The Veterans Turning to Psychedelic Therapy to Heal War Trauma

NEWTON: Now, since 2001, more than 140,000 American veterans and active- duty soldiers have taken their own lives, that’s according to the organization Stop Soldier Suicide. Many who’ve served abroad return home traumatized with little support for their mental health. Now, a new documentary “In Waves and War” follows those who sought out an unconventional alternative in Mexico and hopes of healing.

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 UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He was doing all the things he was told to do, and he was actually getting worse. I got his medical records. I completely changed my  approach. Psychedelic medicines proved to be effective, but both are illegal in the United States. So, Marcus would have to travel to Mexico.

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NEWTON: And director Bonni Cohen and former Navy SEAL Marcus Capone joins Hari Sreenivasan in this conversation. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Paula, thanks. Bonni Cohen…Marcus Capone, thank you both for joining us. Your recent film that’s now visible on Netflix everywhere is a really fascinating journey. Marcus, I wanna start with you. It is a documentary called “In Waves and War,” and it’s about veterans going to Mexico to try a psychedelic treatment to try to overcome some of the intense PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. And I guess, I guess I just wanna start by asking — why did you try this treatment in the first place?

 

MARCUS CAPONE: Yeah, you know, I think, you know, I think the movie is a lot broader than that. I mean, this is a very human, you know, it’s a human touch. It’s a human element. And that’s the most important. It follows three Navy SEALs, two individuals I served with for over 20 years. But it really touches the human side of this issue. 

 

And, you know, as a nation, we fought 20 years of sustained combat. We’ve never seen that in history. It’s unprecedented. And individuals coming home are really introduced to the current system. And whether that’s military medicine or VA healthcare, when someone retires or separates, or even private sector care. And now granted there are many individuals out there that want to help. The problem is the system is a bit old. 

 

And many of these individuals, about 50%, including myself, and I was one of them that came back, we have something called treatment-resistant mental health. Meaning that the, the medicines, the drugs, the antidepressants, the SSRIs, the SNRIs, the traditional talk therapy, it just doesn’t work for half of the population. And so what do we do? We need to pour money into research, and we need to have affordable access here in the U.S. And that’s why we’re going outside the U.S. to places where these treatments are legal and unregulated. And for me, seven years of failed antidepressants, talk therapy, brain treatment centers, I had to travel outside the country to seek out these care — seek out the care, you know, that that really afforded me where we’re at today.

 

SREENIVASAN: Bonni, what’s fascinating to me is that, you know, as Marcus mentioned, this is such a sort of human story. How did you figure out a way to just let these people be vulnerable in front of you on camera? Which seems completely opposite to what has been their winning formula in their lives, which is, I’m not gonna talk about what I do.

 

BONNI COHEN: I mean, I would argue this is a winning formula. Trying to find heroism and heroism in vulnerability is what this is all about. And this is their next mission, right? And they’re there for each other and they’re there to get well and find healing both for themselves as individuals and also for their families. Just to be completely frank about it, we would not have seen any of this without Marcus and Amber basically creating an entryway for us to their community. This is a community that is trained to be lowkey, secretive, not public about what they do in their public and private lives. And it took years of trust with the guidance of Marcus and Amber for us to be able to develop those relationships. And like with any film, if you take time and care and create those relationships, the vulnerability can emerge. And this is a community that wants to help each other. 

 

SREENIVASAN: Now, Marcus, you served several tours in Afghanistan. You retired from the military back in 2013, right? Tell us a little bit, if you can, about the combat situations. The — what caused the, the PTSD, what caused you to be in a place where you were so heavily medicated that you were willing to try anything that you maybe had reached your wit’s end?

 

CAPONE: Yeah. So multiple tours both to Afghanistan and Iraq ‘03 to roughly 2010, back and forth. But I just think the culmination of years of combat, years of constantly on — you’re on that bullet train. You’re constantly deploying. You’re constantly away, 300 days out a year. Now you mix in, which so much research is coming out with traumatic brain injury, well, we’ll call it mild traumatic brain injury. So these are, these are injuries to the brain that are sub-concussive. So even individuals that are not being knocked out. Granted the ones that are being knocked out from explosions, from hits to the head, et cetera, those are concussive blows. These are called sub-concussive blows. There’s research operator syndrome, very similar symptoms as PTSD. And so I just want to put that out there because the term PTSD is also stigmatized. But really it’s just the host of symptoms that you’re having: depression, anxiety, potentially substance use disorder to numb those things.

 

So it’s a culmination of maybe some childhood trauma finding out that’s that’s very prevalent. Of course some wartime trauma, years of deployments, years of burying your friends. Then you leave your family, you transition into the private sector,  and it just doesn’t have the same — and that’s how it’s, to me, it’s just the easy way to explain — it just doesn’t have the same passion and purpose and mission that you had for so long. So you throw all that together and it’s kind of a culmination for disaster. And, and that’s really what a lot of individuals are going through.

