Mental Health
Ibogaine for ADHD & OCD
Two focus disorders, one honest page. The mind that cannot hold a thought, and the mind that cannot let one go. No study has tested ibogaine for either, and we would rather say so in the first sentence than after a deposit.
The honest answer first
There is no ibogaine study for ADHD, and none for OCD. No trial, no case report, nothing registered. In the research literature, ADHD does not appear at all, and OCD appears once, in a 2025 paper hypothesizing that ibogaine's effects on reward circuitry might matter across diagnoses.¹¹² Anyone quoting a success rate made it up.
Why does the question keep coming anyway? Because both are patterns that formed early, run automatically, and have beaten every act of willpower thrown at them, and ibogaine's most consistent reported effect in the addiction work is interrupting exactly that kind of entrenched loop.⁹ ⁸² The nearest actual data: in the Stanford veterans study, attention, processing speed and executive function all improved at one month,⁴² in thirty veterans with brain injuries, a different population, which is all it proves.
Here is our actual position, and it costs us nothing to say it: the true answer to an untrained mind is meditation. We use psychedelics as a tool, a way to help someone gain enough control over their mind that real meditation becomes possible, and meditation is a major part of our program and one of our primary focuses. Both conditions also have studied treatments worth trying first, and when ibogaine does make sense, it is a single day in a hospital with independent licensed Brazilian physicians, cardiac screening first, with any stimulant or SSRI taper planned in screening, never on your own.
The mind, watching itself for once
Here is what the science section cannot capture, and what matters most for a focus disorder. Both ADHD and OCD trap a person inside their own machinery: you do not have the loop, the loop has you. The treatment night is the opposite state. For hours, in a waking dream, the mind is taken out of the driver's seat and shown its own patterns from the outside: where they started, what they were built to protect, and what they have been costing. In the phenomenology research, every surveyed person reported insights about their own past, and most saw scenes from childhood, which is where these patterns tend to begin.¹¹³
People who have spent decades at war with their own attention describe something unfamiliar in that state: watching the pattern with compassion instead of fighting it. In one treated cohort, 43% met criteria for a complete mystical experience, and the realisations people reported centered on release from guilt and worthlessness,¹¹⁴ the exact sediment that years of failed willpower leave behind. We will not romanticize the night: it is long, physically draining, and sometimes harrowing.¹¹⁵ But for a mind that has never once seen itself from outside the loop, that view can be the beginning of a different relationship with itself.
Then comes the practice that everything else exists to serve: meditation. The window after treatment, when the patterns are loose, is when sitting with your own mind stops being impossible and starts being training. We teach it daily on campus and build it into the months after you leave, because the medicine shows you the machinery, but only a practiced mind learns to run it. That is what we mean when we say we work on the mind, not just the brain.
Training ground for the mind
A focus practice needs somewhere with nothing competing for it. The campus is built for that: rainforest, river, a daily meditation practice, and no feeds. See it for yourself.
A world engineered against focus
The focus disorders are real, measurable, and worldwide: hundreds of millions of adults meet ADHD symptom criteria globally,¹¹⁹ and half of the people with past-year OCD are seriously impaired by it.¹⁰⁴ Neither is a moral failure, and neither was invented by phones.
But the environment is not neutral. The modern economy is a machine for harvesting attention, and it is doing something to the demand side too: US stimulant dispensing rose 45.5% in a decade, until the shortage that began in 2022 left most adults on ADHD medication struggling to fill their prescriptions.¹²¹ ¹¹⁷ A culture that shatters everyone's attention, then medicates the shortfall it created, should at least be honest about the loop it is running.
Our argument is not against medication, which many people genuinely need. It is that a mind's relationship with its own attention can also be retrained, and that almost nobody is offered the conditions to try: silence, distance, time, and a practice for looking at the patterns underneath.
Whether your focus is consumed and compulsive, or distracted and at a deficit, the cause is an untrained mind. Yes, maybe your mind has a stronger propensity to fall into these traps.
But the only way out is building the muscle of training the mind and becoming its master, so that you get to direct your focus rather than it being controlled by your lack of awareness.
