Ben Askins on Psychedelics, Ketamine, and the Truth About Veteran Brain Trauma | Broken Brains Podcast | EP 84

 In this episode of Broken Brains, Bruce Parkman speaks with veteran and Physician Associate Ben Askins about repetitive brain trauma and emerging treatment options.

Ben explains how ketamine therapy, neuroplasticity, and new approaches to mental health care may help veterans recover.

This episode explores the future of brain healing.

In This Episode:

• Understanding repetitive brain trauma
 • How ketamine therapy supports healing
 • The role of neuroplasticity
 • Supporting veterans and families
 • The future of mental health treatment

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  📲 Be sure to follow, share, like, and subscribe to support brain health awareness and bring real treatments to those who need them most.

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Veteran Brain Trauma
 01:28 Ben Askins Military and Medical Background
 06:17 Mental Health Challenges in Veterans
 09:00 Caregiver Fatigue and Trauma
 17:32 Psychedelic Therapy and Brain Healing
 18:49 Ketamine Therapy Explained
 29:13 Trauma Recovery and Emotional Processing
 30:57 Finding Meaning After Trauma
 32:22 Neuroplasticity and Brain Recovery
 35:02 Brain Healing Science Explained
 40:01 Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy for Veterans
 49:17 Accessing Treatment Options
 56:13 The Future of Veteran Brain Health

Connect with Ben:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-%E2%80%9Cdoc%E2%80%9D-askins-8b80bb27a/

Produced by Security Halt Media

Transcript

Framing The Brain Trauma Crisis

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the Mack Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma in two forms: repetitive repetitive head impacts from contact sports, and repetitive blast exposure for our military veterans. And what does these conditions are doing to the mental health and brains of our athletes, kids, and veterans? And why is this important? Because this is not trained in our nursing, psychological, and medical communities. So nobody's aware of the correlation between repetitive head impacts, repetitive blast exposure, mental illness. So our men and women are mistreated, misdiagnosed, and we have what is now the largest preventable epidemic of mental health in this country. That's why we do this podcast so that you're informed. Today's guest, another outstanding guest. I don't know where my producer finds these folks, man. This is amazing. Dr. Ben Askins, or Ben Doc Askins, is a physician associate, executive coach, author, and global war and terrorism veteran with advanced training in neuropsychiatry, genomics, genomics and wilderness medicine. With nearly two decades of experience in the military and civilian settings, he specializes specializes in integrative health, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, and human performance. Ben is MAPS certified, an MDMA assisted psychotherapy and trained in performance neuroscience through the Flow Research Collective, a national outdoor leadership school alumnus and wilderness medicine educator. He is known for his creative voice, evidence-based approach, and passion for helping others optimize their health, mindset, and purpose. Mr. Askins, welcome to the show, sir. Wow, that's a hell of an intro. I don't know if I can live up to all of that. Thanks for working on it. I wrote it up on the way to work this morning, man. All good. That's kind of you. I appreciate it. Sounds like a hell of a good idea. Thanks for coming on board. Yeah, it's really exciting to have you here. So my pleasure to be here. Absolutely. So tell us, how did you get here? I mean, what was your journey? Obviously, um, you know, you get some military service behind you.

Late-Blooming Soldier To Combat Medic

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Yeah, I uh, you know, my dad was a Vietnam vet, his dad was a World War II vet. There's kind of a long family tradition of raising the right hand and showing up whenever asked to by old Uncle Sam. And uh I was a bit of a late bloomer in that regard. I got to 27 years old and was like, oh man, they're gonna start like age wavering people. If I don't sign up and go, it's gonna be too late. So I enlisted, I already had a bachelor's degree, uh, and a whole brain, right? Like brain development, you get your whole prefrontal cortex around 25 or 26. Yep, usually they trick people into joining the military at 17 or 18 because they don't have all of the risk assessment levels of the brain developed yet. They're like, oh yeah, sounds like fun. I get paid to blow things up and uh do exercise and get screamed at. That's a you know, uh a person with only half a brain's idea of a good time, but I had a whole brain and still decided to go ahead and sign up if that gives you any kind of an idea about uh how good I am at decision making with major life choices. But yeah, enlisted at 27 as a 68 whiskey, a combat medic. I was already married and couldn't convince my wife that the full-time military was a lifestyle that we could survive together. So I signed up for the one weekend a month, two weeks every summer Army National Guard version of all of that stuff, which uh, you know, anybody who joined the guard during the GWAT will tell you was an absolute lie. I wound up disappearing for years at a time along the way there, uh including one trip to Iraq with a military police company out of the Kentucky Army National Guard. And uh came back from that, used my GI Bill to get a Master of Divinity degree because I like to ask big questions that uh nobody really knows the answers to, but are a lot of uh fun to have conversations about, and then was okay enough as a combat medic that they selected me to go to the inter-service physician assistant program through the military, which is just one of the best kept uh professional secrets in the military at this point. Like my civilian counterparts go upwards of a quarter of a million dollars into debt to become PAs, and I got paid staff sergeant pay to go to school, came out without any debt, and uh, you know, made a living in the meantime. Got done with uh PA school and rolled straight into a civilian career in psychiatry, which was where I first kind of dipped my toe into the psychedelic field doing ketamine-assisted therapy and an outpatient psychiatry practice right around the time that the COVID pandemic was shutting down the planet. So it was a weird time to try to manage some acutely suicidal patients that you might normally want to hospitalize. We were looking at avoiding sending people into the hospital. So I wound up doing a bit of uh baptism by fire there, doing uh suicide intervention therapy with ketamine. And then uh got pulled into another deployment over just to Kosovo in 2022 with the Kentucky National Guard's Infantry Battalion as their battalion surgeon. Came back from that two months later. I was in the maps training to do MDMA assisted therapy there and uh have seen the way that some of those medicines work for the you know particular tribe that we're a part of. So that led to writing a couple of books and starting a podcast and doing some advocacy work in the political arena to just try to get people's attention about things that seem to work for uh recalcitrant difficult problems like brain health and uh mental health in general. That'd be the kind of the long and the short version, maybe.

