a podcast appearance last year about getting into the mind-blowing biz. “It’s a ton of fun helping patients get better.”
Boyle’s clinic also offers other treatments popular with the 1 Percent, like stellate ganglion block, an anesthetic injected into a nerve cluster in the neck to calm the body’s fight-or-flight response. Billionaires like Bob Parsons, who’s battled PTSD since returning from the Vietnam War, have raved about the treatment.
“Celebrities tend to be more inclined to be on the hunt for highly effective solutions across beauty, health, mental health, nutrition and so on,” Boyle said in an interview last year about the treatment.
AOC herself is no stranger to touting the benefits of hallucinogenic drugs for therapy.
The “Squad” rep, who campaigned to end the federal prohibition of marijuana in 2018, has three times proposed legislation to make it easier to study magic mushrooms and other psychedelics.
As a freshman congresswoman in 2019, she introduced an amendment to allow the feds to spend taxpayer money on studying the medical potential of psilocybin, ecstasy and other drugs to treat mental illnesses, calling the early research “promising.”
“It’s well past time we take drug use out of criminal consideration and into medical consideration,” she tweeted at the time.
The amendment was overwhelmingly rejected then, even by her Democratic colleagues, and failed again when she tried a second time in 2021. But the “Bronx girl” got it done on her third attempt, when she co-sponsored a similar bill which was signed into law in 2023.
The Bronx and Queens lawmaker has previously talked about her own mental health, revealing she was in therapy following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, when she said lawmakers effectively “served in war.”
“Oh yeah, I’m doing therapy,” she said on the public radio show Latino USA in 2021, calling the day when she said she hid in the bathroom, fearing for her life as police banged on the door, “an extraordinarily traumatizing event.”
“I’ve had to take a beat,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez, 36, also talked about taking a “self-care” break after the stress of her first campaign in 2018, when she unseated longtime incumbent Joe Crowley to become the youngest woman elected to Congress.
“I went from doing yoga and making wild rice and salmon dinners to eating fast food for dinner and falling asleep in my jeans and makeup,” she wrote in her Instagram story at the time. “I neglected myself.”
Critics don’t see how campaign cash is appropriate for head shrinking.
“While I can understand why AOC would spend $18,000 for a shrink whose specialties include narcissistic personality disorders, using her campaign contributions for what appears to be an expense for personal use violates federal campaign finance laws,” slammed Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center.
“While she describes these expenses as ‘leadership training,’ Dr. Boyle has no expertise in that area, unlike several Democratic campaign consultants,” Kamenar added. “This looks like yet another example of misuse of campaign contributions.”
While AOC and others hailed the potential of drugs like ketamine as a miracle cure for illnesses like PTSD and depression, doctors have warned it’s still a powerful hallucinogenic that carries a risk of inducing psychosis in some people.
“There’s a risk of people receiving infusions for ketamine without an appropriate diagnostic workup and considering other factors which may be responsible for their symptoms,” psychiatrist Dr. Simon Dosovitz recently told The Post. “It is a strongly dissociative drug.”
Boyle did not return The Post’s request for comment.
