MDMA Assisted Therapy with Michael and Annie Mithoefer

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #12 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space

Jeremy Deller, ‘The Problem with Humans’ available here

Gotta love MAPS PBC, the Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies Public Benefit Corporation.

An MDMA ban in 1984 inspired its founder Rick Doblin to somehow keep the flame alive. Decades later, in July 2022 a letter leaked to The Intercept’s Mattha Busby implied the Biden administration are stepping up for country-wide medicalisation of MDMA and psilocybin. MAPS expects legalisation in the USA by 2024.

MAPS is technically a ‘non-profit’ entity with a public benefit corporation bolted on. In June 2022 the MAPS C-suite was joined by Boston Consulting Group managing director Dan Grossman, and former Sandoz CEO Jeff George a managing partner at VC fund Maytal Capital, boardroom heavy hitters both. The ‘extractive’ big pharma model is under challenge, it seems, from empowered non-profits like MAPS and in the UK, Amanda Fielding’s Beckley PsyTech. 

“We facilitated out first Grof holotropic breathwork session where Vital is based near Vermont, with Vital’s patrons Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson”

MAPS will be distributing its radical new treatment program, including its accompanying talk therapy, ‘MDMA-AT’, for free. MDMA-AT has obtained a ‘special protocol’ from the FDA so it does not need to be revised before MDMA itself is available legally. That’s an incredible achievement for the veteran healers who devised, wrote and guided it to American federal approval, Vital Week 12 lecturers Michael and Annie Mithoefer.

The young Dr Michael Mithoefer was up to his scrubs in gore for ten years as medical director at the emergency departments of Charleston County and Georgetown County hospitals, North Carolina. He turned to psychiatry in 1991. The trauma specialist is trained in Internal Family Systems, EMDR and Grof Holotropic Breathwork. His wife and dyad partner Annie is a certified nurse and Hakomi therapist who’s also Groffed-up. The two have worked for MAPS since the early 2000s and are also on the advisory board of Bristol’s AWAKN; they’ve been to Ben Sessa’s house in Somerset. Check it out:

Awakn’s Ben Sessa hosts the Mithoefers in Somerset, England

“We facilitated out first Grof holotropic breathwork session where Vital is based near Vermont, with Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson who can’t be a hundred feet away from the offices right now, so there’s symmetry there,” said Dr Mithoefer to open the eight hours of workshops he and Annie graciously provided for Vital students.

Here’s the Mithoefers on Psychedelics Today’s podcast, and on Aubrey Marcus for the bros. More on the New Psychonaut YouTube channel. And here’s this issue:

Next issue: Ketamine therapy thought-leader Veronika Gold direct from her bustling Polaris Insights clinic in San Francisco

Drugs are the Love

Space

MDMA for couples' therapy: 4/4 octopuses can’t be wrong

Ithell Colquhoun, ‘Song of Songs’ via Unit London

Can the inner healer mend a broken relationship?

Next up for MAPS therapy program designers Dr Michael Meithofer and his wife Annie AKA ‘Annie and Michael’ in spacespeak, is MDMA for couples’ counselling.

“We knew that MDMA was useful for communication… and some of the other anecdotal things about it,” Annie told none other than Professor David Nutt on the Drug Science podcast (where you can hear Dr Nutt, the David Attenborough of drugs, a UK national treasure say ‘Back to the show!’)

Annie collaborated on the initial research for a new era in MDMA couples’ therapy with Toronto’s Dr Anne Wagner. The Remedy clinic director has come up during further investigations into juicy subjects two weeks in a row (sync). Last week it was in a call for further research into psychedelic treatment for borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Yet Dr Wagner is not the only intrepid sailor of the soul cooking up excellent experiments using ecstasy. John Hopkins’ university neuroscience department, not to be outdone, gave E to octopuses. They’d noticed ‘that octopuses and humans had nearly identical genomic codes for the transporter that binds the neurotransmitter serotonin to the neuron's membrane.’

The California double-spot octopus is a solitary creature, barely interacting with others of its kind besides once a year, briefly, for mating. Even then the male uses a sex arm and it looks like mid-air refuelling. 

Would you believe though, that when researchers put the octopuses ‘in a beaker containing a liquified version of the drug’ according to National Geographic, they exhibited significantly more social behaviour?

‘Particularly telling, said scientist Gul Dolen, was that after being returned to their tanks at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, the octopuses went on to reproduce.’ 

During the Q&A after Annie and Michael’s lecture the pair were asked about giving MDMA to animals. After all, dogs are given anti-depressants. When I got my own chance to talk to them, I celebrated group ceremonial use of the ecstasy sacrament in the form of our rave culture then made a bad taste joke about giving MDMA to our pets hadn’t gone nearly as well. Now we know to shove them in a beaker of it.

’At no point did the octopuses ink, which would be a sign of stress,’ Dr Dolan told Nat Geo in response to all of our ethical concerns. 

Inner space of safety

Medical

MDMA boasts striking therapeutic properties beyond increased connection

Chemical X, ‘Spectrum’

“I believe MDMA is the ideal drug for psychotherapy,” says non-nonsense Awakn founder and trauma expert Dr Ben Sessa.

The exciting bits are MDMA triggers a ‘oxytocin-dependent reopening’ of a ‘social reward learning critical period’. It puts your brain in the state of early childhood and adolescence, when it establishes key neural pathways. The hypothesis is that dysfunctional thought patterns can be adjusted in this state.

MDMA increases pre-frontal cortex activity like an ADHD stimulant, lowers activity in the amygdala ‘fear centre’ deep in the reptile brain, and is notable for its relationship to both dopamine and serotonin. It creates an ‘optimal level of arousal’ that is neither too little nor too much for the brain to process its thoughts and instincts. 

Added neuroplasticity helps memories reconsolidate so patients feel safer in safe settings, for example. MDMA scored strongly on PTSD patients with dissociative symptoms who often prove the toughest to treat. Trial data was consistent across the five test sites spread globally. 

Ecstasy was first named ‘Adam’ then ‘Empathy’

Trial subjects previously suffered severe symptoms that had resisted regular therapeutic treatment for many years.

‘MDMA was invented for shellshocked soldiers’ is a trope I may be guilty of falling for. It wasn’t an appetite suppressant either when patented by Merck in 1914. Forensic research into the German pharmaceutical firm suggests a humbler origins for the love drug as merely a stepping-stone towards developing an alternative to hydrastinine, used to prevent internal bleeding particularly in the uterus.

The military nonetheless had it knocking around for whatever reason in the 1950s around the first time scientists tested MDMA on humans and recorded the results. These soon reached the keen ears of Alexander Shulgin, who says he first synthesised it in 1965. It was originally named ‘Adam’, and also ‘Empathy’. 

Patients during MDMA-AT are given 125mg of what the subculture renamed ‘ecstasy’ with up to 75mg of booster. Apocryphally, a friend who took part in an Imperial MDMA trial said it was hella strong.