What if the solution to one of the most daunting psychological conditions were a party drug?

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, affects a huge portion of our population. And while the treatments we use today vary, at best they’re only about 50% effective. But new research suggests that people diagnosed with PTSD can experience a lot of relief from unconventional medicine. And that medicine is MDMA.

People with PTSD often experience fear or stress, even when they’re not in danger. It can result from a range of previous experiences, such as witnessing someone’s death or a physical assault. If you experience PTSD, you might be familiar with symptoms like flashbacks, numbed emotional responses, and sleep problems. So this is one of those things that can influence every aspect of your life.

But, despite its broad impact, researchers aren’t totally sure what’s going on in your body to cause those symptoms. One chemical that might hold some answers is oxytocin. This is a molecule that regulates your anxiety and memories. And rat studies suggest that when you’ve got a lot of it, oxytocin mainly goes to the emotional center of your brain, called the amygdala, and decreases your fear and anxiety. That means having a lot of oxytocin is typically great because it keeps you calm. And a study published in 2021 found that PTSD patients had significantly less oxytocin than people without the condition. The authors of that study suggested that this could be a source of their stress, although they acknowledged that it’s tough to measure this stuff, so more research is needed.

Right now, we’re kind of in a chicken-or-egg situation regarding the link between oxytocin and PTSD. People who have a particular variety of oxytocin-related genes might be at higher risk for PTSD. That predisposition is the egg. And trauma can kick the enzyme that breaks down oxytocin into high gear. The environmental factor is the chicken. But both of those things could happen to the same person. Some people might be unlucky enough to have both the predisposition for low oxytocin and traumatic experiences that set off PTSD.

And for people living with PTSD, studies show that current treatments, like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, only work about half of the time. Since PTSD is associated with low oxytocin levels, one potential solution is to bump up your oxytocin. But you can’t just give someone a shot of oxytocin to get rid of their symptoms because oxytocin has a hard time getting into the brain from outside. It’s blocked by a group of cells called the blood-brain barrier. And that’s where MDMA could help.

MDMA stimulates your brain cells to release more oxytocin. So if you can’t give someone oxytocin, you can get them to make their own using that drug. Clinical studies have found that MDMA, in combination with therapy, is an effective treatment for PTSD. And these were the most thorough tests we do. They were placebo-controlled, so half of the participants got MDMA and the other half got a pill that didn’t do anything. They were randomized, so no selection went into who got MDMA and who didn’t. They were double-blind, so neither the participants nor the researchers knew who got MDMA during testing. They were conducted in multiple testing sites, so the results could be more broadly applicable to people in different places. And they were phase 3 clinical trials, so they’d already passed the basic research and first two rounds of human studies.

After the trials, most of the participants who had been given MDMA weren’t even diagnosable as having PTSD anymore! And several participants who hadn’t been able to work due to their PTSD symptoms returned to work.