Another look at Ecstasy in treatment of PTSD

May 4, 2008

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
Amy Turner

An Ecstasy tablet. 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? After 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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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3850302.ece