Every time articles like this appear on Hacker News it fills me with joy. I have personally watched a much older person heal extensive personal trauma with just one MDMA session, and to this day I regard it as a miracle that seemed impossible prior to the treatment.<p>MAPS is just entering into their Stage III research process after being granted a "breakthrough therapy" by the FDA (<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-designates-mdma-as-breakthrough-therapy-for-ptsd/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-designates-mdma-as-breakthr...</a>) and need all the funds they can muster. The tech community can really step up here. If you have it in you, donate what you can: <a href="https://store.maps.org/np/clients/maps/donation.jsp?campaign=11" rel="nofollow">https://store.maps.org/np/clients/maps/donation.jsp?campaign...</a>
For decades, there has been a near complete effective block on medical research for certain classes of drugs. Timothy Leary and that kind of 60’s stuff chilled legitimate science. Only recently have small changes started to happen, to the point the government, the flipping FDA, has started to think Ectasy (MDMA) might be a viable treatment for some of our most horrible mental illnesses.<p>So many people wonder when science will let us do things. When will we land on the moon, when will we cure cancer (most cancer anyway, a handful have been effectively cured), when will all of mankind benefit from the next great insights? We ask this yet in a lot of ways, we won’t even open our minds enough to give it our best shot.<p>How much can x, mushrooms, ketamine et al really change devastated lives for the better under the right conditions? We may never know.<p>I fully respect the opinion of people who say these drugs shouldn’t ever be used, or that disagree with me on any issue in general. But I will never respect someone who doesn’t want to know the answers and the data.<p>It happens with drugs, gun control, so many political issues, people actually do not want, and even work against collection of, objective data. Of course of any given data set can be biased or flawed, and that has nothing to do with getting the best data you can, iterating, and improving it.<p>If we are opposed to something, it’s ostensibly for a reason right? Why would we ever not want to strengthen our argument, or discard it, based on better understanding of our “reason”?
From a comment elsewhere by "Brian" on moving past psychological trauma:
<a href="http://www.hughhowey.com/our-silos-leak/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hughhowey.com/our-silos-leak/</a>
"Cognitive behavioral therapists don’t even bother trying to figure out the why — because when most people get their so-called “epiphany” explaining why they’re feeling so badly, the knowledge doesn’t give them any clue as to how to feel better and be happy. All they know is, X and Y and Z happened to me many moons ago, and that’s why I feel like crap now. But what do I actually do about it?
Bandler and Grinder figured it out forty plus years ago during the infancy of NLP too: focus on what you want, focus on what makes you happy, model people who are successful and happy and voila …. you’ll move in that direction too. Like you said above, Hugh, thinking about something that bothers you over and over is just another way of reexperiencing the pain and torment. Unless you’re coming at the memory from a fresh perspective, it’s like rubbing salt in the wound."<p>So, if a drug like MDMA helps someone see a memory from a fresh perspective, maybe it could help? But otherwise, the general advice above seems useful.
It's a shame that it took so long before we started to truly study the positive uses/effects of drugs like MDMA and Psilocybin. I wonder how long it will take society to really drop the "DARE/DRUGS ARE BAD" mentality and start having more rational discussions about this stuff.
If anyone is interested in learning more about this stuff, the annual Horizons conference is this weekend in NYC:<p><a href="http://www.horizonsnyc.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.horizonsnyc.org</a><p>And there will most likely be a MAPS event on Saturday night as well. I'm not going this year, but in previous years they've always been good.
Is there a way to do this in the US or other countries in half ways safe manner? I would be very interested but the people I know who trip regularly don't seem responsible enough for my taste.
As I get older, so much of what I grew up being totally excited with but which was considered fringe and counterculture is now being recognized as truly revolutionary.<p>I remember as a medical student on placement asking a palliative care physician about whether they had considered the use of MDMA in end of life care to provide dying people and their families with a potential method of spending some really incredible time together. She scoffed at the idea and continued prescribing the same old crap. 10 years later psychiatrists are saying the currently MDMA, ketamine and the psychedelics are providing the most exciting breakthroughs in modern psychiatric drugs in decades.
If anyone on Hacker News would like a crash course on the history and potential of psychedelic substances - I cannot recommend the book Acid Test by Tom Shroder more highly.<p>Or, for a shorter view, the article Trip Treatment by Michael Pollan: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment</a>
Check out the book TRUST, SURRENDER, RECEIVE by Anne Other.<p>It features the history, politics, science and first hand accounts of 40 people who used MDMA for healing PTSD and trauma in an underground practice.<p>Very powerful book.<p>Http://bit.ly/mdmabook
I feel like there has to be a good amount of people in the world who take psychedelics on a regular basis. At least more so than your average person. I'd imagine they are still broken, shattered, and lost individuals. Maybe some people have accessed some secret knowledge on their trips. But for the vast majority, I doubt that's the case.<p>I am not saying that there is no benefit, especially for an extreme case like this. That relief these people get, a chance to exist without the confusion and pain, and just feel like love.<p>But the high you get is a distraction from the pain you are feeling. It's not the taking of MDMA or Psilocybin that fixes the issues. It's the integration. It's the "lessons" you learn from your experience.<p>But are you learning, or are you just finally looking at what you didn't want to all these years? Do you need to take psychedelics to look?<p>I think we should keep researching, because we should see what is at the end of this tunnel.