Editor’s note: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
For a year straight, Brian Mosley maintained the same evening routine.
His wife and kids upstairs in the family’s home in Stone Oak, Mosley changed out of his work clothes and headed to the backyard, where he would sit on a rock, play fetch with the dog, smoke a few bowls of weed, and quietly plan his suicide.
Mosley, then 48, had everything he wanted. Three children with his college sweetheart, a decorated career in U.S. Army Special Forces followed by success in finance, a nice home in a gated San Antonio neighborhood.
Despite outward appearances, however, Mosley was suffering. His combat experiences overseas, as well as the loss of a child, had left Mosley with chronic pain and PTSD that showed up as anger, anxiety and depression. He used alcohol, stimulants, opioids and marijuana to cope.
One spring evening, an old Army friend interrupted Mosley’s routine with a phone call. He asked Mosley what he was up to.
“Sitting out here on a rock, smoking a bunch of weed, daydreaming about killing myself,” was Mosley’s response.
It was the first time Mosley was honest with anyone about how much he was struggling. About his marriage falling apart. About his children avoiding him and his unpredictable anger spells. About his plans to disappear once the kids were out of the house for college.
The phone call would eventually lead Mosley to seek a different kind of therapeutic to treat his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, across the border into Mexico to take a psychedelic called ibogaine with a group of retired combat veterans.
The alternative treatment route has gained favor among veterans seeking relief from PTSD, addiction and traumatic brain injury, but remains illegal in the U.S. and comes with serious risks.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month directing federal agencies to speed up reviews of psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine.
In March, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows announced that Texas would launch a $50 million research program focused on conducting its own ibogaine clinical trials.
Among evidence-based treatments, the gold standard is still trauma-focused psychotherapy.
“Psychedelics are the kind of in their infancy,” says Dr. Alan Peterson, a clinical psychologist at UT Health San Antonio. “We really don’t have the good research now, [but] I think there’s a lot of potential.”
‘Everything was about going back’
Brian Mosley graduated in 1999 from Texas A&M University with a finance degree with his sights set on joining the U.S. Army. Shortly before graduating and heading to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he met his future wife in a parking lot behind the university’s baseball stadium.
Mosley described his time at Fort Bragg as “painfully boring.” Restless and craving something more exciting, Mosley went through selection for the Green Berets, the Army’s elite special forces unit focused on unconventional warfare and counterterrorism.
He was selected, and in the mid-2000s deployed to Afghanistan, where U.S. forces were fighting the Taliban. His unit were tasked with training Afghan soldiers, and carrying out missions to kill or capture high-value targets, as he described it.
Eight months later, Brian and Sabrina Mosley traveled to Saint Lucia, a vacation spot they’d long dreamed of. But Mosley found himself tense and restless, like his mind was still stuck in combat.
Over the next several years, he cycled through back-to-back deployments, including missions in Colombia supporting operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and more tours in Afghanistan.
Mosley returned from every deployment noticing subtle shifts in his temperament, eventually finding himself more comfortable overseas than back home. Neither he nor his wife thought much of it, however.
In 2007, Sabrina Mosley gave birth to their first child, Emma. Then in Afghanistan, Mosley was granted a short trip back home to meet his daughter — and to escort the bodies of three South Carolina National Guardsmen attached to his unit who were killed after their vehicle struck a roadside bomb.
A year later, Mosley was promoted. He should have been happy, he said, but the new role pulled him away from a counterterrorism mission in Iraq.
“Everything was about going back,” he said.
‘No bandwidth for grief’
In 2009, Sabrina Mosley was pregnant with their second child, Olivia. Her pregnancy was considered high-risk due to complications from her first.
She sensed something was wrong as her due date approached. Eventually she couldn’t feel Olivia kicking. When doctors induced labor, the baby’s heartbeat disappeared and she was rushed into an emergency cesarian section.
Olivia was delivered in bad shape, and rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. In the NICU, Mosley watched the monitors and tried to understand what they were telling him. He knew enough from medical training he received in the special forces to know things were bad.
Olivia had a tumor on her neck that had diverted blood flow she needed to develop in the womb, Mosley said. There was nothing doctors could do. He watched the oxygen monitor slowly fall. He made the decision to remove life support and brought Olivia to his wife.
“Watching your child die, … you just didn’t know how to handle it,” Mosley said.
Olivia was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near Mosley’s grandparents. Still in shock, the family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where Mosley enrolled at the Naval War College as part of his promotion.