 

SREENIVASAN: You know before we talk a little bit about ibogaine, the, the Navy SEALs had a spokesman said back in 2024. “While initial research shows some positive results, ibogaine remains a Schedule 1 substance making, its use illegal under U.S. law.” The Navy has a “zero tolerance” for drug abuse, and SEALs should instead seek care through “approved medical channels.” 

 

So if that is the context in which the U.S. government and the, the Navy sees this, Marcus, I want you to tell us a little bit about what is this drug? What is it actually doing to the brain? Or what is it allowing the brain to do on its own?

 

CAPONE: Sure. So as a non-medical expert — I don’t have MD or or PhD after my name– but ibogaine has been around for a long time. It’s extracted from a root called iboga. Iboga is grown in West Africa. There’s, tribes have been using it there for many years, as I mentioned earlier, for mental health and detoxification and other spiritual growth. You know, consciousness enhancement. Ibogaine is most prevalent in Iboga. They extract the ibogaine out. It’s a, it’s a single molecule. And Ibogaine puts you on about a six to eight hour, very intense psychedelic experience, not like your typical if you call ’em tryptamines or classic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, where everything’s kind of a little weird. Ibogaine, it’s a, it’s an extremely medicalized treatments, you’re in a bed, you do a ton of blood work, you do a EKG, you can’t have anything in your system as Bonnie mentioned. There are contraindications. You’re constantly monitored by nurse and by doctors. What it does is it allows you to see different aspects of your life that may be affecting you on your day to day from different perspectives. 

 

So, for instance, and this one’s easy, I was judging my family really difficult. Like I would judge them for every, I would judge Amber, I would judge the kids, you know, Why do you do this? Why do you do that? Well, during my Ibogaine journey, I had a perspective shift of I felt what it was like being judged by my father. And it hurt. And when you’re in the experience, you actually feel it. Like you actually, you know, D.J. talks about, I felt the sweat on my shirt, you’re in the moment. And I felt how horrible it is to be judged like that. And then I saw myself judging my family. You know what I said? I will never judge them again. And so just think of how many years of therapy that can take to change an individual where that happens literally overnight. And that story is and thousands of times over, but it’s just a good example of what they do.

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, Bonni, you, you chose a very interesting kind of vehicle to help the viewer understand what Marcus — or the other veterans, and tell us about how you chose to, how you visualized and designed what is possibly happening in somebody else’s brain and sharing that with a, an audience at Netflix.

 

COHEN: Sure. Well, Marcus talked about it, you know, the perspective shift that happens in the ibogaine on the medicine, where as he’s described, you’re not only, you’re not only going through a life review, but you can actually shape shift into someone else’s point of view and watch the scene from another angle. That lends itself to an animated visual experience, as far as we were concerned. 

 

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COHEN: In Marcus’s experience, he describes seeing photographs of his life, you know, going by like a deck of cards. I mean, just for, for us as visual storytellers, being able to use that imagery and translate that into animation felt like just the way to go. Because a photorealistic approach would be, be kind of crazy, you know? What, what would you do with that? Whereas if you can be in a more ethereal, animated space and recognize those documentary photographs and elements and storytelling, while also having the perspective shifts visually, it, we, we saw that that could sort of create a pseudo experience of being in the ibogaine and what these guys might be seeing. 

 

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SREENIVASAN: What you really do in the film is point out how crucial and important the family was, is, around them, and the ripple effects of what happens to this individual and what happens. Sometimes it destroys families. Sometimes it’s just the challenges that they quietly live with. 

 

COHEN: Yeah. I mean, we really tried to highlight the families in the film. We, you know, Caden, Marcus and Amber’s son, was brave enough to participate in the film and also show his vulnerability, which in my mind is equally, as you point out, as valid and interesting and important to consider as the veterans who, the, the service people, the military coming home. And I, I just, I think what we really tried to do with the film is show how the wives — Marcus talked about Amber being his rock and his reason for survival. That’s really true. And we saw that over and over again with the wives who we spoke to were, when they were dealing with you know, their husbands who they loved, who they thought that they recognized, come home, really acting and seeming like different people. And they didn’t, they didn’t quite know what to do.

 

And it’s, it’s, you, you sort of live in a shame of that and a quiet of that that doesn’t feel like you can talk to people freely and try and get the help that’s needed. And there’s a particular formula in this country for what that help should look like, and it wasn’t the right help. And these women you see in the film, you see Amber, and then you see Patsy Shipley, DJ’s wife, reach out to Amber to seek help for her husband. And they are tenacious. They go after these remedies and these solutions, and they will try anything and it works for them. And they’re willing to really, you know, go to the last stop on the train to make sure that their family can come back to health. So you wanna talk about heroines and heroes in this film? You really need to look at the wives.

 

SREENIVASAN: There’s a statistic that an admiral in this film mentions that four times as many servicemembers and veterans have died by suicide than have been killed in combat. And that is just an astounding number. I’m assuming not all of them had the same outcomes. Not all of them chose to, you know, try this treatment in Mexico. 

