Hitting the Brain’s Reset Button

[Originally published Thursday, 01 Dec 2016]

When Jonathan Lubecky tries to pinpoint the lowest point of his life, he has a hard time picking one. There was the day in 2006 the former Army Sergeant came home from Iraq to find his wife gone, along with his dog and his motorcycle.

“A bad country song,” he says.

Then there was the Christmas eve when Lubecky walked out of a Raleigh bar where he was trying to drown his nightmares, went to church, and was turned away. “They told me, ‘We’re full, come back in the morning.’ ” That led to his first suicide attempt. The last, of five, was November 4, 2013. “My wife and I had a fight, I blacked out, I found out later I slit my wrists,” Lubecky says. He ended up in a psych ward for six long days.

Less than a year after waking up in that padded room, Lubecky found himself in a Charleston, South Carolina, bungalow that serves as the office of Dr. Michael Mithoefer and his wife Annie, a trained nurse. The Mithoefers are a psychotherapy team leading a series of experiments testing the drug MDMA—better known as “ecstasy”—as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Lubecky had been diagnosed with PTSD in 2006. In addition, a blast injury from a training accident had left him with memory problems and a deep depression. He’d sat through countless therapy sessions, but this one was different. It was his first experience with MDMA. His head was spinning, his eyes full of faint geometric patterns. His tongue, usually paralyzed when it came to talking about the war or his struggles, was untied. “What was interesting was that for the first time I was talking about these things, and I didn’t have a physical reaction,” he recalls.

After just two sessions with the drug, Lubecky’s PTSD symptoms were virtually gone. His experience is typical of the two dozen people—veterans, firefighters, and police officers—in Mithoefer’s study.

More here

[See detailed study results here]