How Ibogaine Could Treat Depression and Anxiety – Nolan Williams at TED2025

In his 2025 TED Talk, Nolan Williams argues that institutional resistance, driven by those who reject simple, plant-based medicinal solutions in favor of complex, man-made chemicals, can delay the adoption of natural therapies, and in doing so, lead to loss of life.

For example, this paradigm delayed the cure for scurvy for over a century and cost a million lives. In his talk Nolan offers the opinion that this same approach is being repeated today, by keeping powerful psychedelic plant medicines like ibogaine — which show dramatic efficacy in treating traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addiction — illegal as it’s classified as a Schedule I drug, thus preventing life-saving treatments from those in need.

As director of Stanford University School of Medicine’s Brain Stimulation Lab, Nolan could have approached this topic from a highly technical angle. Instead, he takes us on a journey, beginning with a stop onboard a British naval vessel in 1756. Here he sets the stage for his premise — that nature sometimes offers a cure to a common human ailment, but if there is resistance to adoption, the delay can cost lives.

He then introduces a new plant-derived medicine, ibogaine, used historically by the Bwiti people. He shares the story of Marcus Capone, a Navy SEAL who had to travel to Mexico for the illegal compound that saved his life, convincing Williams to study it.

What’s interesting is that, instead of recounting the details secondhand, Nolan uses clips of an interview with Marcus so that we hear his words directly. This may or may not be an option when you’re telling your story in public, but it’s a technique to consider when the possibility exists.

As this treatment is controversial, and has potential side-effects, he concludes with both a sense of caution, and a call for open-minded, data-driven evaluation, warning that “the clock is ticking” on the edge between institutional rejection and acceptance.

It’s obvious that Nolan believes in the potential of this treatment, but at the same time he carefully chooses his words and doesn’t make universal claims that are not supported by the research to date. This is a factor that anyone telling a science-based story needs to pay attention to.

Transcript

Alright, it’s 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, the 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-fruiter. 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-fruiters: people who weaponize scientific skepticism to thwart new treatments from getting out to the world.

And so scurvy is an illness that killed two 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 that could be used for this problem. So much so that it actually birthed the world’s first clinical trial. So the clinical trial, as 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. You know, we were able to see that this was actually helpful. But the problem was that from the time of James Lind‘s study to the time of widespread implementation was more than 100 years. A million people died. But this was a war waged against progress by these anti-fruiters. 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 Tabernanthe Iboga root bark of central West Africa was used by the Bwiti 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, and had PTSD once he got out. And he went down to Mexico, outside of the US, as a US soldier, outside of the US, down to a foreign country to receive a compound that is illegal in the US, a compound that he believes 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 Erick’s story, and you tell me what you think.

(Video) Erick: I don’t know exactly all the 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 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.

NW: So, this is the study that we conducted at Stanford. Just like Erick, 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 ibogaine.

Significant reductions in anxiety, 80-plus percent, significant reductions in depression. And remarkably, resolution of disability from traumatic brain injury. Something that we haven’t seen before. So now I’m going to let Erick tell you about that.

(Video) Erick: 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 a drink?” “Nah, 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, “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. It’s hard to tell somebody one weekend and everything’s different. Like some kind of magic pill or something, which it’s not. I mean, 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 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.

NW: So now, I’m going to let Erick describe 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.

(Video) Erick: The visuals that I remember the most were like going through a photo album, but like a Rolodex and you flip it as fast as you can and everything goes by and it’s a blur. There’s clips 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 that I need to stop poisoning myself. In every aspect possible.

NW: 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 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 and running. Some of them all the way through to being evaluated or reevaluated by the FDA very soon. Ibogaine, we’re trying to get an investigational new drug application to 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 anti-fruiters. 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, right? And what I’m also here to tell you is that these compounds sit on Schedule I. And what that means is that they’re on the same level of control as heroin. Right

It means that there’s no medicinal use and they have a high abuse liability. How many of you think that there was no medicinal help for Erick? How many thought that there was?

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 will tell.

Thank you.

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