They lived in a small, white house right on the water, their kitchen window overlooking Narragansett Bay and the Claiborne Pell Bridge. Mosley would throw rocks from the back patio into the bay. Big seagulls would perch nearby.
“You talk about trauma processing, I processed it like a champ,” Mosley said sarcastically. “I would drink three handles of vodka a week and I threw myself into work.”
Sabrina Mosley faced health challenges following her C-section. A friendly pair of neighbors stepped in like an extra set of parents, helping them get through the immediate aftermath of Olivia’s death. But the couple doesn’t recall much support from the Army.
Sabrina Mosley tried therapy, but it didn’t stick. And she didn’t realize how much her husband was drinking to cope.
“There was no bandwidth for grief,” she said.
Corporate to combat
In 2010, Mosley returned to Afghanistan for his fifth deployment.
The war was not going well. His unit was getting into near constant firefights with the Taliban. IEDs lined dirt roads. And Mosley found himself increasingly frustrated with decisions from his higher-ups. “We were losing,” he said.
Three Green Berets in his unit were killed in a coordinated ambush.
By the end of the deployment nearly two years later, Mosley was “a disaster,” both physically and mentally, he said. He was struggling with what he now knows was depression, as well as chronic pain from an injury he sustained after falling off a two-story building, and alcohol abuse.
In 2012, back in North Carolina, Mosley turned in his paperwork to leave the Army. He remembers being given a foam “brain squishy” as a reminder to get checked for traumatic brain injury.
Mosley earned a master’s degree in business administration. Sabrina Mosley had another child. And the family moved back home to Dallas.
Mosley went into investment banking, pouring himself into the work, moving to bigger firms with better titles. But his physical and mental health continued to deteriorate.
His anger dial was either zero or 100, he said, and small inconveniences could set him off. He struggled to connect with anyone in his life, including coworkers, his wife and two young daughters. Over time, his family got good at staying out of whatever room he was in.
“We all just kind of started to steer clear,” Sabrina Mosely said. “Depression never really entered my thought process. It was just, he’s angry all the time.”
It never really entered Mosley’s thought process either.
“It was kind of a Gen X thing,” Brian, who is 50, said. “You weren’t shot, you weren’t blown up. [PTSD], that’s for people who can’t pull their shit together.”
“Everyone’s coming home and behaving the same way,” Sabrina Mosley said. “There was no ‘look for these signs’ or ‘call this person.’ You definitely weren’t going to call anyone for help, because that meant something was wrong with your spouse, and then they might not be able to do their job. There really was no support.”
‘Have you heard of plant medicine?’
In 2023, the couple moved to San Antonio. By then, they were “roommates who shared a bed,” Mosley said. The change of scenery improved things briefly, but it didn’t last.
He was on 14 different prescription medications, including opioids to manage his chronic pain and other health issues. He was also taking high doses of Adderall to get through the day.
Two years before their move, Mosley switched from alcohol to marijuana as his preferred emotional suppressant. It helped him fall asleep, manage his pain, and “probably [did] my liver some good,” he said.
Mosley was strongly opposed to the mainstream treatments for his depression and PTSD, like antidepressant drugs and therapy. He was “scared to death” of needing to be on antidepressants for life. And he had poor experiences in therapy during childhood, he said.
On top of that, Mosley still couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong. All he knew was that everything felt gray. “I didn’t even know how to begin to affect the change,” he said.
By this point, his evenings had settled into a pattern. He would change clothes after work, and head to the backyard to ostensibly play fetch with the dog. In reality, he was smoking several bowls of cannabis — enough to get him “fraternity stoned,” he said — to blunt his emotions.
One summer evening in 2024, an old Army buddy that Mosley hadn’t spoken to in nearly a decade called him out of the blue. His friend was involved with a group called Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions and had traveled to Mexico to take psychedelics.
“Have you heard of plant medicine?” he asked Mosley.
“I’m smoking a plant right now. Does that count?” Mosley replied.
He persuaded Mosley to fill out an application with VETS, and to be honest about his suicidal thoughts. Mosley filled out the application and ended up on the waitlist. Two months later, he was on his way to San Diego.
Across the border
VETS has coordinated roughly 1,200 veteran trips to clinics in Mexico that administer psychedelic drugs like ayahuasca, psilocybin and ibogaine since 2019.
Mosley, who had never taken a psychedelic drug before, planned to take ibogaine, an alkaloid derived from the root bark of the iboga plant, native to Central Africa.