Psychiatry, COVID, And Ketamine Triage

SPEAKER_00 5:57

How I got here today. What uh yeah, what'd you do this summer, right? I guess you know the book report when you got back to school. No, I mean that it's a fascinating journey, sir. And uh thank you for your service. I really appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and it's um you know it it it just you know begs the question is why do these psychedelic assisted therapies continue to be ignored? And where, you know, where you know, where where does this, you know, where where does this this this end? I mean, because uh you know you've seen both sides of you've seen the civilian world. I can't even imagine what it was like during COVID to try and manage uh you know manage patients. What was your what was the biggest challenge? I mean, uh especially since you know you know if you're gonna do integrative therapy, you've got to kind of have somebody else in the room, right? I mean, were you able to do any telehealth stuff or how did you solve for that?

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Yeah, for sure. We had to pivot from in-person to telehealth at that time. You know, I got my medical license in February of 2020. And if you look at the timeline, March of 2020 was when they started the whole two weeks to flatten the curve idea of keeping everybody locked up tight inside. Uh so we had to pivot to telehealth. We had a team-based approach. I wasn't, you know, flying solo on this. I had a mentor uh who's an excellent physician, and uh we all just kind of hung tight together, did a lot of case reviews, making sure we were uh paying close attention to what was going on with each patient, and then it was kind of it's a lot like uh like you would imagine casualty collection point triage sorts of stuff winds up working. You just start with the biggest problem that you think you can get some leverage on, and you do that, uh, just like they taught us to do as as medics. At times it felt a little bit metaphorically like some kind of hacksaw ridge sort of scenario where it's like you just pick one up, you carry them to the edge, you hand them off to somebody else. Do I have any energy left? Sure. Let's go back and get another one, and you just keep going until uh until either you can't anymore or somebody else picks up and and you get a little help along the way.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because you know when we talk about caretakers and or you know the integrative side of people. I talk to a lot of folks in the psychedelic space that, you know, when you're under psychedelic therapy, you unload a lot of stuff. And um, you know, some people like myself prefer to undergo these therapies by themselves. Others, you know, go through it with a counselor or or a therapist or a guide, right? Um and they absorb a lot of a lot of negative stuff, right? I mean, you know, people are unloading some really, really deep and often very dark stuff. And I and and and so now we're finding out that the mental wellness of our of our caregiver population is almost as impacted by you know the people that they see because over the years of absorbing the this energy that comes out of their out of these patients, right? I mean, and I continuously counsel uh them to to kind of keep you know keep awareness. Um do you do you um do you recognize that as a as an issue with uh with the space as well?

Caregiver Burden And Compassion Fatigue

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Yeah, absolutely. I um I mean the use the terms that get used for it are things like compassion fatigue, which seems like an understatement to me in terms of like my own experience of it, is it just seems to cut to the core of who we are. Like I think of life as having kind of several different orders of meaning to it. Um and yeah, the the there are, however you want to think of them, they're sort of intangible or difficult to measure emotional costs that are paid by people who are just sitting in the room holding the space and having the conversation in a way that maintains the level of seriousness and sobriety necessary for someone who is, you know, working through the absolute worst experiences of their entire lives to try to get to the other side of healing that. There's an energy transfer that takes place that we haven't done the kind of research around necessary to understand really well. Like I could share a story with you around that if that's um you know interesting to you. I uh wrote a book back in 2023 about it was an ambitious uh project to undertake. I decided to write my own autobiography, but make it a simulator for what it might be like to experience psychedelic therapy. So it's kind of an odd book. It's a bit different than just, hey, I went to these places at these times and did these things like the average autobiography might be. It's a little bit weirder and plays around a little bit more philosophically, but there's an anti-suicide chapter near the end of the book. And I went to uh the maps psychedelic science conference and had a booth there where I was kind of repping the book and playing this fun little game with people where uh I'd give away free copies of the book. If you'd pull a number out of this hat and sit down in this chair in the booth and read whatever chapter of the book you pulled the number out for, and then just tell me what you thought of the chapter. If you hated it, if you loved it, whatever. Price of admission, free book uh is read a chapter. And over and over again. It was fun, right? It's a little psychedelic game we play, you know, and um over and over again, people started pulling out that anti-suicide chapter and then wanting to kind of open up and share with me about thoughts that they'd been having recently or loved ones that they had been, you know, thinking deeply about who are who are struggling with whether or not they still want to be here or still have that, you know, uh ability to make meaning for themselves or whatever it might be. So I spent the day, uh I had, you know, I was wearing like a Deadpool costume as like a cosplay sort of joke sort of thing, like as a fun convention center, you know, more like a party with some nerd, nerdy researchers sort of vibe. And that was kind of how I was drawing attention was uh, you know, cosplay in his Deadpool. So I'm here in this Deadpool costume doing impromptu like suicide intervention therapy in a booth and a convention center in Denver. Super unexpected. And after about the fourth or fifth time doing that on the fly, somebody just like making eye contact with me and they're crying and uh and wanting to talk through some of these things, and then like getting on psychology today and helping them make an appointment with a therapist in their hometown, just like really uh trying to take care of these folks. I got to like the middle of the afternoon and was like, I feel like I have to cry. And I don't, you know, it was it was this like just energy had built up throughout the day of like hearing these people's stories, and I didn't want to do that in public, standing there in this not in a Deadpool costume, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:04

That would be anti-hero.

