Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy & Trauma Research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

The treatment for PTSD has been elusive, and traditional pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy have not had much of an impact on trauma survivors with PTSD, particularly veterans. Veterans often find medications are too numbing, and “talk therapy” about trauma is too distressing and leads to dropouts. There is a need for a new paradigm of care: MDMA-assisted psychotherapy helps patients achieve a state of self-compassion and introspection that may facilitate trauma work without distress. Researchers at the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine are testing this approach and learning how it works from a biological perspective. They believe it is important to train a new generation of therapists in this highly different modality. By partnering with the VA, this lab will test these new therapies in the kind of systems that treat very severe PTSD.