HEALTH
Can Psychedelics Make You Whole? An unconventional treatment for severe trauma By Danielle Berrin
COURTESY OF SAMANTHA ROSE STEIN
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amantha rose stein had been on the ascending arc of her career as the director of special projects for TechCrunch, an online media platform reporting on high tech and startups, when, as Joan Didion famously put it in The Year of Magical Thinking, Stein’s life changed “in the instant.” A fixture in Silicon Valley, Stein frequently traveled overseas to helm Startup Battlefield, a global competition run by TechCrunch in which early-stage startups are invited to compete for prize money as well as the attention of media and investors. The role placed Stein, who is Jewish, in a vaunted position, able to anoint the next hot startup in one of the most lucrative industries in the world. During the summer of 2018, while on a work trip in Beirut, Stein was violently assaulted. She declined to share details but said that the episode triggered a post-traumatic stress disorder so paralyzing that she was unable to leave her house. “I experienced a living death,” Stein, 33, said when we sat down together in the courtyard of her hotel during a visit to Los Angeles last November. After the assault, Stein had difficulty sleeping and exercising. Her appetite decreased. She suffered from nausea, nightmares and panic attacks and was diagnosed with clinical depression. For months afterward,
she avoided socializing even with her closest friends. “I became a ghost of myself. Nothing brought me joy or pleasure,” she said. Stein threw herself into the pursuit of a cure. She tried an array of therapies, from the cutting-edge to the traditional: cognitive behavioral therapy, trauma therapy, sound healing and mindfulness practice, among others. When those didn’t work, she took prescribed pharmaceuticals. Stein was fortunate to have the means to shell out tens of thousands on her healing journey, but what did it matter when nothing was helping? Informed by her professional role identifying breakthrough companies, Stein decided to interview PTSD experts about breakthrough therapies. That’s how she was steered toward an unconventional treatment: psychedelic-assisted therapy. This protocol combines the use of psychedelics—a class of drugs able to induce altered thoughts and sensory perceptions—with talk therapy. “I was super resistant at first,” Stein said. “You don’t want to feel more altered when you’re already altered.” But she was desperate. Stein is now among those who claim that a handful of psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions was transformational, enabling her to confront her trauma and heal her wounds. “I don’t think I would be where I MARCH/APRIL 2022
Samantha Rose Stein
am today or who I am today without psychedelics,” Stein told me. “I credit these therapies with bringing me back to life.”
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sychedelic drugs—including MDMA, the drug known as “ecstasy,” and psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”—are still illegal in the United States, classified by the federal government as Schedule I, meaning they have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. But a network of clinicians has been researching and administering them nonetheless. Over the last decade, research in psychedelics has undergone a renaissance thanks largely to the advocacy work of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The nonprofit, founded by Rick Doblin, who is Jewish, promotes and funds psychedelic research in the United States and other countries, including Israel, which has become a leading center for this area of study. As a result, psychedelic-assisted therapy has gained the imprimatur of prestigious research institutions, including Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Yale, which are helping to rebrand substances once thought to
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