Abstract
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe mental health condition originating from traumatic events or experiences, and affecting many aspects of an individual's daily functionality. Symptoms can be debiliatating, devastating, and life-threatening, leading an individual suffering with PTSD to often feel overwhelmed. Currently, there are multiple accepted treatments for PTSD, including exposure therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and eye movement desensitization and reporcessing therapy (EMDR), and trauma-focused psychotherapy. However, many barriers exist between PTSD patients and their available treatment options. These barriers include financial difficulties, comorbidity of conditions, stigmatization of receiving mental health care, lack of insurance coverage, or difficulty finding proper treatment providers. This leads both experts and PTSD clients alike searching for alternative treatments for trauma-based, including psychodelic-assisted psychotherapy processes. This review will address MDMA as a specific adjunct to trauma-based psychotherapy, confronting topics of PTSD, MDMA as both a recreational and a therapeutic drug, MDMA's chemical workings in the brain and body, MDMA's positive and negative effects, and MDMA-assisted therapy opposed to existing PTSD therapies. This paper is written with the understanding that PTSD does not present identically in any two human beings and that psychodelic psychiatric treatment is currently a debated issue in many fields.