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Traumatic Brain Injury
A Cure for Traumatic Brain Injuries?
Stanford researchers say a psychedelic drug can provide relief for TBI and PTSD.
Posted April 14, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Veterans face high rates of PTSD, TBI, and suicide; current treatments often fall short.
- A single treatment with ibogaine shows dramatic improvements in mood, cognition, and other disabilities.
- Despite promise, U.S. laws still ban clinical research on ibogaine treatment for TBI.
- Like citrus for scurvy, ibogaine may be a safe and powerful plant-based cure for modern brain injuries.
Working with veterans, who are at elevated risk of the condition, Stanford University researchers are pioneering a new treatment for traumatic brain injury (TBI). But right now, they can’t do it in the United States.
TBI Disrupts the Brain and Mental Health
The trauma of physical injury to the brain can alter the brain’s structure and function in ways that can contribute to neuropsychiatric symptoms. These include impaired neural connectivity and cerebral blood flow; changes in memory, attention, processing speed and executive functions; depression, anxiety, suicidality, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Veterans make up only 6.4% of the general U.S. population, yet they account for 20% of suicides. Experts suspect that TBI plays a role. In the past two decades, more than 440,000 U.S. veterans with symptoms associated with TBI have sought help from the Veterans Administration.
Currently the only medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat PTSD are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are best known for treating depression and anxiety. Increasingly, however, interest in the use of psychedelic agents to treat PTSD has led to the Veterans Health Administration's (VHA) funding research on the use of such compounds.
One agent under study is MDMA (methylenedixoymethamphetamine), an empathogen-entactogenic drug known to induce feelings of empathy, emotional openness, and heightened social connection. Despite its FDA designation as a Schedule I drug (prohibiting prescribing, dispensing, or administering), the FDA labeled MDMA-assisted psychotherapy a “beakthrough therapy” for PTSD in 2017. (Schedule I drugs are substances considered to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”) The drug is now in Phase-3 clinical trials.
Ibogaine is another psychedelic agent designated a Schedule I drug. But it has not been approved for clinical trials and cannot be legally used or even studied in the U.S. A psychoactive compound derived from the Tabernanthe iboga shrub, it interacts with multiple neurotransmitter systems and has anecdotally been reported to be associated with improvements across multiple dimensions, including addiction-reduction, mood and emotion regulation, and cognitive function.
Ibogaine’s Effects on Veterans
When Nolan Williams, Stanford Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, heard about veterans who reported positive outcomes from ibogaine use, he decided to do clinical and neurobiological assessments. He and other researchers traveled to Mexico to study 30 veterans who sought treatment for traumatic brain injuries at a clinic there.
At a 2025 TED conference, Williams explained that most of the participants had both PTSD and traumatic brain injury. A single treatment with ibogaine (in combination with magnesium to counteract the risk of cardiac arrhythmia), he said, resulted in significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and alcohol use, as well as resolution of disability from traumatic brain injury.
Not only were the results dramatic, it was potentially the first study to provide evidence for an effective single-dose drug treatment that improves chronic disability related to repeated combat-related TBI.
As Director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab, Williams and his team have been developing neuroimaging-based approaches to predict treatment responses to therapeutic neuromodulation and psychedelics, and to precisely deliver therapeutics to specific areas of the brain. He hopes to develop innovative technologies and therapeutics that can target the neural circuitry that is disrupted in mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and other neuropsychiatric conditions.
But getting plant-based drugs approved is challenging.
A Lesson from History
Imagine it’s the 1700s and you’re on a ship from Europe headed across the Atlantic, Williams suggested to the TED audience. “Your legs are swollen, your gums are bleeding, you just lost a tooth.” You’ve developed scurvy, he explained, which can be cured by ingesting enough citrus. But when you ask for the plant-based remedy, the doctor dismisses the idea, instead prescribing arsenic tonics (the standard treatment at the time). You get worse instead of better. By the time you arrive, many of your shipmates have died.
Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C in the diet. And until it was discovered that citrus was the right medicine, millions of people—sailors in particular—died from it.
“The modern scourge of sailors (Navy Seals) isn't scurvy,” Williams says. “It's traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.” Currently available treatments for veterans with TBI involve talk therapy, cognitive rehabilitation, and FDA-approved medications that target particular symptoms associated with TBI. While they do help some people, their effectiveness is limited. And there are no FDA-approved treatments that specifically address the repeated combat-related traumatic brain injuries themselves.
Williams played a video of a veteran talking about the results of his ibogaine treatment. “Everything has changed,” the veteran said. “The real work started after the experience, but the experience gave me the tools to be able to do the work in the first place. There are so many people that could heal from this. There are so many people that would still be here.”