 

CAPONE: We’ve lost now over 140,000 veterans, active-duty to, to you know, by their own hand, death by suicide. And it’s heart wrenching to think about that, that, you know, we, we fight these wars, we do what we’re supposed to do. We do it for our country, we do it for ourself, but then we come home and we fight this other battle, and we’re losing so many more individuals to suicide than we did on the battlefield. There’s just something wrong there. 

 

There’s, there’s something, you know, I don’t wanna call it broken, because again, when you go down to the individual level — no matter where we’re at — the V.A., the medical, the, the military medical system, private care, everybody wants to help. I just don’t believe we have the tools right now to do that. And, and to go back to your question, I’ve seen everything across the board, but it seems to be the standard treatment of care for folks coming back that are labeled, you know, having PTSD or symptoms of depression anxiety…it’s a bag of, it’s a bag of pills. It’s, it’s antidepressants, it’s SSRIs, it’s SNRIs, it’s mood stabilizers. The problem, if individuals don’t respond to those, they up their dose or they change their medication. And then individuals start having other symptoms, they may not be able to concentrate. So they’re given drugs like nuvigil and Provigil. These things gave me incredibly terrible migraine headaches. Some people are then prescribed Adderall for more focus. Or now they can’t sleep because they’re on these medications that are keeping ’em up to help them focus. They’re prescribed Ambien and other sleep drugs to go to bed.

 

SREENIVASAN: Bonni, tell us on the one hand, anecdotally, did you notice a change in the people that went through this treatment? And then also you have a section in here with a researcher at Stanford who’s trying a, a very clinical way to follow the outcomes of this. Where are we in understanding whether this treatment is producing changes?

 

COHEN: It’s not one and done. It can’t be, that would be a, a crazy concept. But on the other hand, we saw incredible changes in Matty. He wanted to talk, he wanted to talk about what he saw and what he experienced, and how he could start to let go of the fear that had been gripping him from a very, very early age. And that was, you know, and the light that comes back on, and the, a lot of the guys talk about this light that they hadn’t seen in their eyes since they were smaller children et cetera.

 

And then we really saw some interesting, significant — as you point out with the Stanford study — clinical change because, you know, the Stanford researchers were doing these interviews with the guys right before they went down to Mexico, and then right when they came back. And then of course they interview them, they do psychological measures, they do interviews, they do all of this work with them right after they come back from Mexico, and then also 30 days after that. And so what you see in the film is, you know, at the beginning — the film actually opens with these these guys going down to Mexico, being seen through the eyes of the Stanford researchers, really struggling. And then at the end of the film, you do have access to their descriptions of how they feel once they’ve been through the medicine.

 

CAPONE: Yeah. The — ibogaine not just affects the neuro, the psychology of the brain. It actually gets into like the neurochemistry, the neurobiology. It’s actually fixing the brain. It’s healing the brain. Similar to what, you know, maybe stem cells may be doing as individuals are going for treatment for their knees and their backs, et cetera. This is doing that for the brain. And, and the, and the researchers at Stanford said, Marcus, I’ll, I’ll put it in your perspective where you would understand this. Think of this as like a heat-seeking missile. The ibogaine gets into your brain and it finds out the areas of the brain are not working correctly and not communicating, may have lesions from repeated blows or TBIs. It’s getting in there and it’s fixing the brain. There was a ton of studies as, as Bonni mentioned before and after, there’s FMRI imaging, and that’s when you take the imaging — that doesn’t lie — and, and pair that with the symptoms rating scales of how individuals are feeling. You have just — psychiatry has never seen this before in a drug. And, and that’s the, that’s what we were told. It reversed brain age for 30 individuals on average by a year and a half. And that’s just unheard of.

 

SREENIVASAN:Marcus, I also want to use this opportunity because I have no idea what veteran is watching what at what time, and whether this interview reaches somebody who is struggling with their mental health. And if there was something that you could say to them, what, what do you say? What would you say, to try to, I don’t know, give them some hope?

 

CAPONE: Yeah. Well, I, that’s exactly what I’d say is, is they need to have hope. If you’re, if you’re listening, if you’re watching, you need to have hope. You need to understand that I’ve been there, DJ’s been there, Matty’s been there. Literally thousands of individuals, friends that we worked with. We’ve all been there.

 

And I just wanna say that we’re, we’re working on, we’re working on it. We’re, we’re doing our best to open up affordable access here in the U.S. We shouldn’t be going overseas for treatment, especially for a country we live in and love. And we fought for. And, and I just wanna say also, there has to be action. You have, you have to want to heal. You know, we can bring you to the water to drink, but we can’t make you drink it, right? So you have to, you know, you gotta find that fortitude and you gotta find that bit to just get up, get out there, call a friend, check on your friends, check on your kids, check on your spouse. Make sure people are doing what they can to, to heal as society. We need our tribe. We need our community. We can’t do this alone.

 

SREENIVASAN: Marcus Capone, Bonni Cohen. The film is called “In Waves and War.” You can see it on Netflix now. Thank you both so much for joining us. 

 

COHEN: Thank you. 

 

CAPONE: Thank you.