Anyone marginally familiar with psychedelics has heard of magic mushrooms, LSD, or even MDMA. But ibogaine, the psychoactive compound in the Central African shrub Tabernanthe iboga, may not be on many people’s radars. Researchers are beginning to test its efficacy in treating mental health disorders, much in the same way scientists are studying classic psychedelics, with one surprising discovery documented in 2024 by a Stanford research team: The psychedelic may also be able to help treat traumatic brain injury.
Ibogaine remains a Schedule I substance in the U.S., despite showing promise in treating addiction and PTSD since the 1960s. Still, safety concerns persist, including reports of cardiac arrhythmia and deaths among retreat participants in recent years.
Traditions and treatments
Ibogaine has been used for centuries by indigenous peoples of Gabon, in Central Africa, for initiation rituals. Identified by Westerners in the late 19th century, it was taken to France and used as an ingredient in an anti-addiction tonic called Lambarène. Clinical researchers began to study it formally in the 1960s, and it spread into detox and retreat centers across Europe and the Americas in the 1990s, when research was halted due to health and safety concerns.
Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of ibogaine retreats have cropped up around the world, while controlled clinical trials remain practically nonexistent. A considerable amount of controversy around the safe and effective use of ibogaine has been stirred up since the 2010 death of a retreat participant forced a clinic to close down in Mexico, where ibogaine remains unregulated. Since then, as reported by Matha Busby for Rolling Stone Magazine, a string of deaths have called into question how responsibly these retreats are operating, and whether clinical science can shed some light on best practice.
Promise for traumatic brain injury
Existing research has positioned ibogaine as a promising treatment for opioid addiction, PTSD, and — as of last year — brain injuries. In the first study of its kind, a Stanford research team published results in January 2024 detailing the safety, tolerability, and efficacy of ibogaine for treating traumatic brain injury (TBI) in military veterans.
Of the 30 special operations vets who received treatment, nearly all experienced some level of immediate symptom relief. One month after treatment, the vets reported on average an 88% reduction in PTSD symptoms, an 87% reduction in depression symptoms, and an 81% reduction in anxiety symptoms, compared to pre-treatment. Notably, they also experienced improvements in cognitive function, including concentration, information processing, memory, and impulsivity.
The vets had traveled to a clinic in Mexico to receive treatment, and were evaluated before and after their sessions.
“It was a reasonably risky decision,” Nolan Williams, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medical School, told Big Think. “Going after a study that a lot of people told me was not the most straightforward scenario for this — trying to evaluate people at Stanford, have them go down to Mexico, come back, get re-evaluated.”
But for Williams, who is in the final stages of sending off an application to the FDA, it’s a meaningful first step toward reviving scientific research on ibogaine. It may also be a giant step forward for TBI, a notoriously difficult disease to cure. Defined as any brain injury that results from an acute physical trauma, it can show up in any number of places in the brain, leading to any number of effects, depending on where the injury occurred.
“If you had a TBI in your visual cortex, you’d have cortical blindness. If you had a trauma to your mood regulatory circuitry, you’d have depression. Blindness and depression are very different, but they’re both the result of a TBI in that case.”
And that’s what makes TBI so tricky to treat.
“It’s very hard to design a treatment for a problem that has such a broad repertoire of presentations. But if you’ve got a compound that seems to restore or rewind the time on plasticity and restore function, then it doesn’t matter where the hit was.”
That’s what his team is starting to see with ibogaine. “The neuroanatomically specific areas may be irrelevant to therapeutic effect, whereas something like local brain stimulation (which I’m a big fan of) is only going to be relevant for the spots you’re stimulating.”
How does ibogaine treatment work?
Even in 2025, some ideas about psychedelics’ mechanisms of action are overly simplistic, such as the notion that one type of neurotransmitter needs to target one type of receptor.
“It’s very unlikely that the brain works that way, that you just need to hit one system,” Williams told Big Think. “Ibogaine hits a lot of different systems at the same time. It’s the difference between playing a single instrument and having an orchestra. The orchestra is kind of a simultaneous activation of multiple neurotransmitter systems at the same time that are probably working in concert with each other.”
Ibogaine affects several key brain chemicals, including serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate. It also seems to boost the brain’s ability to grow and adapt by increasing levels of something called BDNF, a protein that supports brain health. Beyond the biology, the drug can trigger intense, dream-like experiences that many users describe as deeply meaningful or transformative.
Williams says this may be part of the reason why ibogaine has shown promise for treating PTSD.
“It’s sort of an early life emotional re-evaluator drug. You look at these emotionally salient memories, you relive them, you re-understand them. Like the Christmas Carol Scrooge movie, where he goes back and sees his childhood, you’re seeing it from a third-person perspective. That’s really what I think it’s doing.”
That said, it’s up for debate how relevant the dream-like state is for treating TBI specifically.
Since the study came out, Williams’ team has evaluated data showing that, at least preliminarily, ibogaine treatment might help to reverse aging in the brain to some extent, though these findings have yet to be peer-reviewed. These effects, which also include cortical thickening and alterations to the emotion regulation system, appear to be durable, lasting up to a year.
To date, there has never been a prospective trial using a psychedelic to treat TBI. With several papers in review and grant applications in the works, Williams is “just trying to get this going.” So far, there hasn’t been a trial where the drug was administered in the US, he says, because of some of the cardiac risks associated with ibogaine. “They’re rare, but the FDA is aware of it.”
Meanwhile, initiatives in other states are on the move, with the Texas Ibogaine Initiative advocating for $50 million in state funding to launch the first FDA-approved ibogaine clinical trials in the U.S.
“My job, and our job, is to be able to educate the people about this psychoactive plant medicine that is absolutely showing a stunning ability to bring people back to normalcy,” former Texas governor Rick Perry said in an interview on the Joe Rogan Experience in January. “To literally give them their lives back.”
This article The overlooked psychedelic that may help treat traumatic brain injury is featured on Big Think.
The post “The overlooked psychedelic that may help treat traumatic brain injury” by Saga Briggs was published on 03/24/2025 by bigthink.com