Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign paid nearly $19,000 to a psychiatrist known for ketamine treatments last year, listing the payments as “leadership training and consulting.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s committee sent three payments to Dr. Brian Boyle totaling $18,725 across 2025, according to Federal Election Commission records. The disbursements were $11,550 in March, $2,800 in May and $4,375 in October.
Boyle serves as Chief Psychiatric Officer at Stella, a mental health clinic chain with more than 20 locations, according to the company’s website. He trained at Harvard Medical School and spent nine years as an attending psychiatrist at McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Stella offers ketamine-assisted therapy, Spravato (an FDA-approved esketamine nasal spray), transcranial magnetic stimulation and stellate ganglion blocks. (RELATED: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Undercuts Global Stage Debut With Word-Salad Answer To Basic Foreign Policy Question)
Federal law bars candidates from spending campaign funds on personal expenses. The FEC applies what it calls the “irrespective test” to draw that line, asking whether an obligation would exist regardless of a candidate’s campaign or official duties.
Shrinking socialists: AOC spends $19K on psychiatrist known for ketamine therapy https://t.co/EReLloVtlu pic.twitter.com/gaLxNqoLKA
— New York Post (@nypost) March 21, 2026
Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, told the New York Post (NYP) the spending appeared to violate that standard. “While she describes these expenses as ‘leadership training,’ Dr. Boyle has no expertise in that area, unlike several Democratic campaign consultants,” Kamenar said. “This looks like yet another example of misuse of campaign contributions.”
The payments arrived during a year when AOC already faced questions over how her office categorized expenses. Americans for Public Trust filed a separate ethics complaint in March 2025 over other disbursements labeled as “training,” Fox News reported. Ocasio-Cortez called those allegations “100% wrong” on social media.
The congresswoman has long pushed to expand psychedelic-assisted therapy research. She co-sponsored a bipartisan bill with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) that funded Pentagon studies on psychedelics for servicemembers with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, according to a press release from Crenshaw’s office. That legislation became law as part of the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
Psychiatrist Dr. Simon Dosovitz cautioned that ketamine still carries real risks. “It is a strongly dissociative drug,” Dosovitz told the NYP.
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