Combat-veteran-led research on microdosing and trauma.

What's been missing from the research.

The current wave of psychedelic clinical research has focused on therapist-assisted high-dose protocols: MDMA for PTSD, psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, ibogaine for traumatic brain injury. These studies are important. They are also expensive, geographically limited, and time-bounded — a single MDMA-PTSD course runs months of structured therapy in approved clinical settings.

Meanwhile, combat veterans across the country are microdosing on their own. What they are learning about dose, timing, daily-life integration, interactions with sleep, hypervigilance, intimacy, and substance co-use does not appear in the published literature.

The Microdosing Vets study treats those experiences as primary data — not as anecdote to be validated against later clinical trials, but as the substantive empirical material a qualitative dissertation can be built on.

How the study works.

The study uses two methodological commitments together: reflexive thematic analysis and methodological triangulation. Both are established approaches in qualitative research; together they form the design described in A Soldier's Journey Home.

The participant interview

A combat veteran who has microdosed LSD for PTSD-related symptoms — and who consents to participate — sits for a remote, recorded, one-on-one interview of approximately eighty minutes. The interviewer is the principal investigator: a fellow combat veteran. The conversation is semi-structured, opening with the veteran's experience of military service and trauma, moving through their decision to begin microdosing, and following whatever the participant identifies as the meaningful effects of the practice on daily life. Questions are designed to surface lived experience, not to confirm hypotheses.

The Friendly Observer

Each participant nominates someone close to them — a partner, family member, close friend, or peer — to sit for a separate interview about the participant's experience as observed from the outside. The Friendly Observer interview is conducted independently. Its purpose is methodological triangulation: pairing the participant's first-person report with the perspective of a person whose proximity gives them standing to corroborate, contradict, or contextualize what the participant has shared.

The analysis

Both interview streams are transcribed, de-identified, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) — a qualitative method that surfaces patterns of meaning across cases while acknowledging the researcher's own position within the data. Reflexivity matters here: the principal investigator's experience as a combat veteran is treated as part of the interpretive frame, not as a bias to be eliminated. The full methodology is documented in the dissertation's third chapter.

What this yields

A peer-reviewable account of what microdosing looks like, sounds like, and means for U.S. combat veterans with PTSD — built from cases rather than population averages, and capable of generating the questions that future clinical trials will need to ask.

From deployment to dissertation.

Patrick enlisted in the Ohio Army National Guard during his freshman year of college, after September 11, 2001. A 19-month deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom followed. He returned home and built a career in holistic health, founding a wellness community in the Greater Cincinnati area and earning dual master's degrees in complementary and alternative medicine and herbal medicine.

Years of that work clarified what had not been reachable through gym, yoga, nutrition, or community alone. The conventional treatment pathways available to him as a veteran had not reached the root of what war had left in him, in his family, and in the broader military community.

Encountering psychedelics opened a different therapeutic register — not as recreational substances or miracle cures, but as carefully bounded tools whose effects on lived experience deserved serious documentation. Around the same period, he began formal training in Vipassana meditation, a Buddha-lineage contemplative practice with an established place within transpersonal psychology, and it continues to inform his approach. The doctoral research now underway at CIIS is the formalization of the psychedelic inquiry, focused on the population whose self-directed use has gone undocumented in the peer-reviewed literature: U.S. combat veterans with PTSD.

Where the study is now.

• Recruitment Active. The study is currently enrolling U.S. combat veterans who have microdosed LSD for PTSD-related symptoms. The five-minute screening is at /qualify.
• Anticipated completion 2027. The dissertation is currently in the recruitment and data-collection phase, with analysis and writing to follow.
• Planned publications A Soldier's Journey Home (dissertation manuscript, 2027 anticipated). Additional peer-reviewed publications drawn from the dataset are planned to follow.
• Phase 2 — Psilocybin A planned follow-on study examining microdosed psilocybin in the same population is currently building a waitlist at /psilocybin-waitlist. Phase 2 will require separate ethics approval and is not part of the active dissertation work.

Institutional and community support.

Conducted through the California Institute of Integral Studies. Supported by the Pat Tillman Foundation Scholarship (2023) and the Robert Joseph & Wilhelmina Ann Kranzke Research Scholarship.

Patrick's own path to this point has been supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Disabled American Veterans — without their support, none of this would have been possible. The research itself is made possible by the U.S. combat veterans who talk about this material on the record, and by the partners, family members, and friends who agree to serve as Friendly Observers alongside them.