Deadpool, Suicide Stories, And Release

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Yeah, it's just ridiculous, right? The book's called The Anti-Hero's Journey. I can't think of anything more anti-heroic than like just having an emotional breakdown right there in front of everybody. There's a mushroom guy over here and a neurofeedback guy over here, and there's this 240-pound, you know, veteran standing here weeping uncontrollably. It's not gonna work. So I was like, shit, I gotta get out of here. So I took off uh running to my hotel room in this Deadpool costume, right? There's like homeless guys on the street trying to stop me. I'm like throwing them all my money out of my wallet. Just get out of my way, get the hell out of the way. I gotta go. I gotta go. And I get to the hotel, and two of my uh my buddies are in the hotel lobby, and they're like, hey, what? You don't want to stop and talk to us? So I'm yelling across this hotel lobby. No, I gotta shit real bad. I gotta get to the room because it seemed less embarrassing to yell, I gotta take a shit than I gotta go cry. I gotta go ball my own man or whatever. But I got to my hotel room and I just had this crazy experience of like just crying and crying and crying for these other people. I had whatever their story was put on me, and it felt like if I didn't do something with that energy, if I just stuffed it down and suppressed it, like I'd been taught since I was a little boy to do, that it was somehow going to turn into like, I don't know, a prostate tumor or something that was gonna try to kill me. So I just cried and cried and cried, and uh and then hearing the sound of my own crying sounded kind of funny and it started to make me laugh. And I started like laughing, so I was just swinging back and forth on this energetic pole from like weeping to laughing. Like, is this really happening? What's going on? And it was just this crazy energy that had to get moved through my body, and then I was okay, and I don't think we get the opportunity to like do that sort of thing or recognize what's happening there as caregivers to allow ourselves the space to just feel the emotions that are created by sharing other people's emotions with them. I think if we all did that a bit more often, we might be able to endure it a bit longer. But it certainly does fill up to a certain point. You know, there's a uh famous book by David Hackworth, uh, his biography was about David Hackworth, man. Right? And uh and yes, just an amazing, you know, perfect attendance record, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Yeah, and then you know, a journalist on the front lines afterward. And he taught he uses this analogy of having a jar of water, and whenever the jar gets full, there's just nothing you're gonna do to allow the water to get out of that other than evaporation. You can't pour it out, you can't do anything about it. And if a guy's jar gets full, you're just gonna have to wait and see if it ever gets unfull again. I think there's things we could do prior to having a full jar that may allow us to kind of bleed some of that stuff out along the lines of all just doing all the healthy things, but especially allowing yourself the room and the space and the time to process whatever emotions you feel as a caregiver, I think is a bedrock cornerstone of that. A long way of getting around to answering your question there.

Why Psychedelics: Tools For Inner Work

SPEAKER_00 16:24

No, no, no, because this is one of the things I'd like the audience to understand is that, you know, we're having huge problems in uh, you know, our law enforcement community with police officers that are assigned to pedophile and and child sex and trafficking cases because of the stuff they have to look at. And over time, man, I mean the the the the the the the self-harm rates are huge. And so we are uh we are working with and helping out programs that bring these cops out for a week or so and just get them to your set, right? You know, police officers, military, NFL professional football players, all the same people, right? Can't cry, can't, you know, you you suck it all up, you make the you know, the deep, dark humor, you know, jokes, but uh whatever, but you do not cry. And and so, you know, we're we're trying to underst uh understand is that like some of the stuff that you're talking about here with psychedelic assisted therapy is awesome. I mean, I've been through a lot of it, I've known a lot of people that have been through it, and I honestly believe myself is that you cannot get anywhere faster with from a spiritual perspective, a self-healing perspective, than you can when you crack yourself open with these with these medicines. And I think it's you know, I it's been an amazing transformation in my personal life. But I wanted to bring that up because you know, you're a caretaker, and then um I want to kind of you know move over a little bit about these psychedelics, right? And a lot of people ask me, what's it like to be on ketamine? What's it like to do MDMA or psilocybin? I've done ayahuasca, I've done I just came through ibergain more in a research perspective, you know, spiritual. I wanted to do the spiritual, but I want to be able to walk the walk. When I talk about these things, because I've been there, all right. I, you know, and so but if you could, as a practitioner, talk to a little bit about our audience because ketamine is, well, it's been FDA approved off and on, the military uses it. Um, and I think it's a great, I call it a gateway. This is the gate, that's the psychedelic gateway for me, right? So everybody should start with ketamine because it is fundamentally, you know, eye-opening from the experience perspective and from you know the the the the ability to unload and and and to cry and to feel and to emote and all that. So can you talk to the audience a little bit about you know ketamine and MDA, man? I mean, what's you know the benefits of what's the experience like, you know, uh because there were we have a lot of questions about, hey, I really want to improve myself, but where do I start? And I think that, you know, beyond if you know the brain damage side, things we'll talk about a little bit here is is that these medicines can absolutely uh put you on a fast path to self-healing.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Yeah, absolutely. Uh what a fantastic question. Um bef before I answer it, I want to mention something that you made me think of with respect to kind of the uh the law enforcement folks that are dealing with uh heavy caseloads there and just the the wear and tear on living that uh lifestyle. I think we're living in a time where it's the tide is turning to some extent in the public conversation around mental health. Like, you know, my dad as a Vietnam veteran, you know, crying was seen as weakness, and that was the expectation in that generation, right? Was that that wasn't something that you were gonna do was process emotion ever, period, much less publicly. Ever. But we've got yeah, right? We're just gonna stuff him down and we're gonna die with it inside us, and that's fine. It might kill you, but you're not killing his father, his father, right, exactly. His father's father before him did that or whatever. Yeah, and they all died at like 50, Dad. Like that for me, you know. Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

My dad died at 44 from anger, cigarettes, and alcohol. Like, really? Exactly. Yeah.

