How a Vietnam vet saved his second marriage and overcame years of PTSD with help from MDMA therapy

MDMA, like psilocybin mushrooms, is being investigated as a potentially therapeutic drug.

Anna Kim/Insider

• MDMA, a schedule I drug, has gained attention for it's potential use as a therapeutic drug. 
• Researchers have used it to succesfully treat depression, PTSD, and more. 
• Rachel Nuwer tells how the therapy helped a veteran overcome PTSD in her book, "I Feel Love."  

Psychedelic therapy seems to have swung from fringe experimental treatment to mainstream acceptance overnight. That, in part, is thanks to the many anecdotes around its success at helping treat conditions like PTSD.

In her new book "I Feel Love," author Rachel Nuwer tells the story of Vietnam veteran John Reissenweber, whose time in the service transformed his personality and left him feeling isolated from everyone in his civilian life.

The following is an excerpt from Rachel Nuwer's new book, "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World."

John never considered that he might have any sort of problem, and he certainly never thought that he might have PTSD. "Oh, hell no! In order to have PTSD, you're weak," he said of his past mindset.

He never even applied to the VA for benefits he was entitled to for his broken eardrums because "I didn't need any help from anybody," he said. "I didn't need anybody telling me I was disabled, because I came back with ten fingers and ten toes and others didn't."

PTSD can affect the mind and body.

Diego Cervo/Shutterstock

In 2003 John's life changed for the better when he met Stacy Turner, his current wife. They had connected online, and the first time he saw her in person, he exclaimed, "My god, you are so beautiful!"

"How do you not love a man who says that to you with all this warmth in his eyes?" Stacy said. "John loved so much about me, and I felt that way about him, too."

Things were great for half a year or so, but then Stacy "started to see the cracks," as she put it. One beautiful afternoon, they were sitting on a blanket in a woodsy section of San Francisco's Glen Canyon Park, having a picnic, when John's demeanor suddenly changed. He started scanning the area and became "real cold and distant," Stacy recalled.

"Then he starts talking about strategic and vulnerable positions and where you could worry about a firefight and where people could be hiding. I looked at him, and I was like, 'He is fucking back in Vietnam.' I just corked the wine, packed up, and said 'We're going home, this is not a good place for you to be.'"

Stacy loved John, but the stress and strain of tiptoeing around his temper worsened over the years. "No matter what I said or did, the chance of it being wrong was huge, and if it was wrong, the results were catastrophic," she said.

A soldier uses his M16 during a battle in the Vietnam War in 1971.

Neal Ulevich/AP

Twice, she kicked him out, but they always got back together. Finally, Stacy told John that he had to get professional help, or she was done. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with PTSD, but talk therapy wasn't improving things. One day his psychiatrist handed him a copy of Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" and told him about the MAPS MDMA trials.

"I had a very strong aversion to mind-altering drugs, because by now, I knew I was wrapped pretty tightly," John said. "I was afraid if I did anything I'd really come undone."

Stacy and John's doctor convinced him to apply for the trial anyway. But when he took a PTSD evaluation to find out if he qualified, he reverted to his old habit of downplaying his symptoms.

"I lied to myself again, like I did all my life since I came back from Vietnam," he said. It worked: shortly after taking the test, he received a polite letter stating that he did not meet the criteria for the study.

Stacy wasn't having it. She reached out to Gregory Wells, a psychologist co-leading the San Francisco trials, and asked him to take a closer look at their evaluation process.

"If you dismissed John for high blood pressure, I'd understand," she said. "But if you dismissed him because you thought he wasn't messed up enough, you just really missed the boat and he totally snowed you."

Stacy's letter did the trick. In August 2019 John arrived at Wells's office for his first session of MDMA-assisted therapy. "I felt a combination of scared shitless and determined," he said. "I'd gotten to the point where I had realized that maybe there is something to this, maybe I do have some PTSD. And maybe this can help."

As he reclined on the daybed with headphones and eyeshades on, it didn't take John long to "realize that something was going on," he said. He felt deeply affected by the music and ungrounded in his own body. Suddenly, a vision appeared in his mind.

John had a vision that he was standing on a lunar plane similar to the famous Earthrise photo.

NASA

He was standing on a lunar plane reminiscent of the Apollo 10 "Earthrise" photo, with stars all around. In the lower lefthand corner there was a dark, foreboding hole, which John chose to ignore.

He focused instead on a liquid-like drop of energy that appeared in front of him, which John realized represented his consciousness coalescing at the time of his birth. "Everything was nice, calm, serene," John said. "I felt a connection to everything."

However, when a second drop appeared and hit the ground, John heard helicopters, gunfire, and shouting — the disruption Vietnam had caused to his psyche. Although John's therapists were "really super," he said, he kept quiet. "I didn't want to talk about it with anybody," he said. "I was doing it on my own."

In the month after that first session, John felt more relaxed than he had in decades. He could take a walk outside and enjoy feeling the breeze on his skin. He could have a conversation with Stacy and imagine what she was thinking and feeling.

John began his second session of MDMA-assisted therapy eager to see what other gains it might bring. Immediately, his mind brought him back to the same lunar landscape. The fearful black pit was still there, but he focused solely on the first drop, and the second drop never came.

All day he lay on the couch, hugging himself, rocking back and forth, and petting a dog that one of his therapists had brought along. "I was caring for that child self of me," he said.

Following his second session, for the first time, John started remembering his dreams. A few days before his third and final session, however, he had a terrible nightmare: he was in military clothing, deathly afraid, as the sounds of mortar blasts overwhelmed him.

He was left with a sense of dread, and he went into the last MDMA session determined to engage with the black pit in the corner. "You can't shy away from it anymore," he told himself—and jumped straight in.

He thought he would pass through it — "like Pollan's book said, 'passing into the light,'" he explained — but he got "completely and totally stuck." John spent the rest of the session trapped in the pit, unable to move.

The next morning, his entire body was sore. When he came by the therapist's office for his integration session, he was too terrified to go back into the room. He knew he needed more help than the limited clinical trial could provide, so he got a new therapist.

A woman demonstrates what a patient would experience in a psychedelic therapy room at Field Trip, a clinic in Toronto.

COLE BURSTON / Contributor/Getty Images

With her guidance, he came to realize that the black pit represented the anger and hurt he had felt since Vietnam. That revelation permitted him to examine his life afresh, pulling out memories, one by one, like a series of file cards that he could rearrange into a coherent whole.

While the MDMA-assisted therapy on its own by no means healed John, it was "like an electric shock to the system," he said. It revealed his hurt and his fears, and more importantly, it showed him that he was entitled to feel that way.

"It was like a complete and total rebirth," he said. "It gave me the ability to look at myself and say, 'You know, you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to be right, it's okay to be who you are.' Without it, I could have taken all the cognitive behavior therapy in the world and nothing would have happened."

"I Feel Love" by Rachel Nuwer was published in June and describes the fascinating transformation of how we've come to use the psychedelic drug MDMA.

Bloomsbury Publishing

John has continued traditional therapy and has also gotten involved at the VA, where he connected with other veterans. In October 2021 he began volunteering with a VA program aimed at rehabilitating veterans through golf.

He no longer feels like he's "running at 100 percent" all the time, he said, and he isn't sent into a tailspin by the small, unavoidable obstacles that daily life throws his way. Most importantly, he's been able to connect more deeply with Stacy, whom he calls his guardian angel.

"I can talk to Stacy," he said. "I'm not afraid of doing that anymore."

From I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World out now from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Nuwer. All rights reserved.

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