This isn’t directly related to art therapy, but it’s still very interesting news for those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A study of veterans that began 6 years ago has caused a stir with its recent findings that MDMA, the active ingredient found in ecstasy, can be used to effectively treat symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) began this study of MDMA and PTSD about 6 years ago in 2004. It was the first clinical trial of a psychedelic drug in 35 years.
One person was constantly angry, had haunting nightmares, and he withdrew and became isolated. He was daignosed with PTSD. He grew desperate after months of therapy, and eventually became part of the test. He swallowed a tablet, and after a few sessions assisted by ecstasy, his PTSD symptoms were “completely eliminated.”
This could be a huge breakthrough considering the seriousness and challenges that come with PTSD. Below is an article from TimesOnline.co.uk about how ecstasy (MDMA) changed Donna’s life after she was raped years before.
In 1993, Donna was brutally raped. She was a single parent living in a small town in Alaska, working as a dental nurse for the Air Force. She was due to work an early shift the next day and her two-year-old daughter was staying with a friend for the night. She was alone at home. At midnight she opened the door to a stranger who said he was looking for his dog. He asked if her husband was at home, and a second’s hesitation was enough. He burst in, backing her up against the fireplace in the living room. Donna picked up a poker to defend herself. He said: “If you co-operate, I won’t kill you. I’ve got a gun.” And he reached into his jacket.
“I dropped the poker and that was it,” she says. “I thought, this is how I’m going to die. No life flashed before my eyes, I didn’t think about my daughter. Just death. I left my body and I stayed that way. The next thing I remember, the cops were coming through the door with a dog.”
She endured the rape with her eyes squeezed shut. That she hadn’t physically struggled would later form a large part of the guilt and shame that contributed to her PTSD. “I guess a lot of women would say, ‘Someone would have to kill me before I’d let that happen.’ Well, I did what I thought I had to do to survive,” she says. When she heard a shuffle of feet outside the door she screamed for all she was worth. Her attacker beat her. Two policemen, probably alerted by a neighbour, broke down the door and arrested the man, then drove Donna to the Air Force hospital where she worked. “Of course it was full of people who knew me,” she says. “It was completely embarrassing. And after that, nobody knew what to say. People avoided me, they looked at me funny. It was miserable.”
Afterwards, convinced that getting on with life was the best thing for herself and her child, Donna carried on as usual. She was embarrassed that people who knew her also knew about the rape, particularly as she was still working at the hospital. But she couldn’t remember much of the attack itself, and didn’t try. So she was surprised when, four years later, her symptoms started to kick in. “I had no idea it was PTSD. I couldn’t understand why I was so angry, why I was having nightmares, flashbacks, fainting spells, migraine, why I felt so awful, like my body was stuffed with cotton wool. Things had been going so good.”
She started drinking heavily and went from relationship to relationship, finding men hard to trust and get close to. Convinced that she was dying and wouldn’t live to see her next birthday, she went to the Air Force psychiatrist. “And that’s where it started – take this pill, that pill. I’ve been on every kind of antidepressant – Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil. Wellbutrin made me feel suicidal. Prozac did the same. The pills were just masking the symptoms, I wasn’t getting any better.”
Yet she met her “soul mate”, Steve, and married him in 2000. “When I first saw him I thought, ‘This is the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.’ We were like one person, finishing each other’s sentences,” she says. They muddled along, with Donna putting on a brave face. She had two more children. But getting close wasn’t easy: “The longer we were married, the worse I got.”
Once, Steve and Donna were watching TV when she had a vivid flashback to the night she was raped. “I looked at the door, I saw it open, and that feeling came over me all over again.
I thought, ‘My God, why won’t this go away?’ Steve tried to understand, but unless you’ve been through this, you don’t know what it’s like.”
Donna moved to South Carolina in 2002 when Steve – also in the services – was posted there. She began seeing a psychiatrist called Dr Marcet, who diagnosed her with PTSD and attributed it to the rape. It helped to know that whatever it was had a name and a cause: “I was like, why hasn’t anybody told me this before?” It was Marcet who referred her to the Mithoefers.
