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I thought it might be helpful to have a thread devoted to forms of treatment. I came across this reference just the other day...

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Ecstasy is the key to treating PTSD

At last the incurably traumatised may be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And controversially, the key to taming their demons is the ‘killer’ drug Ecstasy. That’s what it took to make Donna Kilgore feel alive again – that and the doctor who prescribed it. As the pill began to take effect, she giggled for the first time in ages. She felt warm and fuzzy, as if she was floating. The anxiety melted away. Gradually, it all became clear: the guilt, the anger, the shame.

Before, she’d been frozen, unable to feel anything but fear for 10 years. Touching her own arms was, she says, “like touching a corpse”. She was terrified, unable to respond to her loving husband or rock her baby to sleep. She couldn’t drive over bridges for fear of dying, was by turns uncontrollably angry and paralysed with numbness. When she spoke, she heard her voice as if it were miles away; her head felt detached from her body. “It was like living in a movie but watching myself through the camera lens,” she says. “I wasn’t real.”

Unknowingly, Donna, now 39, had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And she would become the first subject in a pioneering American research programme to test the effects of MDMA – otherwise known as the dancefloor drug Ecstasy – on PTSD sufferers.

Some doctors believe MDMA could be the key to solving previously untreatable deep-rooted traumas. For a hard core of PTSD cases, no amount of antidepressants or psychotherapy can rid them of the horror of systematic abuse or a bad near-death experience, and the slightest reminder triggers vivid flashbacks.

PTSD-specific psychotherapy has always been based on the idea that the sufferer must be guided back to the pivotal moment of that trauma – the crash, the battlefield, the moment of rape – and relive it before they can move on and begin to heal. But what if that trauma is insurmountable? What if a person is so horrified by their experience that even to think of revisiting it can bring on hysterics? The Home Office estimates that 11,000 clubbers take Ecstasy every weekend. Could MDMA – the illegal class-A rave drug, found in the system of Leah Betts when she died in 1995, and over 200 others since – really help? Dr Michael Mithoefer, the psychiatrist from South Carolina who struggled for years to get funding and permission for the study, believes so. Some regard his study – approved by the US government – as irresponsible, dangerous even. But Mithoefer’s results tell a different story.

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Donna had never taken Ecstasy before. “I was a little afraid, but I was desperate. I had to have some kind of relief. I didn’t want to live any more. This was no way to wake up every morning. So I met Dr Mithoefer. I said, ‘Doctor, I will do anything short of a lobotomy. I need to get better.’ ” That’s how, in March 2004, Donna became the first of Mithoefer’s subjects in the MDMA study. Lying on a futon, with Mithoefer on one side of her and his wife, Annie, a psychiatric nurse, on the other, talking softly to her, she swallowed the small white pill. It was her last hope.

“After 5 or 10 minutes, I started giggling and I said, ‘I don’t think I got the placebo,”’ she recalls. “It was a fuzzy, relaxing, on-a-different-plane feeling. Kind of floaty. It was an awakening.” For the first time Donna faced her fears. “I saw myself standing on top of a mountain looking down. You know you’ve got to go down the mountain and up the other side to get better. But there’s so much fog down there, you’re afraid of going into it. You know what’s down there and it’s horrible.

“What MDMA did was clear the fog so I could see. Down there was guilt, anger, shame, fear. And it wasn’t so bad. I thought, ‘I can do this. This fear is not going to kill me.’ I remembered the rape from start to finish – those memories I had repressed so deeply.” Encouraged by the Mithoefers, Donna expressed her overwhelming love for her family, how she felt protected by their support and grateful for their love.

MDMA is well known for inducing these compassionate, “loved-up” feelings. For Donna, the experience was life-changing.

So what happened when she went home? Was she cured? She sighs. “I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a cure. But after the first session I got up the next day and went outside, and it was like walking into a crayon box – everything was clear and bright. I did better in my job, in my marriage, with my kids. I had a feeling I’d never had before – hope. I felt I could live instead of exist.”

What makes MDMA so useful, Mithoefer believes, is the trust it establishes. “Many people with PTSD have a great deal of trouble trusting anybody, especially if they’ve been betrayed by someone who abused their trust, like a parent or a caregiver,” he says. “MDMA has this effect of lowering fear and defences. It also allows more compassion for oneself and for others. People can revisit the trauma, feel the original feelings but not be retraumatised, not feel overwhelmed or have to numb out to cope with it.”

Read the full article here: Ecstacy & PTSD and please, don't try this at home. The drug used in this study was a purified form whereas the drugs available for "recreational" use are typically cut with any variety of substances. If you are interested in pursuing this form of treatment I would encourage you to seek out a practioner who can monitor and oversee the treatment.

See also: Dr. Ecstacy Will See You Now


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