STAT+: After MDMA therapy, she considered suicide. The trial data tell a different story
The MDMA study was her last hope. She had read headlines celebrating a 83% response rate in one small, early study of the psychedelic for treating PTSD, and was counting on the new clinical trial to alleviate her own post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead, after her first MDMA session, she felt intense despair when her symptoms didn’t dissipate.
She described standing on a train platform, while on the phone with her study therapists, and considering jumping in front of a train, according to a video of the participant describing the experience at a 2016 conference on psychedelic therapy that STAT has seen. “For the first time in a really long time I went, ‘I am done,’” she told the audience. “All that is pounding through my head is: ‘Why am I not that 83%?’”
In the end, the study participant, who STAT isn’t identifying to protect her personal medical information, told herself she couldn’t jump; she said she worried that doing so would be marked as an adverse event and risk threatening the success of the MDMA research — which was a crucial step in efforts to seek Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug. Suicidal ideation itself should be counted as an adverse event, said Philip Corlett, a psychiatry professor at Yale University. But the incident doesn’t seem to be reflected in the published data from the trial on clinicaltrials.gov, the government registry of studies and their outcomes.
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