Originally published in The Coming Home Project’s August 2026 newsletter.
Military veterans are at risk of various mental health conditions, with profound implications for post-deployment quality of life. Current treatment options encounter high dropout rates and non-responsiveness, and overlook the importance of community building in veterans’ holistic recovery. Preliminary research suggests psychedelics offer therapeutic benefits for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans. Integrating psychedelic therapies with a communal retreat setting could provide a more holistic framework for improving veterans’ well-being.
This is the first study to investigate psychedelic retreats as a holistic therapy for veterans’ mental health alongside community reintegration. Fifty-eight Veterans participating in retreats involving either ayahuasca or psilocybin were followed across eight outcome measures — not just PTSD, but depression, anxiety, sleep, quality of life, mental well-being, post-concussive symptoms, and military-to-civilian reintegration. Significant improvements were reported across all eight areas, with the greatest percentage improvements found for depression and PTSD. Veterans attending psilocybin retreats showed greater improvements in most outcomes, while ayahuasca retreats showed a slightly greater edge specifically on PTSD symptoms. Participants with the most severe symptoms at baseline saw the greatest gains.
Because this was a naturalistic study rather than a randomized clinical trial, we cannot say the psychedelics alone caused those improvements — but the findings are particularly relevant to Veterans because trauma rarely exists as one isolated diagnosis. Psychedelic retreats, this research suggests, could provide a treatment framework that addresses psychological well-being, communal factors, and reintegration into civilian life all at once — rather than treating each in isolation.
Source
Keep reading
- State of the Science: Ayahuasca 2026
- The Rythmia and CHP veteran retreat week
- More research summaries
Get our newsletter. New research and stories from the Tribe, in your inbox. Sign up here.
Want to see how the work happens? How our process works. Ready to take a first step? Tell us about yourself.
Veterans Crisis Line: Dial 988, then press 1 | Text 838255
