Juliana Mercer, a Marine Corps Marine who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, went looking for magic mushrooms in Costa Rica. She came into contact with a nonprofit organization that helps war veterans with psychedelic therapies. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, one in XNUMX male veterans and nearly two in XNUMX female veterans suffer from PTSD.
Mercer who served a total of 16 years, now director of veterans advocacy for the Veterans Support Group Healing Breakthrough, advocates the use of MDMA and other psychedelic-assisted therapies for veterans suffering from a range of mental health issues.
Psychedelics: Entheogens and entactogens
The former Marine advocates connecting veterans to these therapies. Although MDMA is better known as ecstasy or molly, there are major chemical differences between street psychedelics and the variants used in treatments.
Psychedelics are considered entheogens, which when consumed produce an altered perception of reality. A hallucinatory effect. This is the traditional chemical reaction experienced by users who use it as a party drug.
On the other hand, the MDMA therapies that groups like Healing Breakthrough are pursuing are entactogens. Those kinds of chemical properties lead to "profound states of introspection and personal reflection" and "affiliative social behavior," according to an article in Frontiers of Psychiatry by medical chemist David Nichols.
Researchers have already received promising initial results. In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated MDMA as a “breakthrough therapy” for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Psilocybin for the treatment of anxiety and depression received that designation in 2019.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS for short, has been researching the effects of MDMA for more than thirty years. It was tasked with conducting further research into the treatment, the most recent of which was a multi-site clinical trial and the second Phase III study.
The second study confirmed the results of the first phase III study. According to MAPS, more than 86% of participants who received the MDMA-assisted therapy experienced “clinically meaningful” improvement 18 weeks after starting the trial. More than 71% of participants who received MDMA-assisted therapy also no longer met diagnostic criteria for PTSD at the end of the study, compared to just over 46% of participants who received the placebo and therapy.
Psychedelics and therapies allow patients to get into a better introspective and reflective mindset to process PTSD. “I have no doubt that we are currently witnessing how the safe and responsible use of psychedelics is ushering in a revolutionary era for psychiatry and psychotherapy,” says Mercer. She expects the FDA will approve the treatment next year.
Source: militarytimes.com (EN)
