TED Talks Daily - How ibogaine could treat depression and anxiety | Nolan Williams

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

The late Stanford neuroscientist Nolan Williams shares his research on the potential of a plant-derived psychoactive compound called ibogaine to help people with traumatic brain injury recover from PTSD, depression and anxiety. (Followed by a brief Q&A with Head of TED Chris Anderson) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Nolan Williams, who passed in October of this year, was an interventional neuropsychiatrist and the director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab. His groundbreaking research ranged from rapid acting plant-based medicines to medical devices, that can retrain misfiring brain circuits. He gave a talk at TED 2025 in April about his latest research,

the potential of a plant-derived psychoactive compound called Ibogain to treat traumatic brain injury and PTSD. We're sharing his talk today in memory of Nolan and to honor the legacy of his work. It's coming up. All right, at 1756, you're all aboard a British naval vessel headed to the new world. You're down below deck with your fellow sailors, and you're all sick. Your legs are swollen, your gums are bleeding, you just lost a tooth.

You go to the ship's doctor, and he tells you this is due to internal decay and laziness. You ask about this foreign fruit medicine, this citrus medicine that you could take, and he tells you that this is not a treatment for what you have. It's too simple. It's a plant medicine, and he's an anti-fruter. And instead, he prescribes you arsenic tonics.

True story. And you get worse. and when you get to the new world, half of your shipmates are deceased. My name is Nolan Williams, and I'm here to talk to you about anti-fruters, people who weaponize scientific skepticism to thwart new treatments from getting out to the world.

And so scurvy is an illness that kills. to build 2 million people from the time of Columbus all the way through to the time of widespread citrus adoption. And scurvy is the result of a lack of vitamin C in the diet. And the reason why these sailors had a lack of vitamin C is because it was a long sea voyage, so you need to eat dried meats and that sort of thing. And so we observed early on in the 1500s

this association between eating citrus fruit and the prevention or the treatment of scurvy. And so it was written early on that this was a precious medicine, something could be used for this problem, so much so that it actually birthed the world's first clinical trial. So the clinical trial is a scientific tool

is the result of trying to find a solution for scurvy. And so they gave all these man-made treatments, and then they gave citrus. And I don't have to tell you what the answer to this scientific question was. The people that got the citrus fruit were helping everybody else at the end of the experiment. But there was a reaction. The Royal Societies did not like this idea.

there was backlash, and many thought this was too simple to be a solution for such a problem that a plant could not solve such a complex problem, and instead they prescribed arsenic, mercury, man-made chemicals. Now, science eventually prevailed. We were able to see that this was actually helpful. But the problem was, that from the time of James Lent's study to the time of widespread implementation, it was more than 100 years. A million people died.

But this was a war waged against progress by these anti-fruiter's. And it was another 100 years before we even knew what was in the citrus fruit that was improving scurvy. Right? We'd rid the world of scurvy at that point. And so I'm going to switch to a new plant medicine, psychedelics.

Psychedelics have been used for thousands of years by indigenous populations. The Tabernath Iboga root bark of Central West Africa was used by the Boiti for psychospiritual purposes for centuries. And they knew that this was a powerful compound. It needed to be done in certain kind of medical-like or medical settings in modern medicine. And we need to be able to monitor people. because it does have risks like a rare cardiac arrhythmia and death. And so the modern scourge of sailors, Navy SEALs, isn't scurvy.

It's traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. And the treatments that are out there, oral antidepressants and talk therapy, do help some people, but they're limited. And so these veterans have decided when they don't get improvement from the standard treatments, that some of them have gone out to take psychedelic medicines.

And I was approached by one such veteran, Marcus Capone, him and his wife, Amber. Marcus had been a Navy SEAL for 13 years and suffered many traumatic brain injuries, had PTSD once he got out. And he went down to Mexico, outside of the U.S., as a U.S. soldier, outside of the U.S., down to a foreign country, to receive a compound that is illegal in the U.S.,

a compound that he believed saved his life. And when I met these folks, I heard the story. At first, I was a little bit skeptical, but then once I heard Marcus's story and other stories, I became convinced that this was something worth studying. So now I'm going to let you listen to Eric's story, and you tell me what you think. I don't know exactly all their reasons, why I'm not whole? I know a lot of the symptoms like being a basically barely functioning alcoholic

my entire life to the point of neglecting myself, neglecting my kids. It's so bad that I have like zero control over it. I haven't gone a day without drinking in probably 10 years. This is my last chance. I want to be able to heal myself

so that I can be whole for my family. So this is the study that we conducted at Stanford. Just like Eric, most of these folks had PTSD in addition to traumatic brain injury beforehand, but after they had a significant reduction and crossed the line to no longer meet PTSD diagnosis after they received diabetes.

