
MDMA therapy achieves astounding 76% success rate for treating PTSD - mgdo
https://newatlas.com/mdma-ptsd-successful-trial-results/57074/
======
not_real_acct
Everyone that I know hates my wife and I, because we're just so ridiculously
happy with each other. It's just sickening, we're that super annoying couple
that finish each other's sentences and act like teenagers in love, even though
we've known each other for well over two decades.

I don't think I could have done it without LSD.

Here's what happened:

I was raised by a single mom and I just had NO IDEA how to talk to women
whatsoever. On top of that, I was always the kid who'd spend all weekend
squirreled away in his room writing code.

I never had any luck with girls, I honestly lost my virginity to a girl
because I did her taxes. No joke, she basically felt bad for my nerdy self and
threw me a bone because I did her taxes.

In some other timeline, I could've turned into an incel.

Instead, when I was 20, a coworker gave me some LSD one night and we went to a
night club. On a normal night, I would've spent the whole night trying to
'pick up' girls. On that night, I just wanted to dance and have a good time.

And it stuck.

I stopped worrying about trying to find a GF.

I stopped stressing out about being lonely.

Practically overnight, I found myself going out and focusing on having a good
time and just having fun. And the interesting thing about LSD is that I didn't
have to do it every night. I did it one time and it changed how I viewed the
world. It wasn't a crutch, it just re-arranged how I saw things.

Naturally, you know where this is going right? I met a great girl, and
suddenly I wasn't nervous or self conscious or creepy, I was just like "hey
let's go out and have a good time."

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> And the interesting thing about LSD is that I didn't have to do it every
> night. I did it one time and it changed how I viewed the world. It wasn't a
> crutch, it just re-arranged how I saw things.

This is one of the most scary things I have read. What if you got lucky in
that it was beneficial for you? For all we know it could have easily gone the
other way where just that single dose on that single night could have
permanently ruined your life. Persistent effects of drugs after a single use
are a terrifying phenomenon.

~~~
philwelch
If I put my cynic's hat on, they're _especially_ terrifying to drug companies.
If you take SSRI's and they work, you'll take SSRI's every day for the rest of
your life. If you take LSD or MDMA or ketamine and it works, you're done after
one dose.

Anecdotally, people who regularly took LSD seemed to get increasingly weird
compared to those who only took it once or a small number of times (c.f.
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-
psychede...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-
psychedelicists-so-weird/)), so if anything, a persistent effect might turn
into a compounding effect if you _don 't_ restrict yourself to a single use.

Also, there are cases (cf [http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-
specter-of...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-of-
permanent-side-effects/)) of psychedelic drug users suffering persistent _bad_
effects.

The interrelation between physiological and psychological mechanisms is still
largely unknown, but what is known is that even normal human experience can
sometimes have a persistent one-time psychological effect. The possibility of
harnessing such an effect for therapeutic purposes is concerning, perhaps, but
no more than any of the other mysterious mucking about we tend to do.

~~~
atomical
> If you take LSD or MDMA or ketamine and it works, you're done after one
> dose.

Where is the proof for this outrageous statement? It certainly isn't true for
ketamine's use in depression.

------
travmatt
Every time I read an article about the continuing progress MAPS has made into
using ‘recreational’ drugs to alleviate these terrible afflictions, I can’t
help but think of all the people who suffered because this research was
demonized and outlawed decades ago for easy political points. Much
appreciation for Rick Doblin for sticking to the research when the scientific
community was told to stop.

~~~
eckmLJE
I agree with you for the most part, but fear of psychedelics by political
leaders is bigger than scoring points. What can be a miracle cure for
individuals with various mental illnesses can have a similarly potent impact
on "healthy" minds and result in radical changes in how we view the world and
each other... In ways that could threaten the political status quo. On the one
hand it sounds wonderful to me-- on the other, potentially quite dangerous and
disruptive.

~~~
brokenmachine
The current political status quo is not "dangerous and disruptive" to you?

I'm not even specifically referring to the US.

------
RickS
This research continues to leave me extremely hopeful.

After reading a similar report a few months ago, I decided to roll the dice
and put aside my fears of more serious drugs to see if this could work for me.