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.”
I know it works because i have been self medicating for nearly 7yrs now and it works for me…..no i don’t get all loved up or any really way out effects it just levels me out 1 to 2 tablets a day.
It makes me feel relaxed and able to talk to people handle crowds and control my rage out bursts all the things that stop me from living a normal life,it makes me want to do things rather than sit on my ass and not bother with the outside world.
I think a lot more research should be done into this as i started taking it after reading at length a case on the internet about a american guy(ex police) who suffered really bad but after taking MDMA it helped him so much that he got his life back on track.
The only thing stopping it is that the stigma of DRUGS so to speak but i have found that i get less side effects if any than i do with the drugs the doctor gives me so it has to be better doesn’t it ??
@maddog – 1-2 pills per day for 7 years now of mdma? i think you are lucky to be alive. your response is not in favor of medically assisted mdma research, it is actually going against it. i am surprised you do not have severe kidney failure by now. please try to think before you speak when trying to assist these articles that the public is seeing in regards to this topic. this is a VERY controversial subject and we should do the best we can to try to help the viewer’s interpretation.
Dee, i have no knowledge of MDMA per se, but curious why u think he’d be lucky to be alive or have sever kidney failure from it. yeah i get its a drug, and long term use of anything has a potential for all kinds of hosts of health issues, (artificial sweeter,plastic, teflon, even some Vitamin’s and numerous “healthy” products alot of us use everyday) but seriously, i think your opinion that maddogs comment is actually going against the research instead of in favor of it seems wrong to me, seems to me he proves that the long term use IF done right CAN be done, obviously it should be medically assisted, blood work, kidney/liver test to be sure, BUT i have been under a doctors care for a back issue that started as just a bulging L5 disk in 2002 (now is completely disintegrated yet very painful), in Sept. 2012 my family was advised to come say their goodbyes etc. b/c i was not expected to make it much longer, i was yellow from head to toe, highest bilirubin levels some had ever seen, i could not eat, sound and light made me feel like i was a volcano erupting from the inside out, I was sent to a bigger hospital hours away for an emergency Liver transplant because i was indeed in Complete LIVER FAILURE. a month prior everything seemed normal. obviously i did make it through, and by miracle alone WITHOUT the liver transplant which i may have never gotten anyway, as sick as i was, and i could still need in the future(they predicted withing 5 years based on the level of cirrhosis I’m now left with.
i am by far not okay, or living a normal life, i can’t work, and normal daily activities still after 2 1/2 years are hard, there is no getting up showering, getting dressed, doing hair, making breakfast, getting kids up and out all in a couple hours anymore. i am weak, and everything must be preplanned and spread out little bits at a time, with breaks in between. I’ve learned to cope sort of, but its hard, and if i do too much its like i’m drained of everything, and must recharge which takes forever sometimes. life is hard in general, and the “But you don’t look sick” really gets to me,
the most likely (tho no one will say so) cause?or at very least a contributor. HIGH DOSES of combinations of pain killers, mainly including NSAIDS like Tylenol. why my dr always just increased the meds with Tylenol instead of switching up, to a different class of pain killer like i’m on now I’ll never know, but i think maddog WAS thinking before he spoke, to share his experience to hopefully help others, and maybe you should shouldn’t attack others for doing so.
i don’t think anyone should take maddogs approach and self medicate, but so many ppl do, on so many different things, food, drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling, shopping, so on and on. and like me, being treated by a doctor with what the FDA deemed safe high doses yet wasn’t safe for me,
The air we breathe is harmful, yet we can’t not breathe it, some can tolerate it others need meds to control the side effects the pollutants cause to them some need oxygen supplemented. what works for one, doesn’t work for others,
i dont think maddog was suggesting that anyone take his approach either, simply stating that it indeed worked for him, so it should be looked into.
Hello there.