Contracting vs Expansive Medicines

SPEAKER_01 20:01

And I, you know, I got up this morning and looked at my Instagram, and I have a really good friend/slash colleague named Dr. Andrew Fisher, who is a legend in the military medicine community, like helped design the Ranger fresh whole blood transfusion protocols back when he was a Ranger PA. Now he's a trauma surgeon down in uh New Mexico or Texas somewhere. His handle's trauma daddy, just a living legend, helped write a lot of the uh TC3 protocols that we use in pre-hospital care in the military. You know, he was a Ranger for a long time. Um and his post was I have depression, and it's uh you know, a selfie of what this is what depression looks like. And he's just uh, you know, he's pulling away from his fellowship as a trauma surgeon to get help. And that's actually courage, that's actually strength, that's not weakness. That's and whenever guys like him, and uh you know, a whole host of other examples out there, that's just the freshest one for me because I know him and I saw it this morning, but that it is courageous to process the entirety of your experience as a human being rather than denying and suppressing and ignoring some of those sorts of things. So we're lucky as uh, you know, uh to be alive at this particular time whenever the mindset is changing, not just individually, but at a collective level, to where you can be fully yourself and and get the opportunity to recover in ways that just wasn't available to previous generations, at least here in America, where the expectations were very different. Um but one of those opportunities to do that that you had asked about is hey, what's the deal with uh, you know, ketamine and and MDMA and some of those sorts of medicines? And there's a lot of these different, you know, medicines that get put into the category of psychedelic, psychedelic just meaning like soul opening or mind manifesting. There's a famous um LSD researcher named Dr. Stan Groff that is Quoted as having said that what the microscope was for biology and what the telescope was for astronomy, psychedelics will be for psychology. It's a tool to be used to explore your own interior life and world and understand in an individual and on like a population level what it means to be human is what the opportunity that's being extended to us by these whole host of tools. You listed a whole bunch of them there, ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, ibogaine, uh the DMT family of different things. Hell, there's psychedelic fish out there. Like this stuff grows in the dirt, this stuff grows in the water.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Right? It's on amphibians and animals, like it's everywhere. I don't even know how people find this stuff, but you know.

Bad Trips, Meaning, And Set-Setting

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Supposedly you could release a little bit of it from your you know, pineal gland under certain breathwork circumstances. Like they tried making this stuff illegal and you make it in between your own ears, it's really hard to pull off, you know. Um, and we're getting the opportunity to kind of repeal some of those very mistaken war on drugs era, Nixon era uh legislation that prevented a whole lot of human flourishing and purvate a great deal of harm on society for sure. Um, but what I think is is helpful to explain um in terms of what you'd asked about, kind of this gateway and what's the what's a useful way to start to engage in psychedelic assisted therapy uh for somebody who's just dipping their toe in it. Um you know, I there was a survey that was done in the late uh 2010 among U.S. adults saying that eight out of ten adults in America have not tried psychedelics but are curious about them. And that was kind of some of the inspiration for why I decided to write the anti-hero's journey the way that I wrote it was if you've never done a psychedelic and you want to read a book that will simulate that for you a little bit, you could try this. And then you don't have to do anything illegal, you don't have to ingest something. You know, like once you put that stuff in you, you bought your ticket, now you're gonna ride your ride. But if you start feeling something, you can take the book and chuck it in the corner, you can set it down, you start feeling something you don't want to feel, you get a you get to take a knee or whatever. It's an easy way to get into it. Um, but the recommendations from folks who have a lot of experience with uh both the research and uh the use of these medicines is that there are some that are more the way I like to break it out is either contracting medicines or expansive medicines. The contracting medicines are medicines that help you to move into your interior world, your life, your memories, your emotions, your experiences in a way that allows you to make greater sense out of them, the same way that good therapy should be able to allow you to feel safe enough to revisit the you know, the big bad stuff, the deep, dark stuff, the most traumatic or morally injurious experiences that you've had. And you need to do a certain amount of that contracting interior work in order to build a platform for yourself to then be able to navigate the more expansive medicines, the stuff that's going to show you not just your own personal history, but you know, cosmic history or what's the meaning of all of this rather than just what's the meaning of me being here or of that particular event or what have you. So where you hear about quote unquote bad trips with some of these might just be somebody taking a very expansive medicine prior to having the platform built through contracting medicines to allow them to expand out in a way that's not destabilizing because expansion is what you know an explosive does, right? If if you expand too rapidly, it could feel like you're being pulled apart rather than like you're growing. Um, and that's the the risk of jumping to some of the uh you know the bigger medicines on the list or the longer days, like you were describing, ibogaine or the um classic psychedelics like higher dose psilocybin or LSD. What ketamine and MDMA then offer to people is the opportunity to build that platform and do some of that interior work. Ketamine B and MDMA both being relatively shorter acting medicines. A ketamine experience might be 45 minutes to an hour long in a clinical setting. An MDMA experience in the clinical trials is anywhere from three to nine hours long, and that can be with multiple dosing, depending on the protocol that's being used there. Um and those wind up being more dreamlike experiences where people can approach memories from a place of compassion and curiosity and courage rather than overwhelm and being triggered and re-traumatized, and you get the opportunity to kind of relocate those memories for yourself in your own autobiographical narrative. And then once you've got that narrative buttoned up a little bit more tightly for yourself, then you get the opportunity to maybe quote unquote graduate or upgrade to some of the other medicines that you'd mentioned there that can be a lot more both physically and spiritually intensive for somebody. Is that helpful?

SPEAKER_00 27:51

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I I've never heard it put like that with contractual versus expansive medicine. And I've I for some reason I've always told people, you know, because ketamine's, you know, pretty available, it's it's pretty much legal, it's not covered by insurance like it should be right now. But I think it's a great tool for people that are struggling to get started. And I I've always coached people said, look, you know, they say, Well, I don't want to have a bad trip. Like, well, dude, bad trips are based on bad experiences and bad memories, and until you process them, you know, you're gonna have bad trips. You know, there's just, you know, and and and and but even bad trips are bad, but they're on the other side of them, they are so worth the journey because of the experience of dealing with stuff that you've repressed that you've never thought about, you don't want to think about. Well, you talk about your book chucking it in the corner, right? You talk about therapy. Hey, when you tell your shrink, I don't want to talk about that no more. If you're under, if you're in ketamine or you're on an MDMA, you don't you don't have that option. It's like a video game. It's playing, it's gonna roll, and that medicine takes you where it needs to where you need to go, whether you like it or not. But even the bad trips are so powerful. Actually, they're the most powerful experience, I think, for a lot of people, because they're going places where they haven't been for a long time or they forgot about it, right? And and purposely, right? So, anyways, I mean there's a lot there that you just stated that I think should get people excited because you know, there's so many people that want to try this, you know, they try it. And of course, you know, the the legality of it on one hand, the availability on the other, the insurance coverage are all major obstacles right now to what I think is is some of the most profound implications for implic implications for the psych you know the psych the psychiatry and the psychology arena because you've got to get people to open up and they're so that I mean our egos are tough, man. We don't want to open up, man. You know, so I think a lot of what you just said really unpacks a lot of that. Yeah, I I no go ahead. No, no, you're good. I mean, it's good. I mean, I just wanted to get your comments on that because people is like, well, I don't want to have a bad trip, or they think that they're recreational drugs. Like, look, these things are work, bro. You can get a shovel and dig a trench. You're not gonna work as hard as you are under the influence of these medicines.

