RolandVerfaillie
Novelist, poet, and satirist. Thirty years a therapist. Twelve books about the search for meaning in a noisy age.
New for 2026
The Ketamine Diaries
Field notes from the fictional SereniPath Ketamine and Wellness Clinic, where medicine, marketing, and improvisational theater join hands and skip toward the edge of a cliff. Part diary, all farce.
Written by the clinical director of a working ketamine clinic, it is a satire about what happens when helping professionals fall in love with ritual, mistake spectacle for treatment, and get a little too enmeshed with the people they are meant to help. In this clinic, ketamine may open the mind, but it also opens the floodgates.
Also new this year: a revised edition of the family saga There's No Place That's Home and the fifth volume of collected poems, The Evening Muse.
Twelve books, twenty years
Comic novels, a novella about death, short stories, a family saga, and five volumes of poetry. Select a cover for the full description and where to buy it.
Slow the hell down, and pick up a book and read it.
The therapist behind the books
Roland B. Verfaillie has spent more than thirty years as a licensed mental health therapist, in private practice and in state and federal service. He holds a Ph.D. in professional counseling, with earlier degrees in psychology, chemistry, and counseling psychology, and he contributed to the Brookings Institution's urban studies project in Washington, D.C.
He was the first civilian Director of Community Services for the U.S. Army garrison in Augsburg, Germany, later a supervisory psychologist for the Department of Defense, and since 2008 a Military and Family Life Consultant, traveling worldwide to sit with service members and their families through combat stress, deployment, and the strain both put on a marriage.
Today he is Clinical Director at Allay Health and Wellness in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, a ketamine and Spravato clinic where he leads the trauma-informed treatment program. His specialties are substance use disorders and trauma recovery. He lives in Stuart, Florida.
The writing began in 2006 with The Book of Job(s), published under his own imprint, Purple Onion Press. What followed was a second comic novel, a book that set out to ruin dance for everyone, a novella about dying, a collection of short stories, five volumes of poetry, and a family saga drawn from relatives who left eastern Canada for the East Coast of the United States and lived through the Depression there.
"The medicine may create a window where material that has been inaccessible becomes approachable. But a window is not a destination."
Roland Verfaillie, on ketamine-assisted therapyConnect
For readings, interviews, or a word about the books, reach Roland through LinkedIn or the clinic.