My name is Alissa and I’m a 22 year old college student from Michigan State University. I’m currently in a Wellness Centre in Florida for 28 days working on my depression. We are doing art therapy tomorrow so I was doing a little bit of research and came across your site. I think your website is an amazing thing and I’m very excited to participate in tomorrow art. I’m not one to comment on random blogs about what I like or dislike but this website stood out in both ways. Your article about PTSD and MDMA(active ingredient in Ecstasy) Really really bothers me because of the lack of information and knowledge it presented. I experimented with this drug through the sad place that I have been and let me tell you, it is NOT ok to think that this drug is ok. It makes you feel on top of the world for that 4-8 hour period but after that, your depression is even worse. You used up all your serotonin for the next 14 days in that small time period. Where does that leave you? What any serious club goer knows, suicide tuesdays. It is a very very sad low place that nobody should have to ever experience. If whoever did the research on this article, did the research at all, they would know this. I really hate to sound harsh or hateful towards this, but before someone reads the snip-bit of that article thinks its ok to take ecstasy to cure their negative feelings towards anything, I really hope that it is removed and/or the information is corrected.
Thank you.
you’re right no one should have to experience what you called suicide Tuesdays, which i know nothing about specifically, but those of us with PTSD, would probably compare you’re party come down experience to our everyday, at very least most of the time.
in my dark sad place days, looking for anything anywhere to find some sort of ‘normal’ escaping the pain, the darkness, the anxiety, the flashbacks, etc. i found METH, well i didn’t find it i was just given to me, changed my world, i liked it, yet even the days following, weeks following even, i didn’t do what the others did, ya know the whole methhead persona, stereotype whatever. i wasn’t geeking out, or trying to get my next fix or what ever. i was normal, clouds cleared from my head, i could think, i could organize one thing, focus, complete a task, and go to SLEEP at night. it was wonderful, only one problem, well lots actually, it was illegal, toxic, as god only knows what was in it. and with the laws now to help combat the problem with this drug, no way i’d go near it, no telling what ppl substitute now adays,
BUT i did see a psychiatrist not long after i had my experience with it. i was open honest and detailed about the where, what, how, of my experience. He immediately threw out all the test paperwork etc. i was there for and started over….and came up with a diagnosis that explained so many issues that go back all the way to childhood….and now being treated with what i call a FDA approved version….and even kids get this med. IT changed my life, the balance in MY brain was not right, and this now corrects it, and without the harmful who knows what, of self medicating, BUT the fact remains, even the prescription version is used as a party drug, for some that don’t need it,
Depending on your individualized brain chemistry what is needed to maintain ‘normal’ for one, is exactly the same for someone else to be ‘high’, and even so could cause another to be paranoid, depressed etc. the same goes for almost anything, i could look at a bag of cookies and swear i gain weight,and my blood sugar zoom up, yet others can eat the whole bag, and more, and not gain a ounce, or go into sugar comma….
hopefully noone would read one story online about MDMA and say yep thats for me, i think i’ll stock up right now….you see an ad for fast food, or a beer commercial, u dont hop in your car and go buy it each and every time? mayb think about it once in a while, maybe a couple times you do, but MOST ppl are smarter than that, some are not, but i seriously doubt those are the ones reading this article anyway. and its not like you can just drive in to town and run in a buy MDMA right off the shelf, anyway, right?
I am with Alissa and Dee… MDMA is powerful substance that carries it’s own dangers, physical emotional and mental. I’m sorry, but the lack of information here is irresponsible… As a substance abuse counselor I find it disturbing that the negative side effects of the drug MDMA are not being made available to the readers with this delivery of an almost miraculous cure for PTSD…PTSD is a serious monster of a disorder that sometimes takes years upon years to even scratch the surface! Suggesting that a recreational drug may erase all of this is controversial at the very least, and possibly a death wish for some at the other end of the spectrum.
Maybe this article should discuss “the seriousness and challenges that come with” substance abuse, dependence and addictions.
Maybe the writer should be responsible enough to tell the readers about “the seriousness and challenges that come with” substance abuse, dependence and addiction.