Neuroplasticity And Repair After Trauma

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Yeah, for sure. Um, you know, the the bad trip phenomenon varies from I think person to person. A lot of the time it winds up being somebody, you know, passed somebody else something in high school study hall and they didn't know what it was and they took it and then they're just having a bad time or whatever, right? Like, sure. That would be a bad time no matter what. Uh the set and the setting is you know, kind of it matters who you're with and what, you know, mindset you enter these non-ordinary states of consciousness with. Um, but to to your point that sometimes the quote unquote bad trips wind up being uh incredibly meaningful on the other side of them, you know, that's a big deal uh in the approach to this therapy. You know, Dr. Victor Frankel was an Auschwitz survivor who wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning, and kind of one of the uh bedrock statements that he makes in there is that all suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as it finds a meaning. And it's that moral injury that dislocates our capacity to make meaning out of the suffering that psychedelics particularly wind up helping people to reduce that dislocation and be able to start to make meaning again, even out of some of the things that seem the most senseless and the most meaningless in the first place. And a bad trip, unfortunately, can be a way that you can start to do some of that sort of stuff is making meaning out of why this thing went that particular way or why was that so difficult or or what have you. Um and you you find tools. Whatever you figured out how to navigate through that bad trip winds up being for you, winds up being something you can go back to over and over again whenever life itself starts to feel like a bad trip.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

Absolutely. And then you understand on the other side that maybe it wasn't that bad. I mean, I survived it, right? Now I can process it, I can deal with it. Was it really that bad? I can't believe I haven't thought about that in 35 years. You know, whatever. Right. Let's talk about here. Yeah, I'm still here, right? I made it, I survived. I mean, I've you know, but the uh let's talk about the other aspect is because this the side that we just thought talked about when it comes to the substance of this uh subject of this podcast, comparative brain trauma and the impact of brains, is actually a perk. All right, it's like spiritual growth and all that is actually a perk for some of these medicines when they're prescribed for their impact on the the the the the the the physiology of the brain itself. And I'd like to talk about that a little bit because I do believe that and in my own personal case, and I had a mental breakdown about three and a half years ago, and it was just due to all the trauma that my brain had taken, you know, 21 years in the army, semi-pro rugby, yeah, just too much, right? Self-inflicted wounds, all night yards, right? Shot in the face, yada yada. So the um you know and and so but through this therapy, I've also noticed that all those symptoms, whether it's memory, whether it's the electrical crackling in my head, all that gone away. And when I'm done with keram ketamine or any of these, my brain like felt like it ran a marathon. Can you talk about how this impacts healing, neuroplasticity, and some of the you know, more physical aspects of brain? Because I mean, for a lot of guys that have to take this and women, this is a one-two punch, right? You get the brain healing and you get the whole, you know, the spiritual upload, you know, that whole uh increase in spirituality and personal growth.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah, exactly. I think um, you know, that's well said, uh, and and and kind of the pivotal point that research has recognized as occurring with all of these different substances is this what they call a neuroplastic window, which is just a you know fancy way of saying that you're growing new brain cells in important locations where you may have lost density before. Um, you know, whether that be from repetitive head injuries uh accumulating over time, a particular event, like did you say being shot in the face, yada yada yada?

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Yeah, yeah. I mean uh you know, no big deal, just shot in the face. No, but this is just one of the many impacts I've been uh took, you know. I was in training, it was bullet strapnell, but sure, no fun.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah, hard pass.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

If I can badge that one, I will, right? Just wanna know who shot the uh who shot the starting major. All the medics are holding me down, they're all fighting over who's gonna who's gonna you know patch me up. I'm like, get off me. Who shot me? Who shot me? Who's the fucker to shoot me?

SPEAKER_01 34:51

That's all I wanted to know. Sorry. I didn't want to just blow past yada, yada, yada. I forget.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

That could have been part of my problem.

