Carlie’s Story: Brain Injury, Ibogaine and Reclaiming the Self

One week before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, Carlie Ostrom was hit by a car while crossing the road.

Before the accident, she describes herself as a high-performing student. Alongside university, she was juggling internships, freelance software product management, and choreography and performances with her dance team.

Then everything changed.

Carlie underwent a decompressive hemicraniectomy, was placed in an induced coma and spent weeks in an altered state of reality.

She remembers nothing of the accident itself.

What she does remember is what came afterwards.

“I emerged from the hospital as an infant.”

Outpatient rehabilitation meant relearning things that had once been automatic: writing with a pen, playing Uno, even walking without dropping the water bottle she was carrying.

Within months, however, Carlie says she was discharged from rehabilitation for “plateauing”

It would take years for her to discover what recovery meant for herself.

Rebuilding function was easier than rebuilding herself

Carlie did recover abilities.

She deliberately placed herself in cognitively demanding environments, returning to part-time work in software despite living with a daily fear that she would be fired for being incompetent. Eventually she progressed to full-time work and received a promotion.

In 2022, she changed direction again, returning to education to complete pre-med coursework.

Physical recovery followed a similar trajectory. Returning to the gym and dance helped her regain balance, strength and coordination, although she says it took around three years before she returned to movement.

Yet Carlie makes an important distinction between recovering skills and recovering something much harder to define.

“I found that re-acquiring skills was much easier than finding my sense of self again.”

Alongside the cognitive and physical effects of her injury were chronic migraine, insomnia, fatigue and extreme sensitivity to light and sound. There was also post-traumatic stress and persistent rumination.

But when Carlie talks about trauma, she doesn’t primarily mean the moment the car hit her.

“A lot of people assume the trauma was about the day of the accident or being in the hospital, but for me it was about the tumultuous, confusing, and isolating time I had being so disabled and apparently stuck in dysfunction for good, according to the experts.”

She describes repeatedly encountering setbacks and having very little access to an internal sense of “this is who I am” or “this is how to handle this.”

Looking back now, however, she can identify something else that survived underneath those years.

“I understand in retrospect that I had immense hope, resiliency, and bravery in myself.” 

That hope would eventually lead her outside conventional rehabilitation.

Discovering that change was still possible

Carlie’s journey towards ibogaine didn’t begin with ibogaine.

In 2020, she underwent treatment with the Portable Neuromodulation Stimulator (PoNS), which she describes as rapidly transforming her fatigue and vestibular difficulties.

Whatever the mechanisms underlying her individual response, psychologically the experience gave her something important: evidence that substantial change could still occur.

Then, in 2021, during what she describes as a period of dead ends in conventional treatment and suicidality, she began using psilocybin mushrooms outside a clinical setting.

The significance she attributes to those experiences wasn’t simply symptom relief.

Instead, they changed how she understood her relationship with herself.

“While much of my community and the medical system had given up or abandoned me, I myself had been steadfast.”

Her conclusion was simple:

“I would never abandon me.”

Carlie had improved before. She began to believe she could continue improving. When she subsequently encountered emerging research investigating ibogaine in veterans with traumatic brain injury and PTSD, she decided to pursue treatment. By the time she travelled to Mexico in June 2025, she wasn’t sceptical. She was hopeful.

“In the months leading up to my ibogaine treatment, I was white knuckling through each day but focusing on the hope.” 

Meeting the grief

Ibogaine is a psychoactive compound derived from the African iboga plant. Its effects can be prolonged, with high-dose experiences sometimes lasting many hours.

Carlie describes her own experience as intensely physical and psychological.

In her mind’s eye appeared seemingly random images: bugs, sidewalks, elbows.

She describes having an intuitive sense of whether each image was relevant to what she was trying to work through.

Then different images began appearing.

They were moments from the darker periods of her recovery.

Instead of turning away from them, Carlie allowed herself to experience the emotional pain attached to them.

“The cries that surfaced were akin to a newborn baby’s screaming.”

At the same time, she found herself drawing upon psychological work she’d already been practising for years.

