Agony and ecstasy: the war veterans trying MDMA treatment

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD is the subject of Give Me Your Love. Devising the show took our company Ridiculusmus on a journey of discovery - and left me inside a cardboard box on stage

How do you depict therapy on stage? The aim of such treatment is to diffuse tension, but as a dramatist one wants to create it. In 2014, David Woods and I researched a new treatment approach for psychosis which we explored in our show The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland. We had scenes featuring a psychiatrist and his patient, and although we shook it up a bit by having the patient walk out of the therapy room at intervals to participate in scenes on the other side of a wall, it was still a challenge to make it interesting or dramatic.

That challenge is even greater with our new show, Give Me Your Love, about MDMA therapy for treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When we were preparing The Eradication, I interviewed Ben Sessa, a Taunton-based psychiatrist who told me in passing about the MDMA therapy, for which he was coordinating the UK's first clinical study. I knew MDMA (or ecstasy) could enhance mood and boost the senses in a dance club environment, but I'd no idea of its potential as a therapeutic adjunct. Ben told me that in earlier decades, MDMA was sometimes used in couples' therapy to improve emotional communication skills and is now being trialled on war veterans with chronic stress in the US. I asked him how the therapy works.