MDMA, Oxytocin, And Fear Off Switch

Access: Decrim, Medicalization, Legalization

SPEAKER_01 35:03

Which whichever uh you know event winds up uh creating this. Even under chronic stress conditions, without uh explosions, without head injuries, without contact sports, chronic stress associated with anxiety and depression and post-traumatic stress and moral injury, we can see on uh brain scans the loss of density in important places related to executive function in the cerebral cortex and related to memory uh in the hippocampus. We know that uh humans will lose synaptic density in those places. And through these various medicines, ketamine being the one that is uh rapid acting in that regard, there is an upregulation of different things like brain-derived neurotrophic factors, which are all just sort of miracle grow for brain, like the way that your brain grew very rapidly when you were a fetus or whenever you were in the first 10 years of life. We're reopening a new window there where a lot of these things are upregulated in a way that is difficult to do any other way. So that at the biological level, you're getting back synaptic density, and more brain winds up being more function, more health, more ability to remember, more ability to self-regulate whenever uh overwhelming emotions would normally actually overwhelm us, the ability to have a brake pedal on your anger, the ability to recognize whenever you're feeling afraid or anxious and being able to engage in, you know, behaviors that allow you to uh curb that sort of thing rather than losing control and having a panic attack or flying into a rage. You get that opportunity back because you've got the neurons available to use to do that. It's one of the Hebb's axioms is that neurons that fire together wire together. So you get these new neurons that you get to try to uh apply meaningfully in building new habits and ways of being so that you are more patient, more kind, more compassionate, more uh humorous in the face of the sorts of things where you might have been uh a real asshole instead. Um, you get that that opportunity back, right? Uh that that's just the biology. There's this neuroplasticity taking place. Then there's also like this the psycho-spiritual component, the psychology and the spirituality that you mentioned, where while that's happening, while our brain is growing a whole bunch of these new neurons, we wind up having these really wild dreams uh about who we are, where we came from, connecting with angels and ancestors and the source of all life, and gods and demons and heavens and hells and all sorts of things are taking place for whatever reason. And those also wind up being some of the most meaningful experiences that somebody can have that you can tuck away and use for later in, again, reshaping and reforming the person that you are into the person that you desire to be, the most whole, the most healthy, the most high functioning level that you're able to attain, you get that window of opportunity to change it. There's a a leading researcher in the area called uh his name's Robin Carhartt Harris, and he wrote a paper a few years ago about a theory that he calls Rebus, the relaxed beliefs under psychedelics, that people who may hold to very strong beliefs about any given particular thing, even if those beliefs aren't very healthy or functional, like uh, you know, whatever it might be, like very racist beliefs or uh, you know, self-defeating beliefs. I'm useless, I'm worthless. Uh, there's a relaxation of all of the belief structures that you have in place, so you get the opportunity to reevaluate. Am I actually worthless or is that just some bullshit my parents laid on me because they were going through some stuff at the time? And uh maybe I could decide to see myself differently going forward. It's a bit like if you had a ski hill that has a whole bunch of tracks worn into it, and you, you know, it gets frosted over and there's not a whole lot of fresh snow. You got to ride through the tracks that have already been worn, the grooves that are in your brain, wind up being the kind of repetitive, thoughtless thoughts that you have about, yeah, nothing goes right for me. Yeah, I'm I'm a loser. Yeah, this is how this shit always goes. Yeah, oh, this is just the first bad news. All of those sorts of ways that we beat up on ourselves and just add insult to injury. It's like psychedelics are fresh snow on that hill. The whole thing gets a fresh layer of powder and you get the opportunity to carve some new routes down the hill for yourself in a way that is very difficult to accomplish in such a short period of time, otherwise. Good therapy does that. There's a whole bunch of things that do that, but it takes a lot longer and you don't have the neuroplasticity at the level that you do on psychedelic medicines.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

And Doc, I think you just encapsulated the whole argument for using psychedelics right there. I mean, and and and folks need to understand this. It's like, oh my gosh, like you just that analogy with new snow. I mean, the way it's and and I is it's beautiful, all right, because you know, the the problem that we have re with repetitive blast exposure, repetitive impact is that we do have lower synaptic density, right? We do have brand blood-brain barrier penetration, we do have demyelination, dismyelination, and it all needs to be healed. And the only way to heal it, you know, it's not like you're, you know, you can stop, you know, running and heal your leg. You still got to use your brain every day, but you're using a damaged, the only way to put new components in there is to create growth. And so if we could, I mean, you know, we're using ketamine right now for suicidal ideation, you know, mental health problems. You know, and and we're not prescribing it. We're prescribing it because of mental health issues. We're not prescribing it because we know we have a damaged brain and we want to grow the brain, we want to repair the brain. I think that opens up a whole nother window on you know the use cases of ketamine, because right now, every time we've written a grant or we've tried to get like we're we're providing um free ketamine assisted therapy right now in Florida for 100 veterans, right? We got a grant in the state 50 or 100. Yeah. And and and we're trying to collect the data, more data, in order to support going back for more money, and this is why. And so I I think, you know, and and and one of the problems is with how do you measure the amount of the only way you can measure the amount of new brain material new is through clinical assessments afterwards, which are not exactly you know finite, but you know, they give the idea that, hey, my my I my my brain's better, and that's what we're trying to get people to understand. But if we could get ketamine and MDMA and these other psychedelics used for just that reason, just to repair the brain. And like I say, the reason we send them there, that's a perk. You know, you can become a better man, a better woman. I mean, that's awesome, man. But my brain's healthy, right? That's all you care about. Like, stop, will you please fix this? I mean, my mental health is coming from this damaged organ. And if we can repair that, oh my God, my mental illness went away, but I've got spirituality, I I feel better about my, I got my self-esteem, I got whatever, right? It comes out of these things. It's all I have yet to encounter anybody that's come out of psychedelic therapy and felt worse. I mean, it might have felt worse about a bad trip, but as on a person on a journey, they're all trending upwards. So I, you know, I just don't understand a lot of the you know the obstacles. Where are we at right now? You know, I I know you want to say something. If we could talk after that talk about, you know, what are the impediments right now to really making this a an available you know, therapy? I mean, yeah, the the you know, the the drug ketamine costs pennies, right? It doesn't cost hardly anything for the drug. But when you look at the business model of, you know, that's why it's five four or five hundred dollars a session, but it's absolutely worth it if we could, you know, get people on this path willingly.