Some researchers, including Peterson at UT Health San Antonio, see potential in psychedelics, including ibogaine, as complements to established PTSD treatment — prolonged exposure therapy, for example. But they’re unlikely to be effective on their own, he said.
“Each psychedelic is a little bit different,” Peterson said, “but one commonality is we think it increases neuroplasticity — basically your brain’s ability to make sense of things. That’s really the key to using some of these psychedelics, how do you match that up with some type of already established evidence-based psychotherapy treatments?”
Peterson, himself a veteran who did several tours in the Middle East, is the director of STRONG STAR, a federally funded research consortium that develops and validates PTSD interventions in veterans and first responders. Peterson is currently leading a study on whether MDMA, popularly known as ecstasy or molly, can be an effective aid in prolonged exposure therapy.
The drugs do not come without risks, and scientists are still largely in the dark on how these compounds work. Ibogaine has the potential to trigger fatal heart arrhythmias and have deadly interactions with other medications. At least 33 publicly reported deaths from ibogaine have been documented in scientific literature.
Mosley was well aware of the risks. He even told his parents to help get his body back over the border if things went south. But he was also told that the clinic he’d be going to, Ambio Life Sciences, would screen participants ahead of time. His wife, who was staunchly anti-drug, opposed the trip.
But like other veterans who were struggling and had either not seen benefits from or resisted mainstream treatment options, Mosley was willing to take on the risks.
In August 2024, Mosley arrived in San Diego to meet up with the group he’d travel with — five other former special operations veterans. He didn’t know them, but meeting them felt like looking into a mirror, he said. “Just a bunch of angry-looking assholes,” as Mosley put it.
The group drove across the border and into Tijuana. The first day of the retreat included a Mayan-style sauna ceremony and guided chanting.
The following day, Mosley took ibogaine. What followed lasted hours. Intense nausea, repeated dry heaving, and a sense of his body “melting” into the experience.
At points, he said, he saw himself as his father. He heard fragments of things he associated with his upbringing: toxic beliefs he said he hadn’t fully recognized were still shaping his behavior.
In his telling, the experience forced him to confront how much of his behavior was shaped by patterns he had never consciously examined, as well as unprocessed grief from his infant daughter Olivia’s death.
His wife also went to Mexico, months after her husband, with a group of military spouses. She took psilocybin, more commonly known as magic mushrooms, and recalled experiences similar to Mosley’s.
The psychedelics were not magic bullets, but they did offer a window of opportunity for the couple to kickstart changes back home, they said.
Rebuilding
Back in San Antonio, Mosley noticed immediate shifts in his relationship with substances. Adderall, even small doses, felt overwhelming. He was less interested in alcohol and heavy marijuana use. He weaned himself off opioids.
He still felt a pull toward old habits and emotional responses. Mosley parted ways with his employer, realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to do the personal work ahead of him in that role.
But as he started pulling away from substances and the numbing effect they had provided for him for years, he started slowly repairing himself and his relationships.
He found himself thinking about moments he had nearly forgotten, like picking up his youngest daughter from daycare in Rhode Island when his wife was traveling for work, making dinner, drying her hair looking out over the water, falling asleep watching “Wheel of Fortune” together.
“This little girl — I was her everything at one point,” Mosley recalled realizing. “And [now] she doesn’t even want to talk to me.”
For years, Mosley said, Olivia’s death had been “metastatic” inside their family. It was rarely discussed, but it shaped the family dynamic in ways they didn’t fully understand until recently. One of their daughters’ earliest conscious memories, he said, was learning that she had a sister who was dead.
Mosley said he still deals with emotional flare-ups. But he has learned to watch those feelings and let them pass instead of sinking into them, a skill he attributes largely to meditation, which he has turned into a daily practice.
“Just because you did [psychedelics] — I had 48 years of mental programming,” Mosley said. “I [still] wanted to go back to what I was doing. Meditation helped to control that, to kind of be able to move forward into the world and how I wanted.”
Mosley is currently training to become a meditation instructor. In the evenings, he sometimes takes his youngest daughter to soccer practice, lowers the tailgate of his truck, climbs into the bed and meditates in the parking lot for an hour. At first it confused onlookers, but Mosley’s daughter and her friends have gotten used to it.
Sabrina and Brian Mosley went through couples therapy for six months and relearned how to communicate. The family dynamic slowly shifted, and the girls started confiding in their father again.
Brian Mosley took up gardening, too, maintaining a variety of plants in their backyard, not far from the rock he used to sit on.
