MDMA therapy achieves astounding 76% success rate for treating PTSD
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
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."
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.
Of course, that does not mean you should experience everything. I would stay away from acid if I had known schizophrenic antecedents in my family. But that's like with anything: be aware of risk factors, act accordingly. Don't eat too much sugar if you are diabetic, don't explore caves if you are claustrophobic, and so on.
You're assuming everyone has the _ability_ to know that prior to discovering this
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...), 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...) 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.
Also, the illegality of LSD makes it so regularly people use something else thinking it's LSD. Part of the bad problems (such as HPPD) related to LSD usage could be caused by something else. Could also explain why it seems mushrooms are safer.
But it could also be that hallucinogen usage make people weird, yeah. As you said, we don't really know yet. I'm curious and really hopeful.
Where is the proof for this outrageous statement? It certainly isn't true for ketamine's use in depression.
I'm not even specifically referring to the US.
Good example: Rosa Parks was not the first person arrested for refusing to give up her seat, Claudette Calvins was arrested 9 months before Rosa. But Claudette was pregnant out of wedlock to an older man, and shitty or not, civil leaders knew this would be used to attack her and their cause if she was their representative. So they went with Rosa, knowing that her character would be much harder to impeach in the court of public opinion.
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.
FWIW I have not watched House, but that episode is referencing an actual technique developed by V.S. Ramachandran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_box). His book Phantoms of the Brain is fascinating and you may be interested in reading it (even though you are just deploying his work as a metaphor here).
Did your changed perception persisted, at least a little, after your use of MDMA? Do you still have PTSD?
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.