The Religious Path And Community Care

What’s Next For Ben And Resources

SPEAKER_01 43:12

Yeah, ketamine itself as a medicine's dirt cheap, but it winds up being, you know, maintaining an operation that wind it's overhead costs that wind up getting put into making it as expensive as it is, especially since uh you know it's off-label use of an anesthesia medicine, so you're not gonna find too many major payers that are gonna shell out for insurance in that uh in that way for whatever reason. There's a uh a friend of mine runs the ketamine task force, and they've done a bunch of the I've tempted to do advocacy in the payer space to try to get payers on board with that, and that's the answer that they get over and over again, is it's you know, it's off label. So we're not gonna uh mess around with that. But you had asked about also uh MDMA, and I'd I'd be remiss if I didn't mention at least some of the unique ways that it wants. I don't know if you've um had the chance to talk to Rachel Yehuda, would be a great uh guest to have on your podcast. She's running the Bronx VA is doing the uh MDMA for veteran clinical trials that MAPS has put together after the FDA uh asked for further data around uh medicalization of MDMA. They wanted more phase three clinical trials, and she's running those out of the Bronx VA, and she's an awesome physician. I think she's been in the VA system as a psychiatrist for over 30 years and just a super brilliant lady. Um, but MDMA winds up working uniquely among the psychedelics as well. Uh, like the and one of the main things that it does is uh, you know, it's affecting dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which are all targets for antidepressive, anti-anxiety therapies, but it also upregulates oxytocin, which is something nothing else is really doing. And oxytocin is like a pair bonding neurohormone in the human beings. It's like uh it's a very high during the first 10 years of a child's life, and there's kind of a spike on into the teens. And it's about uh, you know, moms and babies have high oxytocin and bond well so that you know they a baby's pretty much useless if we're speaking functionally from a societal perspective. If we're gonna keep those things alive, someone who's already a part of society is gonna have to be in love with it to put up with all of its bullshit for the first 10 years or whatever, whenever it's around. Um, and that's what oxytocin does is it bonds tightly moms and dads to their little kiddos there. And then after you're a teen, and then pair bonding among um like age mates, so like teenagers who, you know, this is we're gonna be best friends forever. Uh, that's sort of, you know, your your high school teammates or whatever uh who you get tight with. And and back whenever we were sort of hunter-gatherers, that was useful because the the younger age set was like the junior warriors that had to go out and and hunt and go to battle together. It it served that function. After that, as an adult, it's pretty much doesn't show up. It's kind, it's kind of gone. Uh, you know, post-orgasm, there's a little bump, and that's about it. Uh, and then it goes back to baseline there. But MDMA will send oxytocin levels back up through the roof, like whenever you were uh a baby or a teenager to those kinds of levels, which gives you the opportunity, again, to feel a level of corrective closeness to yourself a lot of the time, so that you can feel essentially to oversimplify the way that it works in the brain, is it makes fear circuitry suppressed. Fear goes quiet, and then it turns up love and connection circuitry to 11. And you just feel like love overcomes fear in your own experience for a window of time there. And then you can do whatever therapeutic work you need to do around, you know, why were my parents rough on me when I was younger, or why did this horrible accident have to happen, or whatever the case, or you know, whatever you saw in, you know, combat trauma, whatever that might be, you can revisit those things without being afraid and you can be courageous and loving. It's genuinely hard to have a bad time on MDMA. For the most part, everything kind of tastes like gummy bears in the world, is just a van Gogh painting. You're just enjoying everything for a window of time there. And um, you get, again, the neuroplastic benefits and the opportunity to just sort of reconnect with yourself and everyone else connected to yourself from sort of the best version of you neurobiologically and emotionally. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 47:43

No, absolutely. Um, you know, MDMA is one of those substances that you you really can't blame people for taking it recreationally, right? Because it's just they just feel great, right? You know, and yeah, um, it's uh and it's it's kind of rough the fact that they've got it, you know, with it all its effects, that it's kind of what's a schedule, it's a schedule one drug right now. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 48:05

Uh yeah, that alcohol and cigarettes you can get, you know, over the counter within limits, and that you can't some of these other things is just an absolute uh you know civics class level tragedy that should be corrected yesterday, in my opinion. Uh uh takes time to steer the Titanic in a different direction, apparently, especially after it hits the iceberg.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

But anyway. No, uh to your point. I mean, it's uh you know, it's kind of funny. Well, Ibogaine's a class one drug, yet ibogaine, you take it once, you don't want any more drugs forever. So why including ibogain, right? Ibogaine's a class one drug, right? It should be like it should be in every clinic in this country for a suicide, uh suicide, alcohol, all the addiction problems, and then MDMA in the process uh, because you know, ibogaine doesn't solve anything other than the addiction crisis, you still got to deal with your problems. And things like MDMA can absolutely help. And uh so where are we at right now on the the spectrum of that being something I know the they sh the FDA shut it down for some reason, probably because pharma couldn't make enough money. I'll get off my my conspiracy soapbox there.

Closing Notes And Upcoming Summit

SPEAKER_01 49:13

But you know, I mean what do you I mean what do you what we're we're being a conspiracy theorist is just being early to being right anymore, you know? That's all that seems like to me.

SPEAKER_00 49:23

Just looking at it, just looking at the big picture of it.

unknown 49:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:26

There's essentially three paths to access in the United States. There's obviously you can go somewhere where it's legal, right? Which is what we see examples of like the in waves of and war um documentary on Netflix about the uh group guys going down to Mexico to some clinics down there. I know you had Trevor Millar on uh recently, and he's uh involved in those sorts of things, and that's great. If you can uh afford it and have the opportunity to go someplace where it's legal, that's great. Not everybody can do that. For those who can't do that, there's kind of three routes that we're pushing on to try to get access for people. The first is just called decriminalization, which is not the same thing as legalization, but there are certain cities uh and even states that have looked at essentially we're not going to use any of our law enforcement or um none of our law enforcement resources are going to be put towards pursuing charges against people for these particular things. So where you might get rolled up for growing or keeping psychedelic mushrooms in your house now uh in the city of Denver, they're just not even interested in looking at trying to find that they got bigger fish to fry. So they're it's not legal per se, but essentially the agreement at that level of governance is we're not going to charge people for this any longer, um, is one route. So you can live somewhere or visit somewhere where they're just not going to enforce those laws anymore, so they say. And then there's the medicalization route, which is what we've kind of uh tap danced around a bit with like the phase three trials for MDMA with the FDA, is that it's rescheduling. Like you said, these are listed as Schedule I medicines right now, which is supposedly something that has no medical use and is only potentially harmful, and getting that scheduled to a Schedule II or a Schedule III medicine. So for example, schedule two medicines would be ADHD meds uh that are stimulants like adderall or Ritalin or uh opioid pain medicines are Schedule II meds where there's a certain level of government and medical oversight and a lot of requirements in terms of education to be allowed to prescribe those medicines in the first place. But once you get there, then you can go see one of those legal prescribers to get them. Ketamine is a schedule three medicine. Testosterone replacement therapy is a schedule three medicine. So uh trying to get some of these medicines rescheduled to schedule two, schedule three, what have you, to where they could be prescribed is the medicalization route. And then there's the full legalization route where it's not just not illegal or it's you need a prescription to do this, it's uh, you know, it grows in the dirt and nobody's gonna stop you from growing it in the dirt if you wanted to grow it in the dirt in some of these instances. So those are the three kind of levers that we have the opportunity to try to pull on to change the laws of the land around. And different states are looking at doing this different ways. I saw where even just uh earlier this month, the state of Georgia is getting on board with uh, you know, there's a bill in committee to look at legalization and medicalization routes there. There's a ton of different states out there. A really good organization um run by a fellow named Josh Hardman is called Psychedelic Alpha. And if you want to go to Psychedelic Alpha's website, they do a good job of keeping up with the current uh research molecules and what stage of research they're in. So where's psilocybin in the chain of FDI rescheduling uh for like compass pathways uh molecule for psilocybin for depression, for treatment resistant depression? You can get up-to-the-date info on that. And they also do a good job of keeping track of what legislation different states are looking at trying to pass. So in Oregon and Colorado, now there's been legislation passed where you can go to licensed facilitation centers and receive uh psilocybin assisted therapy in one of those centers, in one of those places. So that's an example of kind of the legalization route with a level of um oversight that's been put in place by those states that allows people to then pursue psychedelic assisted therapy in a in a decent container, not like a full-on, you know, libertarian live free or die approach to some of this sort of stuff, like there might have been once upon a time. But uh that's the state of affairs as I understand it in the United States at this point.