Let me tell you. MDMA delivered. Here's an anecdotal stream of consciousness
about it.

I am unsure whether the thing I experienced is something that only MDMA can
provide, or if it is something that is normal in healthy people but is
otherwise unobtainable in people such as myself. In the context of PTSD the
phenomenon typically sought and described is something along the lines of
"zoom out, see yourself, forgive yourself". It does this.

There's an episode of House involving a war vet who lost his hand while
clenching his fist in a moment of trauma. The ghost of his severed hand
remained alive in his mind, clenching, for every day of his life thereafter.
Finally, House sets up an experiment with a mirror in a box that creates an
illusion that his lost hand is intact. The man's mind, sufficiently convinced
that this new reality is plausible, allows him to unclench his haunted fist,
for the first time. The man breaks down in a wave of profound gratitude. I am
weeping as I write this, so familiar is the sensation of existential tension
and release.

That is the most apt metaphor I can conjure for the emotional experience MDMA
provides. You just... let go. Finally. With ease. A task which was previously
not merely impossible, but flatly inconceivable.

Except letting go isn't about whether you're holding a foreign object or not.
It's more like a transition between two states – two shapes the hand can be
in. Closed to open. Imagine having no nerves, no muscles, no sensation that
would let you direct your hand from the shape it is in now, to this
hypothetical other shape it could take. Similarly, you go from one mental
model of the world to another. And so you have to have an idea of what this
other place is.

In the past, I've described to my therapist the struggle of imagining this
place and unclenching, emotionally, as being asked to draw an animal you've
never seen. "Paint me a zarnur", I say. Well.. how many legs does it have? Is
it a mammal? Eyes? Color? Size? There's no sensible place to get started that
isn't just firing birdshot into the dark. It is a special helplessness borne
in the void of total disconnection from what your goal might be.

Emotional forgiveness is an animal you can't draw, because the door that
blocks your sight of him is too heavy for you to move on your own. When I took
MDMA, it was with the pretense that god damnit, if I can't open that door with
my mind, with all my effort, in my current state, then maybe we bulldoze it
open. And maybe it's only open an inch, and I get a peek at a single hair. And
maybe it's only open for a moment, and my glance is fleeting.

And maybe it kills me. Fine. We've gotta try.

Because if it works, it would be something. The beginning of some north star,
from which I might be able to plant myself and work outwards, where previously
there was no ground beneath me.

And that's what happened. For five hours on one night, I felt like a version
of myself that not only _might_ be worthy of love and acceptance from other
humans, but a version of my self that was _inarguably_ worthy.

That evening remains the only blip of signal in an otherwise empty
transmission log. I don't say that to be morbid – I say it with profound
gratitude. It went from zero to one. That's huge.

My biggest regret? That I didn't have a voice recorder. I remember snippets of
conversation, but four hours of mental rearchitecture is not easily recalled
with much fidelity by an amateur.

Nevertheless, the emotion, the sensation, was so real and so profound that I
could never doubt it. Perception is reality, here, and I saw to my
satisfaction that the place I wanted to go, the state where one hopes to
finally be at rest, certainly exists.

If you want to buy runway for hope, that's about as good as it gets.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I was extremely fortunate that I have a
group of friends whom I've known nearly a decade, lived with, grown up with,
and trust fully happen to also be experts in administering such an experience,
so it was about as good as I could have gotten. I feel, having been through
it, that this is a fairly safe thing to attempt. But do take precautions.
Rollsafe[1] appears to be an authority in this space.

[1][https://rollsafe.org/](https://rollsafe.org/)

~~~
Sohakes
Thanks for this comment, it's beautiful.

Did your changed perception persisted, at least a little, after your use of
MDMA? Do you still have PTSD?

~~~
RickS
Thank you.

The short version is yes, some of the perception persisted. The big one I
mentioned in my first post – I have personally verified that my brain is
capable, in at least one scenario, of feeling self acceptance. I won't soon
forget that.

But I can't actually latch onto those feelings and hold them, or lean into
them, or conjure them out of thin air. For example, I'm in a pretty mellow
mood right now, but if I really wanted to go back and relive lots of mean
things that happened to me, I think I could get probably 75% of the way to
proper anger, at least. This "conjuring from thin air" is not yet possible for
the mentality I sought and found through MDMA.

