Gadgetory

but I don't believe that there's going to be anything that's going to take away your PTSD because every time you start talking about all this and we've been talking about in this room my fucking memory banks just start getting one back it right I had to live with it for such a long time and I try to wash it out of my mind I tried fucking everything well okay that's nothing that you're going to forget I got in the army when I was 19 and 1964 and has it in country and 65 and 66 Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic more like best friend I saw him decapitated by helicopter blade and that one that was the one that got me I think that's 22 when I got out you know I knew something was not right emotionally I couldn't put my finger on it PTSD is basically a collection of symptoms that happen to people after a traumatic event such as sexual abuse rape war accidents that kind of thing and it can be really debilitating for people there's a significant instance of suicide and there's a lot of suffering and disability that comes from living with that someone described PTSD is like having a big broken heart and I think a pretty good description you bury those emotions that make you human well historically the treatments weren't terribly effective um a lot of supportive counseling a lot of groups discussing feelings and what's far better is treatments that involve exposure depending on what literature you look at probably around half the people are not well served there's also pharmacology Zoloft and paxil and other medications kind of help to decrease the intensity of symptoms like anxiety but they don't tend to get at the root of the problem and really or cure the disorder I got to the point where I study drugs I just put him in a big bag and throw away said I I don't want to be drugged for the rest of my life that was kind of fast a desperate I just want to do something friend of mine who committed suicide I was just tired of kind of carrying the baggage and I saw this clip on CNN this is the place where we do the study this is where we meet with people and then this is where we do the MDMA sessions intense psychotherapy including eight-hour sessions after taking a capsule of MDMA of ecstasy MDMA is methylene dioxide and that amine it produces a reduction of activity in the amygdala the fear processing part of the brain it enhances activity in the frontal cortex where people put things in context it releases oxytocin and prolactin which are hormones of bonding and affiliation and love and the remarkable thing that we've learned about memory is that when you remember something you have to reconsolidate the memory you're basically recreating the memory so that if this memory is linked to fear and under the influence of MDMA you can bring back the memory but the fear response is dampened down then when you reconsolidate the memory it doesn't have that fear to it and you've been able to put it in context as then and not now well it's certainly understandable that people don't necessarily realize that this can be a potential therapeutic tool and a lot of people don't know the history most people don't understand that MDMA really began as a therapy drug in the middle 70s and early 80s and then from that some people realize that they could make a lot of money selling it in more recreational settings and more public settings and so it was just inevitable that there would be a crackdown the conclusion of the administrative law judge the did the DA hearings was that it did have medical utility and it should be in schedule three meaning you can't sell it in bars but doctors can use it and the DEA administrator overruled that and put it in Schedule one anyway and I felt it was important that we look into this further no no control research had been done we designed a study in which people would have eight-hour all-day sessions with me and Annie in which we give them MDMA and then spend the day with them helping them process what came up I had a very chaotic childhood and because of that I was exposed to you know a lot of random abuse sexual abuse as a child I had a lot of symptoms I was anxious I had sleeplessness I had vomiting irritable bowels but I didn't get any real medical attention until I was like 22 no psychotherapy cognitive behavioral therapy rapid eye movement therapy drugs and medication anything that came through I would try it with complete abandon and it seemed like the more I tried I would uncover more and more stuff we'd come up to the surface and then I it would start to just get worse the first study was inactive placebo compared to MDMA so some people got inactive placebo with all the same therapy the same all day sessions the exact same approach I got placebo so I was not changed even though this was the best of the best of the best I knew that I could come back and I would be getting the medicine two months later now that when everything changed well in our first study basically in a nutshell 25% of the people that got the therapy with placebo were basically free from PTSD at the end compared to 83 percent with MDMA so 83 percent no longer met criteria for PTSD there's thing called a cap score that rates how sick you are after this last treatment he didn't we did my caps evaluation I came back for the two-month follow-up to do the caps to see what the results of it were and he comes back and sits down he says Rachel you don't have post-traumatic stress disorder anymore you don't have it when I first heard about the studies I signed up right away and it's like I got to thinking about I mean it was like 2,400 miles and logistics there's cost involved then I broke it down I said well when I got ecstasy a therapist hell I live next to college town it's a no-brainer you know the treatments that are that are sold to us at the VA are are high in number and varied in legitimacy and MDMA is one of them if a veteran said listen I saw this on CNN and this is something I really want to do why aren't you offering it it might work but we don't have the data to support that this was my own thing you know what they were doing was 2,400 miles away I said I've got to deal with what I have and I didn't have any compunction about it whatsoever fortunately I had a friend of mine son he'd met some guy in Sacramento who's going down to Los Angeles to score a big bunch and I was able to get some and it worked out beautifully the first time I did is like it's just a blanket of warmth of glowing I just like felt alive again in touch with my feelings and stuff and music music was incredible under the influence and after I did the first first session by myself I just like I felt a noticeable noticeable difference then I get touch to the somebody new as a therapist explain to him what I was trying to do and then I did three three-hour sessions and it was extraordinary I mean it just like you know I did what three sessions I couldn't do in 34 years well right now we're in what the FDA calls phase two which is a number of small studies and then hopefully in a couple years we'll be able to move on to Phase three which means two to three hundred people each in multiple sites and you need two of those two that apply to FDA for approval as an indication as a treatment if it keeps going well what we think is going to happen is it would be approved not that you can give a prescription people can pick it up at the pharmacy but that it can be would be approved for use in specially licensed clinics last year the VA spent around five and a half billion dollars on disability payments for over 275,000 vets they perceive this as a crisis there's 22 vets on average meeting suicide every day so while the VA has certain therapies that they've developed there's a pretty strong awareness that there's a substantial number of people for whom these therapies do not work the best treatments are cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure we know that these work it's hard to then say okay now that we've finally got something that is very effective in 65 to 80 percent of cases let's try a far-out type of treatment if somebody were to come along with a treatment that has a lower side effect profile lower attrition same effect size easier to do well then we'll do that would I fear though and what I don't like to see and what basically just pisses me off is when people forego the effective evidence-based treatments for the peripheral type treatments that don't have any real evidence they don't have a great outcome and then they give up on any treatment and that bothers me a lot that does happen sometimes the real issue is does this help people or not and if it does if they're suffering from PTSD and this is a tool that can help them we should develop it and even though there's a short-term cost that some people will seek it out on their own and may find impure drugs or not be sufficiently supported that's not a reason not to develop it into a medicine in effect it's a reason to develop it as quickly as possible there is so much enthusiasm from medical students residents young therapists that are interested in this field I mean just in the last four years I think the amount of enthusiasm and people wanting to do this and open to it has really changed it's funny I tell people about this and you know veterans is stuff like that and it just it goes right over their head and then they don't understand it but you know just I sure did I picked up on right away and you know wouldn't start the word gets out I think things will change so what's X what are they treating almost now that you're staying with you well they're looking at using MDMA to cure PTSD basically that six is a cure of another to be fun there is a it is there is a cure you