Correspondent
As Dawn approached on October 7, 2023, many entertainers at the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza border were taken by illegal recreational drugs like MDMA or LSD.
Hundreds of them were high when, shortly after the sunrise, Hamas Gunmen attacked the place.
Now the neuroscientists who work with the Survivors from the Festival say that there are early signs that MDMA – also known as Ecstasy or Molly – could provide some psychological protection against trauma.
Preliminary results, currently reviewed with the aim of publishing in the coming months, suggest that the drug is associated with more positive mental conditions – both during the event and in months after that.
The study, conducted by scientists at the Haifa University of Israel, could contribute to the growing scientific interest in the way MDMA can be used to treat psychological trauma.
It is believed that these have been the first time scientists have been able to study the event of a mass trauma in which a large number of people have been influenced by drugs that change the mind.
Hamas Gunmen killed 360 people and abducted dozens more at the festival place where 3,500 people hung out.
“We had people who were hiding under the bodies of their friends for hours when they were on LSD or MDMA,” said Prof Roy Solomon, one of those who led the research.
“It is said that a lot of these substances creates plasticity in the brain, so the brain is more open to change. But what happens if you endure this plasticity in such a terrible situation – will it be worse or better?”
The research was accompanied by psychological answers more than 650 survivors from the festival. Two -thirds of them were influenced by recreational drugs, including MDMA, LSD, marijuana or psilocibin – a compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms – before they attacked.
“MDMA, and especially the MDMA that was not mixed with anything else, was the most stable,” the study said, according to Prof. Solomon.
He said that at MDMA during the attack, they seemed much better to be carried mentally in the first five months after that, when a lot of processing took place.
“They slept better, they had less mental trouble – they worked better than people who didn’t take any substance,” he said.
Team believes that the prosocial hormones started the cure – such as oxytocinWhat helps promote binding – helped to reduce fear and enhance the feelings of friendship between those who flee the attack.
And more importantly, they say, they seem to have left the survivors more open to receive love and support of their families and friends after they were at home.
It is clear that the study is limited only to those who survived the attacks, which is difficult to determine with any certainty whether specific medicines have helped or interfere with the chances of escape victims.
But researchers have found that many survivors, like Michal Ohan, firmly believe that he has played the role – and they say that their beliefs, by themselves, can help them recover from events.
“I feel like it saved my life because I was so tall, as if I wasn’t in the real world,” she told me. “Because regular people can’t see all these things – it’s not normal.”
Without drugs, he believes that she would just freeze or collapse to the floor, and armed or grabbed him.
Clinics in various countries already have Experimented with psychotherapy supported by MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) In a trial environment – nevertheless Only Australia approved it as treatment.
The countries that rejected him include the US, where the food and medication administration states concerns about the design of study, that treatment may not offer long -term benefits and the potential risk of heart problems, injuries and abuse.
The MDMA is classified as the drug of class A in the UK and is associated with liver, kidney and heart problems.
In Israel, where MDMA is also illegal, psychologists can only use it to treat clients on an experimental research basis.
Preliminary findings from new studies follow some of them carefully Israeli clinicians who experiment with MDMA as Treatment of PTSD after October 7.
Dr. Anna Harwood-Goss, a clinical psychologist and a research director in Israeli, a medical Psychotrauma Center, described the initial findings as “truly important” for therapists like her.
She is currently experimenting with the use of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD’s Israeli army and took care of ethics to encourage a vulnerable psychological situation in clients when the war takes place.
“At the beginning of the war, we questioned whether we could do it,” she said. “Can we give people a MDMA when there is a risk of air attack siren? This will potentially again traamate them. This study showed us that even if there was a traumatic event during therapy, MDMA could also help process that trauma.”
Dr. Harwood-Goss says the early indications of the use of therapeutic MDMA are encouraging, even among military veterans with chronic PTSD.
She also raised old assumptions about “rules” of therapy – especially the length of sessions, which must be adapted to working with clients under the influence of MDMA, she says.
“For example, it has changed our thoughts about the 50-minute sessions of therapy, with one patient and one therapist,” Dr. Harwood-Goss told me. “Having two therapists and long sessions – up to eight hours – a new way to perform therapy. They are very holistic people look at and give them time.”
He says this new longer format shows promising results, even without patients taking MDMA, with a success rate of 40% in the placebo group.
The Israeli Society also changed its approach to trauma and therapy after October 7, according to Danny Brom, the founder of Fine Psychotraum of the Center at Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem and the higher figure in the industry.
“It’s like this is the first trauma we go through,” he said. “I saw the wars here, I saw a lot of terrorist attacks and people said,” We don’t see the trauma here. ”
“Suddenly there seems to be a general opinion that now all are traumatized and that everyone needs treatment. It’s a wrong approach.”
What was spoiled, he said, is a sense of security that many Jews believed to give them. These attacks have discovered a collective trauma, he says, associated with the Holocaust and the generations of persecution.
“Our history is full of massacre,” psychologist Vered Atzmon Meshulam told me. “As a psychologist who is now in Israel, we are faced with the opportunity to work with many traumas that have not been treated before, as well as all our narratives for 2,000 years.”
Collective trauma, combat trauma, mind-changing drugs, sexual attacks, hostages, survivors, bodies collectors, injured and bereaved trauma experts in trauma are facing a complex cocktail of clients who are now moving into therapy.
The scope of this challenge for mental health is mirrored in Gaza, where a huge number of people were killed, injured or left homeless after a devastating 15 -month war – and where there are scarce resources that help a deeply traumatized population.
The war in Gaza, launched by the Hamas attacks on the Israeli community in October 2023, was suspended in January in six weeks of tribute, during which Israeli hostages that had held Hamas were replaced by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.
But on both sides, there is little sense that peace and safety has arrived to start healing.
The truce expired last weekend, and 59 of Israeli hostages are still in captivity of Hamas. Many Gazani are waiting, with packed bags, to keep the war.
In the meantime, the surviving new Michal Ohan says she feels that they are over time, some expect her to get out of the attack, but she is still affected.
“I wake up with that and go to sleep with it, and people don’t understand,” she told me.
“We live it every day. I feel that the country has supported us in the first months, but now after a year they feel:” OK, you have to go back to work, back to life. “But we can’t.”
Additional reporting Oren Rosenfeld and Naomi Scherbel-Ball
