AOC Spent $19,000 In Campaign Cash On A Psychiatrist
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign paid nearly $19,000 last year to a psychiatrist known for his ketamine treatments, describing the payments as “leadership training and consulting.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s committee sent three payments to Dr. Brian Boyle totaling $18,725 over 2025, according to Federal Election Commission records. The disbursements were $11,550 in March, $2,800 in May and $4,375 in October.
Boyle is psychiatric director at Stella, a chain of mental health clinics 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 jeopardizes debut on world stage with word salad response to fundamental foreign policy question)
Federal law prohibits candidates from spending campaign funds on personal expenses. The FEC applies what it calls the “independence test” to draw this line, asking whether an obligation would exist regardless of a candidate’s campaign or official duties.
Socialists in decline: AOC spends $19,000 on psychiatrist known for ketamine therapy https://t.co/EReLloVtlu pic.twitter.com/gaLxNqoLKA
– New York Post (@nypost) March 21, 2026
Paul Kamenar, attorney for the National Legal and Policy Center, told the New York Post (NYP) that the spending appeared to violate that standard. “While she calls this spending ‘leadership training,’ Dr. Boyle has no expertise in this area, unlike several Democratic campaign consultants,” Kamenar said. “This looks like yet another example of misuse of campaign contributions.”
The payments arrived over the course of a year when AOC was already facing questions about how her office categorized expenses. Americans for Public Trust filed a separate ethics complaint in March 2025 regarding other disbursements characterized as “training,” Fox News reported. Ocasio-Cortez called the allegations “100% false” on social media.
The MP has long campaigned to expand research into psychedelic-assisted therapies. She co-sponsored a bipartisan bill with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) that funded Pentagon studies of psychedelics for service members suffering from PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, according to a press release from Crenshaw’s office. This legislation became law as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024.
Psychiatrist Dr Simon Dosovitz has warned that ketamine still carries real risks. “It’s a strongly dissociative drug,” Dosovitz told the New York Times.