Charles D. Johnston & Tatiana Aya Tupinambá, Co-Founders, Nekawa
What proper trials could settle
The transdiagnostic idea, that one mechanism of pattern-interruption and reopened plasticity might matter across addiction, trauma, and the focus disorders, is one of the most interesting hypotheses in psychedelic science.¹¹² It is also still just a hypothesis, and ADHD and OCD are where it is least tested: not thinly tested, untested.
The infrastructure for testing it is finally being built. A 2026 US executive order directed the FDA to prioritize psychedelic medicine review, naming ibogaine, with $50 million in funding.⁸⁰ If focus-disorder trials ever run, this page changes; until they do, it stays exactly this blunt.
Our position in the meantime: the fastest way to discredit a promising medicine is to sell it for conditions it has never been tested on. We would rather earn trust slowly than spend it quickly, and teach meditation either way.
Citations (14)
[9] Mash DC, Duque L, Page B, Allen-Ferdinand K (2018). Ibogaine Detoxification Transitions Opioid and Cocaine Abusers Between Dependence and Abstinence: Clinical Observations and Treatment Outcomes. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 9, 529. Read the source →
Open-label study reporting that ibogaine therapy in a safe dose range diminished opioid withdrawal symptoms and reduced drug cravings, transitioning opioid- and cocaine-dependent patients toward abstinence.
[42] Cherian K, Keynan J, Anker L, Faerman A, Brown R, Shamma A, Keynan O, Coetzee J, Batail JM, Phillips A, Bassano N, Sahlem G, Inzunza J, Millar T, Dickinson J, Rolle C, Keller J, Adamson M, Kratter I, Williams N (2024). Magnesium-ibogaine therapy in veterans with traumatic brain injuries. Nature Medicine, 30, 373–381. Read the source →
The MISTIC trial. 30 male US Special Operations Forces veterans with predominantly mild traumatic brain injury received intravenous magnesium plus oral ibogaine (mean 12.1 mg/kg); 23 met criteria for PTSD at baseline. One month after treatment the group had moved from mild-to-moderate disability to no disability on the WHODAS-2.0 (30.2 to 5.1, d = 2.20), the study primary outcome. PTSD symptoms fell 88% on average, with a 100% response rate and 86% remission (d = 2.54); depression fell 87% (83% remission) and anxiety 81% (83% remission). Suicidal ideation fell from 47% at baseline to 7% at one month. Participants also gained in processing speed, executive function, verbal fluency and verbal learning, with no cognitive decline on any measure, and there were no serious or unexpected treatment-emergent adverse events. Open-label and uncontrolled, in a highly selected cohort, with magnesium co-administered, so the effect cannot be attributed to ibogaine alone.
[80] The White House (2026). Fact sheet: President Donald J. Trump is accelerating medical treatments for serious mental illness. whitehouse.gov, 18 April 2026. Read the source →
The April 2026 executive order directing the FDA to prioritise review of psychedelic medicines, naming ibogaine, easing DEA research restrictions, and funding the effort with $50 million.
[82] Brown TK, Alper K (2017). Treatment of opioid use disorder with ibogaine: detoxification and drug use outcomes. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 44(1), 24–36. Read the source →
Prospective study of 30 people treated with ibogaine for opioid use disorder in Mexico, followed for twelve months; documents substantial detoxification effects and month-by-month drug-use trajectories afterwards.
[104] National Institute of Mental Health, from the Harvard National Comorbidity Survey Replication (2017). Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) (statistics page). National Institute of Mental Health. Read the source →
An estimated 2.3% of US adults experience OCD at some point in their lives and 1.2% had it in the past year (women 1.8%, men 0.5%). Half of past-year cases (50.6%) were classified as causing serious impairment. Survey data collected 2001–2003.
[105] Pellegrini L, Giobelli S, Burato S, di Salvo G, Maina G, Albert U (2025). Meta-analysis of age at help-seeking and duration of untreated illness (DUI) in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Journal of Affective Disorders, 380, 212–225. Read the source →
Across 31 studies, people with OCD waited a pooled average of about 7 years from onset before seeking help, and lived with untreated illness for about 6.7 years on average.