The other thing that persists somewhat, though weakly and requiring focus, is
a certain moral/behavioral template associated with the feeling. For example,
I'd guess you can do an okay job of simulating the way you'd think if you were
hangry, drunk, stoned, or overly excited. I now have this for MDMA, which is
really fascinating mostly as a comparison to other things.

For example, I never really understood why people called alcohol a depressant
– it makes me feel pretty great – until taking MDMA. I came down with the
realization that alcohol was more of a devil on the shoulder than the neutral-
but-well-meaning thing that I thought it was. It took the angelic counterparty
of MDMA to illustrate this contrast.

There's something I'm not sure what to call, but I think the best way I could
phrase it is "trajectory/valence of intent". The version of me that was on
MDMA wanted the best for myself, and the best for the world, and was
shockingly lucid in its ability to determine what these things might be, and
recognize what things might need to be added or subtracted from my life. Let's
call this maximally positive intentional valence.

Alcohol is basically the total opposite. It's hedonic, lustful, impulsive,
etc. Importantly, it's not (for me at least, though surely for others)
angry/violent, which in the past led me to see it as having a sort of
neutral/harmless valence of intent. Sophomoric, sure, but not murderous. I
have a new respect for its negativity. Playing the game of life with a focus
on short timelines and impulsiveness isn't neutral – it's downward facing.
That's is somewhat obvious intuitively, but my appreciation for it has a newly
profound depth.

I'll end with a swing at the new mental model I loosely hold – it's a little
off kilter and hard to articulate:

Instead of having one core personality with modifiers ("you are you", and then
your feelings sit on top of this core), each of your moods are distinct
perceptual frameworks that just happen to have ~65% overlap. There is no
"default" state of mind/perception that gets modified by drugs, and there is
no such thing as "sobriety" where there is a home state that is "normal". I
have been "sober" in the medical and vernacular sense while elated and also
while depressed – can these two versions of me fairly be called the same
consciousness? I am no longer confident they can. Each state of mind is a
distinct lens, and you wear them like outfits, roughly only one at once. The
same party through the lens of excitement and depression will be totally
different, and you're unlikely to experience both simultaneously.

Our minds are capable of wearing many, many more perceptual lenses than we
realize, and there's no guarantee we're going to wear all of them in one life.
We're not intrinsically very good at knowing which ones are possible, which
ones are desirable, and have almost no framework for knowing which ones are
"correct" or "normal". We've just got some loose, mostly functional social
constructs that encourage some forms and discourage others, similar to the
Overton window.[1]

I was unable to find the quote, but Sam Harris does a better job than I do of
explaining parts of that idea, and to the extent that I believe it now, much
of that is due to his explanation.

I have a new understanding for the desire of psychonauts[2] to collect,
compare, and understand as many lenses of consciousness as possible. Though I
remain a fairly fearful person, and it will be a long time I think before I've
got the stones to grapple with LSD, psilocybin, or DMT. MDMA doesn't have the
"bad trip" risk in the same way, which makes it a lot less intimidating IMO.

To answer your last question, I'm definitely not "over it", and I haven't
taken a formal reassessment of my mental state in the aftermath (as they do in
MAPS to measure progress), mostly because I don't see the need. I know the
answer, as far as I'm concerned. There simply wasn't that kind of movement.

This neither surprises nor discourages me. I read the MAPS docs, and,
naturally, these people know what they're doing. They have trained
professionals guiding patients through multiple focused sessions deliberately
pointed at taking the maximally theraputic path with minimal distractions. I
had a lounge chair in a basement in SF's chinatown, and hold no illusions
about the delta in efficacy.

Still, progress is progress. I can't get into a program like MAPS right now,
so one does what one can. I consider the forays of 2018 to be practicing, in
the only way you really can these days – recreationally. In 2019, with some
more experience under my belt, I hope to continue more deliberately in the
style of the MAPS program. We'll see how it goes. I know it's a risky to
experiment on yourself in this way, but it's a risk I'm happy to take.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychonautics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychonautics)

