Watch this episode without interruptions.
When Dr. Anna Harwood-Gross’s team finally cleared years of ethics reviews and was awaiting its first delivery of MDMA in October 2023, the war arrived instead.
Testing psychedelics on traumatized soldiers while rockets fall was, as she puts it, a paradigm no one would call ethical, so they stopped.
What changed her mind is the heart of this conversation: as PTSD cases surged, she realized that studying trauma treatment during ongoing violence wasn’t reckless but urgent, and not just for Israel, but for places like Ukraine, Sudan, and Nigeria, where continuous traumatic stress is the norm. This way, the research, funded by the METIV Israel Psychotrauma Center, got back on track.
The interview reveals what the treatment actually looks like: eight-hour sessions, two therapists, a lit candle and music. Harwood’s trial runs two arms, one with MDMA, one with a rigorous talk-based method called SEAT, because many people can’t take psychedelics or won’t surrender that much control.
Harwood-Gross called MDMA almost “a third therapist in the room,” then complicated her own story: the oxytocin “love hormone” everyone credits doesn’t track with dose, and some drug-free patients’ results are indistinguishable from those who took the drug. With standard military-trauma therapy succeeding only about 40% of the time, the other 60% are who this research is racing to reach.
It’s a rare look at science being built in real time, candid about what’s unknown, what the FDA won’t yet approve, and why a method this powerful is still too expensive to scale. Harwood-Gross talked about veterans carrying untreated wounds since the Lebanon wars, academic boycotts cutting off life-saving collaboration, and the funding limbo this work sits in.