[112] Nicolas M (2025). Ibogaine's potential role in supporting reward system recovery across diagnostic boundaries. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 16, 1744383. Read the source →
A theoretical proposal that ibogaine's growth-factor induction, glutamatergic modulation, dopaminergic recalibration and reopening of neuroplasticity could amount to one mechanism for restoring reward-system function across substance use disorder, PTSD, OCD and eating disorders. A hypothesis paper: it is the only place OCD appears in the research literature summarised by the MAPS Investigator's Brochure, and it contains no OCD patient data.
[113] Heink A, Katsikas S, Lange-Altman T (2017). Examination of the phenomenology of the ibogaine treatment experience: role of altered states of consciousness and psychedelic experiences. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 49(3), 201–208. Read the source →
Survey of 27 people who underwent ibogaine treatment: all reported insights about their personal past, 97% experienced visions, 77% saw content drawn from their own childhood, and 85% reported subjective relief from guilt. Large majorities reported insights about the meaning of life, death, and creation. A small, self-selected online survey, reported as phenomenology rather than outcome evidence.
[114] Brown TK, Noller GE, Denenberg JO (2019). Ibogaine and subjective experience: transformative states and psychopharmacotherapy in the treatment of opioid use disorder. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 51(2), 155–165. Read the source →
In 44 opioid-dependent people undergoing ibogaine treatment, 43% met criteria for a complete mystical experience. Participants described cyclic visual content leading to confronting realisations involving remorse and regret toward others, subjective release from guilt and worthlessness, and many compared the significance of the experience to a spiritual transformation.
[115] Camlin TJ, Eulert D, Horvath AT, Bucky SF, Barsuglia J, Polanco M (2018). A phenomenological investigation into the lived experience of ibogaine and its potential to treat opioid use disorders. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2(1), 24–35. Read the source →
Qualitative study of 10 people treated with ibogaine in Mexico: 80% described the experience as physically draining, one comparing it to having survived cancer. The source for stating honestly that the treatment night is often demanding or harrowing rather than pleasant, which also helps explain ibogaine's low abuse potential.
[117] Staley BS, Robinson LR, Claussen AH, et al. (CDC) (2024). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis, treatment, and telehealth use in adults — National Center for Health Statistics Rapid Surveys System, United States, October–November 2023. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 73(40), 890–895. Read the source →
An estimated 6.0% of US adults, about 15.5 million people, had a current ADHD diagnosis in late 2023; over half (55.9%) were not diagnosed until adulthood, and 71.5% of adults taking stimulant medication reported difficulty getting a prescription filled in the past year because it was unavailable. Self-reported survey data, not clinical assessment.
[118] Danielson ML, Claussen AH, Bitsko RH, et al. (CDC) (2024). ADHD prevalence among U.S. children and adolescents in 2022: diagnosis, severity, co-occurring disorders, and treatment. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 53(3), 343–360. Read the source →
11.4% of US children aged 3–17, about 1 in 9 (7.1 million), have received an ADHD diagnosis at some point, roughly a million more than in 2016. Parent-reported diagnosis from the 2022 National Survey of Children's Health, not clinical evaluation.
[119] Song P, Zha M, Yang Q, Zhang Y, Li X, Rudan I (2021). The prevalence of adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: a global systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Global Health, 11, 04009. Read the source →
Globally, an estimated 2.58% of adults (about 140 million) have persistent ADHD carried from childhood, and 6.76% (about 366 million) meet symptom criteria regardless of documented childhood onset. The two figures answer different questions and should not be blended.
[121] US Food and Drug Administration & Drug Enforcement Administration (Califf RM, Milgram A) (2023). Joint letter on prescription stimulant shortages, 1 August 2023. US Food and Drug Administration. Read the source →
US dispensing of prescription stimulants rose 45.5% between 2012 and 2021, and the shortage that began in late 2022 left roughly a billion authorized amphetamine doses unproduced in 2022. A policy statement rather than a study; shortage conditions have evolved since.
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