Significant reductions of anxiety, 80-plus percent, significant reductions in depression. And remarkably, resolution of disability from traumatic brain injury, something that we haven't seen before. And so now I'm going to let Eric tell you about that. It's been about seven months, and pretty much everything is different. A buddy of mine came by the house the other day. He had a drink with him.

He drove there. Hey, you want to drink? No, man, I'm good. I don't drink anymore. He's like, I'll get you a drink. I'm like, no, I really don't drink anymore. He's like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'll go get you a drink.

No, he didn't believe me. I mean, we were standing there talking for probably 30 minutes. In that time before, I would have smoked five cigarettes, you know? And he was like, wait a minute, did you quit smoking too? I was like, yeah. What? Everything has changed. tell somebody like one weekend and everything's different like some kind of magic pill or something

which it's not I mean the the real work started after the experience but the experience gave me the tools to be able to do the work in the first place there are so many people that could heal from this there's there are so many people that would still be here I have friends that would still be here I have family that would still be here so now I'm going to let Eric uh the effect. What did he feel while he was under this compound? And what a lot of people will describe is that they go back and look through earlier life memories, and they're able to see these memories from a detached third-party perspective and look at them and see them and really re-assimilate them into meaning. The visuals that I remember the most were

like going through like a photo album, but like a Rolodex and if like you flip it as fast as you can and everything goes by and it's a blur. It was like flips out of my life. Like an outsider looking in. It allowed me to confront traumas that had much more of an impact on me than I realized. That was one of the biggest things I got from the weekend is just like that I need to stop poisoning myself

in every aspect possible. So just like citrus for scurvy, psychedelic plant medicines were initially seen as quite positive, and even the National Institute of Mental Health Director in the mid-60s thought that these were powerful, potentially powerful therapeutic tools and tools for understanding the brain behavior relationships. But unlike citrus for scurricular, scurvy, psychedelic plant medicines, these plant medicines, were made illegal.

Can you imagine how much longer it would have taken for us to be able to get citrus out if we made the orange illegal? And so there's hope. A small group of scientists in the early 2000s, including some in the audience, have been able to get these studies back up in running, some of them all the way through to being evaluated or re-evaluated by the FDA very soon. IBM, we're trying to get an investigational new drug application through the FDA right now. Now, am I telling you to go and run out and go to Mexico and take psychedelics? No, you need to wait until everything's done, until the trials are done, if they are to show us that these are positive. However, what I am saying is that the data shouldn't be evaluated by

antifruiters. It shouldn't be evaluated by believers either. It should be evaluated by open-minded people that are able to look at the data, clear-minded. And what I'm also here to tell you is that these compounds sit on Schedule 1. And what that means is that they're in the same level, of control as heroin. Right? It means that there's no medicinal use, and they have a high abuse liability. And so you can all sit here and think,

in the 1750s, it would have been crazy to make the orange illegal. What will our grandchildren think about us? Right? And so we're on this edge between institutional rejection and acceptance and the time the clock is ticking. And I'm going to ask you,

did we make the orange illegal? Only time we'll tell. Thank you. A couple of questions. I think for everyone clearly answered that question of whether Eric needed additional help with additional drugs, for example. Yeah.

He was off of everything. You know, these folks end up needing psychotherapy beforehand, and they need a lot of psychotherapy, you know, after. So that is part of it. But in terms of the drug treatment, I began, that was it. That was it. Okay. One of the things that I learned from you,

and tell me if I got this right, is that the reason why addiction becomes so much of a problem in so many cases is that, the more you take a substance, it dials up in your brain the amount of dopamine that you need to feel okay. Yep.

And one possible effect of Ibogaine is that it basically resets that relentless scale that is otherwise almost impossible to psychologically do. Is that? Yeah, that's the view is that part of what is going on is that this actually promotes growth factors called glial-derived neurotrophic factor in the brain, which has a role in regulation,

dopamine neurons. And so the view is that this kind of resets those dopamine neurons to function pre-addiction-like. And it's also true, I think, that if you take abigene unsupervised, you risk, like, heart attack. It's arrhythmia, so an abnormal heart rhythm. And that's why it's important to do this under supervision. We think prophylaxing with certain kind of very low-risk cardiac arrhythmia medications like magnesium sulfate can actually reduce the risk quite a bit, but it is something that needs to be in medical supervision and in cardiac supervision, yeah. But to be clear, in your sort of study of different kinds of medical interventions, how dramatic is this? Yeah, I mean, we've never seen such a, kind of a broad

acting CNS compound before, right? I mean, in my view, it's one of the most amazing drugs on the planet because of this. And so, you know, it's like a, it's the equivalent of like a broad acting antibiotic that can treat all infections. It seems to be able to treat this kind of, you know, in it's early days. So we still have to do a lot of work to prove this totally in Ibogaine, but, you know, TBI, PTSD, depression, that's a really broad effect. Thank you so much for bringing news to TED. Thank you. 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com

slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.