Heroic Hearts
Project

PTSD from military service is one of the most serious and least adequately treated conditions in American public health. More than six thousand veterans die by suicide in the United States each year, more than were killed in combat since September 11th. That statistic alone describes the scale of what is not working.

The conventional treatment options are limited. Fewer than 10% of veterans who begin traditional PTSD treatment programs complete treatment and experience marked improvement. Many veterans try everything the system offers, from medications to talk therapy to inpatient programs, and nothing reaches the wound. They return home having survived war and find themselves unable to survive peace. Their families suffer alongside them.

Heroic Hearts Project connects U.S. military veterans and their families with psychedelic-assisted therapy programs. The organization funds retreat scholarships, primarily for psilocybin and ayahuasca programs conducted in legally operating settings, and surrounds those retreats with peer support, community, and integration resources. They also fund research to build the evidence base and work on policy advocacy to expand domestic access.

The retreats are not recreational. They are structured healing experiences, conducted in safe environments with trained facilitators, specifically designed for people carrying severe trauma. Veterans return from them describing shifts that years of conventional therapy could not produce. Not just symptom reduction, but a fundamental change in how they relate to the experiences that hurt them.

The results are striking: 80% of veterans who participate in HHP programs report significant improvement in their PTSD symptoms after a single program. The organization has been featured in The New York Times, 60 Minutes, CNN, Forbes, The Economist, and National Geographic, and has become one of the most credible organizations working at the intersection of veterans' mental health and psychedelic medicine.

Plant medicines like psilocybin and ayahuasca have been used for centuries in indigenous healing traditions across the world. Modern neuroscience is beginning to understand why they work: they produce profound non-ordinary states of consciousness in which the brain's default mode network, the neural structure responsible for our sense of self, our rumination and our habitual narratives about who we are, temporarily loosens its grip.

In that opening, something becomes possible that is very difficult to achieve in ordinary waking consciousness: the ability to witness one's own experience, including traumatic experience, from a position of relative distance and spaciousness. Trauma that has been locked in the body, compulsively re-enacted, or walled off entirely can surface, be seen, and begin to integrate. The experience is often described as a kind of death and rebirth: a dissolution of the identity built around the wound, and the emergence of something new.

This is not metaphor. Veterans who have been through these programs describe, in precise terms, what happened: a sense of returning to a self that existed before the trauma, or of finally being able to put something down that they had been carrying for decades. The neurological changes have been documented. The clinical outcomes are increasingly robust. What was once dismissed as fringe is now being studied at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Imperial College London.

What Heroic Hearts understands, and what indigenous healers have understood for centuries, is that some forms of suffering require a different kind of access than conventional treatment provides. Non-ordinary states of consciousness are among the most powerful catalysts for deep psychological change that we have. The question is no longer whether they work. The question is how to make them available, safe, and properly supported.

Plant medicines have been part of my own healing and transformation process. They were one of several catalysts, alongside deep trauma work, therapy, and eventually a spontaneous awakening, that opened something in me I had spent years trying to reach through conventional means. I know what it feels like to be changed by a non-ordinary state: the disorientation, the terror at the threshold, the grace that can be found on the other side, and the long work of integration that follows.

I also know what it feels like to navigate these experiences without adequate support. The system I had access to was well-resourced and genuinely helpful for many things, but it did not have the framework for the deeper transformations I was going through. I found my way through, but it was harder and lonelier than it needed to be.

When I learned what Heroic Hearts was doing, it felt like exactly the kind of work I wanted to be part of. Veterans carry some of the heaviest trauma our society produces, and they have often exhausted every conventional resource available to them. Bringing the most effective healing tools we have to the people who need them most, conducted with rigor and care, feels like one of the more meaningful uses of what I have to offer.

I serve on the board as treasurer. And I believe that what this work demonstrates, about how non-ordinary states facilitate transformation, about what integration requires, about what healing can look like when the right tools are available, matters far beyond veterans. It points toward a different model of mental health: one that takes seriously the idea that consciousness itself is a dimension of healing, not just a symptom to be managed.