Six years ago, Dr. Anna Harwood-Gross and her team began designing one of the world's most ambitious psychedelic therapy trials, an Israeli study testing whether MDMA-assisted therapy could help soldiers with combat PTSD that hadn't responded to standard treatment.
They received ethics approval in the summer of 2023. Their first drug delivery was scheduled for October. Then October 7 happened. In this conversation with Sam Halpern, Jpost's senior field reporter, Dr. Harwood-Gross, senior faculty at Ariel University and lead researcher at Herzog Medical Center, walks through the trial's protocol, the bomb-shelter logistics now built into every session, and the comparison arm her team has developed without psychedelics at all (SEAIT — Somatic, Experiential, Acceptance-based, Intensive Trauma therapy).
She's candid about the early stage of the work, the academic boycotts complicating international collaboration, and what the FDA's recent refusal to approve MDMA-assisted therapy means for where the field goes next.
A careful, hopeful, deliberately unhyped conversation with one of the researchers Israel will be hearing more from.
