Dr. Julie Holland Interview: MDMA, Psychiatry, and the Road to Treating PTSD

This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman that gathers voices from self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine to talk through the practical side of psychology. The guest for this session is Dr. Julie Holland, a medical doctor, psychopharmacologist, and psychiatrist who also writes. Her book "Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, The Sleep You're Missing, The Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy" had recently come out, and she is also the author of "Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER," a memoir drawn from her years running the psychiatric emergency room on weekends at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

Erik opens by framing what the two of them want to cover: MDMA, the compound many recreational users know by its street name, Ecstasy. He wants to trace how it has been applied to psychiatric treatment, where that history came from, and the possibility of using it to treat PTSD down the line. Then he asks Dr. Holland to walk through her own path into the subject.

She explains that she started out pre-med at the University of Pennsylvania, aiming to become a psychiatrist. Her major was the biological basis of behavior, a program that pulls together neurobiology, neuropsychology, and psychopharmacology. In other words, she was already studying how drugs act on the brain.

During the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, she stayed on to take more classes and keep reading. That was when she ran across articles describing a drug that was new to her, one that a psychiatrist and psychotherapist was using inside the therapy room with patients, sometimes working with individuals and sometimes with couples.

The discovery grabbed her for two reasons. For anyone immersed in the study of brain chemistry, the arrival of a genuinely new drug is its own kind of thrill, and she points out that nothing new had shown up during the years she was growing up. The second reason mattered more to her: this particular compound was not being handed out as a standalone treatment but used to open up and move along the work of psychotherapy itself.