Readers of this blog know I don’t do well with hypocrisy. That makes New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an easy target. AOC brands herself a “Democratic Socialist,” a label Boston University professor Jonathan Zaitlin says doesn’t exist. What does exist is her talent for turning serious issues into social media pablum while enjoying uncritical corporate media coverage that has helped position her as a credible Democratic presidential candidate for 2028.
AOC undeniably enjoys mingling with the very crowd she claims to oppose.
In 2021, AOC attended the Met Gala, where tickets then cost roughly $35,000. She made headlines wearing a custom “Tax the Rich” designer dress widely estimated to be worth five figures. The House Ethics Committee later found that her ticket, dress, and accessories violated rules prohibiting members of Congress from accepting gifts of substantial value.
Last April, AOC was photographed seated in first class on a JetBlue flight from JFK to Las Vegas en route to a Bernie Sanders rally titled “Fighting Oligarchy.” Perhaps she was upgraded, but the optics were unseemly. A supposed champion of the common folks might be expected to sit with them.
The latest AOC disclosure casts more dark clouds over how she operates.
The New York Post reports that AOC spent nearly $19,000 in campaign funds on a psychiatrist associated with ketamine therapy. Federal Election Commission filings show payments totaling $18,725 to Dr. Brian Boyle, chief psychiatric officer at Stella, a chain of clinics promoting pioneering mental health treatments.
AOC’s campaign paid Boyle $11,550 in March 2025, another $2,800 in May, and $4,375 in October, according to FEC records. The expenses were marked as “leadership training and consulting.”
Let’s be clear. Some psychiatrists and psychologists do provide leadership training and consulting services. I know this firsthand. Two of my former clients, both prominent New York practitioners, advised major corporations and CEOs. Their clients valued their counsel, and their work was grounded in clearly defined professional offerings.
My clients didn’t blur professional lines. They maintained separate platforms for their consulting work, built public reputations in the field, and were routinely cited in management media. There was no ambiguity about what they did.
Most importantly, in their consulting roles they provided leadership counsel and insights. They met clients in professional office settings and did not prescribe medications as part of that work.
If Dr. Boyle is providing leadership counseling, I can find no public record of those activities. Instead, his corporate bio states that his focus is “working with patients to feel heard and to work collaboratively to find the right treatment plan.”
Boyle is no quack. He graduated from Yale with honors in philosophy and earned his MD from Harvard. He served as an attending psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric institute, as well as Massachusetts General Hospital for nine years.
Boyle has specialized in therapies such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive, FDA-approved treatment for major depression in patients who have not found success with antidepressants.
Another specialty is ketamine therapy, in which low doses of the anesthetic are used for treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and chronic pain when other methods have failed. Elon Musk has said he uses small prescribed doses of ketamine to treat depression.
I know of someone who credits TMS with saving her life and helping her manage alcoholism. My own physician routinely refers patients for local TMS therapy. Former Fortune writer Marc Gunther has written extensively about ketamine’s success and how researchers at Yale helped turn it into a budding biotech industry.
There would be no shame if AOC were receiving treatment from Boyle. The question is why campaign funds were used to pay for it.
The FEC has allowed campaign funds for expenses that arise because of the job, such as childcare tied to campaign activity or security tied to threats. But it has treated expenses as improper when they are personal expenses dressed up as campaign costs. Its guidance makes clear that the key test is whether the expense would exist irrespective of the campaign.
Given his pedigree, I imagine Boyle isn’t pleased having his name and clinic dragged into a political controversy over how his treatments are being described.
Despite ketamine’s growing acceptance for medical uses, it has also gained notoriety as a recreational drug and was linked to Matthew Perry’s death. That association harmed the drug’s public image.
The Post referred to ketamine as a “controversial horse tranquilizer.” While ketamine is used in veterinary medicine, it is also a well-established treatment in human medicine.
Ketamine’s branding problem is a familiar one. Drugs that migrate between veterinary and human use are easy targets for lazy labeling, especially when politics gets involved. In clinical practice, ketamine is a serious tool used in controlled settings for patients who have exhausted other options. It’s not a punchline, and it’s not fringe. But once a drug gets reduced to a caricature—“horse tranquilizer,” “horse dewormer”—the nuance disappears, and with it any serious discussion about how and when these therapies actually work.
That’s not a trivial loss. Mental illness continues to rise in the United States, and for many patients, conventional treatments fail. Therapies like ketamine and TMS exist because the standard playbook doesn’t work for everyone. When public discourse reduces these treatments to slogans and ridicule, it doesn’t just distort the science—it discourages serious consideration of options that can be life-changing. The casualty isn’t political messaging. It’s patients.
Characterizing ketamine as a veterinary drug is reminiscent of the pandemic, when the FDA dismissed ivermectin as horse medicine despite its long-standing use in humans and its inclusion on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. An ENT physician who is an authority on ivermectin’s potential uses told me it is one of the safest drugs used in human medicine.
Whenever politics and politicians get involved, facts are misrepresented, deceptive labels get assigned, and context gets stripped away.
AOC is no exception.