SPEAKER_00 54:18

Okay. And that's and that's important to note because right now, I mean, as you said, I mean, it's still out of pocket. All these things that can help people are out of pocket. And and that's what we're trying to change, and that's where legislation comes in. I think that's where veterans can kind of set you know the veterans just have a lot more moral support right now, you know, than you know, oh, mental health people, you know, they're they're all lying or whatever, right? I mean, it meant our we have a mental health crisis here and how we deal with it, how we treat it, how we recognize it. And to your point early in the conversation, the stigma about being mentally ill and reaching out for help is still the largest problem with our veteran community. But there's a lot of support there where veterans can lead the way in bills that can then become good legislation with some thought behind it. And I think everything we're talking about here makes perfect sense. But we're fighting entrenched bureaucracies, we're fighting power, we're fighting the fear of not getting elected. I don't even know, and there's just a lot of things against it, but no matter what those obstacles are, they are reducing over time. It is being more effective, and is as we open up as a society and start understanding that we do have to open up, we do have to uh you know be able to confront our fears that mental illness is not a lifetime of drugs in therapy, which is what everybody believes. If you're a man, mental illness, I mean, I was sucking my thumb and literally crying in my bed three and a half years ago, not knowing what the hell's wrong with it. And I am like, I'm better than I've ever been. Mental illness can be rediminished, it can be cured, it can be released, but it's not done through just drugs and therapy, which is what we we look at mental illness as a lifetime condition. It's bullshit, and it pisses me off when we have medicines like this, and I will call them medicines. A lot of these came from the Lord, right? God built these things and he built the people that created them. So, in my perspective, you know, this is a this is a gift from the Lord that needs to be, you know, released, right? For back lack of a better term. And it's people that you like you that are doing it. I really, really appreciate it. As we close, Ben, tell us like oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 56:24

Go for it. I'd be I'd be remiss. I forgot to mention, and you pointed it out brilliantly right there, the fourth way to get access is the religious or the ceremonial route. There are churches that treat these plants as sacraments, and by joining those organizations under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, it's a protected activity. So participation in communities like ayahuasca churches or I mean, you had my friend Wiz Buckley on. He started the Sacred Warrior Foundation and the No Fallen Heroes uh Foundation and some of those sorts of things where there are, you know, religious traditions that use these as sacraments, and that's another way that you can legally get access to them. Didn't want to leave it.

SPEAKER_00 57:04

No, no, no. That's still gonna cost you some big bones to do them, too, but still it is a it is a way, and it is worth the to me, you know, your mental health is worth the investment, and we'll we'll do everything we can to support people. But you're right. Uh those uh, you know, they and I thought I heard that they just opened an Iboga church in California. So that'd be interesting. So yeah, so instead of Ibogaine, they're actually doing the plant itself instead of the extra plant, I think. So still trying to check in on that. But you you're doing remarkable research, remarkable work. And what I'd like to do as we close out is please tell our audience what's next for Ben Askins. What do you got going on right now? How can people find you if they have questions? And uh so go for it.

SPEAKER_01 57:46

Yeah, if you want to find me, I'm on you know, all the random social media stuff from time to time when I have a little bit of downtime. I think it's a cesspool for the most part, but every once in a while I'll check in with my friends. I think you guys found me on LinkedIn, so like I spend some time on LinkedIn from time to time. I have a website, antiheroesjourney.com, that's kind of my author page. You can get, you know, whatever books I'm working on. I'd like to cook up a few more books if I get the time. Um, and then I work as a physician associate for a group called Pillars Health. You can go to Pillars.health to get more info on, you know, that particular approach to uh we try to do chronic disease prevention rather than chronic disease treatment instead of waiting for you to get sick. Let's just prevent you from being sick for as long as we possibly can, is is how we approach a lot of that stuff. I do a little bit of consulting and coaching on the side. I have a handful of athletes and execs and some of those sorts of folks that find my particular brand of perceiving the world valuable and meaningful. So you're welcome to reach out to me and see if we might uh get in sync with each other. But honestly, most of my time right now is spent just being a dad. I got three teenagers and an 11-year-old at home that I just love the heck out of. So, as much as I can spend time with them, that's how I spend my time.

SPEAKER_00 59:06

Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. My pleasure with a marvelous conversation, man. I know our audience is gonna greatly appreciate it. As we close out, folks, another great episode of Broken Brains. Really appreciate you bringing there. Don't forget, go to the website. I just rewrote the book. It'll be it'll be published by the end of next month. We're gonna have it in Spanish. We're gonna have an audio book, so get it all out there. If you like the podcast, please share it. Let people know you like it. Uh, get other people to come on. And um, you know, because we want to support folks like Ben, go find his podcast as well. Get out there and learn about this stuff because it's so important. We'll be announced the dates for the third international summit on repetitive brain trauma here in September this year in Tampa. Ben will get you on the invite list, and we just encourage you to learn about this and please, you know, protect your kids. Your kids only got one melon. You just heard a lot about why we have to protect it here. So please protect it. Take care of that. Until next time, next time on Broken Brains. God bless you all, and we'll talk to you later. Take care. Bye-bye.