“While feeling that pain, I used my inner healer voice to nurture the parts of me that were suffering, just like I’d been practicing in counseling for years before.”

It wasn’t a comfortable experience. Carlie also describes vomiting repeatedly and using her breath and a mantra to steady herself between episodes. 

But when she eventually emerged from the treatment room around 11 hours after taking the capsules, something happened that she hadn’t expected.

When the light stopped hurting

Carlie walked into the light.

For more than six years, photophobia had been part of her everyday experience following her brain injury.

Now the brightness didn’t hurt.

Her migraine was also gone.

Carlie remembers the duration precisely:

“For the first time in the six years, 1 month, and 1 day since my TBI.”

She had been counting.

Alongside the physical changes came something less tangible.

“I felt an overwhelming sense of trust in the universe.”

The thought that came to her was:

“Everything I’ve been through… brought me to this exact moment.”

She describes it as one of the most profound moments of her life.

Around a month later, she also noticed a substantial change in another long-standing problem: sleep. After years in which she could struggle to sleep through the night as many as five nights each week, she describes sleeping deeply again.

More than a year later, Carlie reports that her sensitivity to brightness has not returned. Her migraine can occasionally reappear during a particularly stressful day, but she estimates its intensity at around 20% of what it once was. Her sleep has regressed somewhat from the immediate post-treatment period but remains markedly different from before treatment. 

But interestingly, when Carlie describes the most important effect of ibogaine, she doesn’t begin with her migraine.

She talks about who she is.

“I began to recognise myself”

Carlie’s description of ibogaine is remarkably concise:

“Ibogaine helps you get back to your true nature.”

For years after her accident, brain injury had become intertwined with her identity.

Ibogaine, she says, helped her begin separating the two.

“I’m not at my core the disabled, angry, volatile, disillusioned, chronically pained person that I was for many years after my accident.”

Instead, she began recognising qualities that felt more fundamentally her:

“Who I really am is kind, creative, brave, ambitious, and curious.”

Then comes perhaps the simplest description of the change:

“I began to recognize myself! What a relief.” 

Her worldview also shifted.

Carlie describes herself before ibogaine as “left-brained, gritty” and logical, without a strong spiritual connection. Afterwards, she developed what she describes as a greater trust in the journey of life.

Before treatment, her thinking could become absolute:

“I will suffer like this forever.”

Now, when difficult periods arrive, she says she has an embodied sense that they will also pass.

“It’s a journey, not a sentence or destination.” 

A theme I’ve heard before

This part of Carlie’s story particularly caught my attention.

I recently published qualitative research exploring how five people with traumatic brain injury perceived psychedelic use in relation to their recovery.

Three themes emerged from their accounts: Trauma Relief and Mood Stabilisation; Perceived Post-Dose Cognitive ‘Lift’; and Insight, Acceptance, and Self-Compassion. 

Carlie wasn’t one of those participants. Yet there are striking similarities between her account and the third theme.

Participants in my research described understanding their injuries and behaviour differently following psychedelic experiences. Some talked about greater acceptance and self-compassion. Others described reconnecting with an identity that had felt obscured by brain injury.

One participant put it simply:

“They helped me get back to who I am.”

Another described finally understanding how their injury had influenced their behaviour and being able to stop blaming themselves for it. 

Identity disruption is an important part of life after brain injury, and my study raised the possibility that insight, identity reconstruction and self-compassion deserve greater attention in future psychedelic brain-injury research.  Carlie’s language of “true nature” and recognising herself again sits remarkably close to those accounts.

When considering psychedelics and brain injury, perhaps we shouldn’t only be asking whether memory scores improve or symptoms decrease.

We might also need to ask: What happens to a person’s relationship with themselves?

Recovery beyond symptoms

Carlie’s experience has also shaped what she believes is missing from brain-injury care.

She is particularly concerned about the environments in which people with neurological disabilities are expected to recover. Sensory overstimulation, cognitive demands, complicated systems and environments that offer little consideration for fatigue or executive dysfunction can themselves become barriers.

For someone pursuing psychedelic treatment, Carlie believes those considerations become even more important.

“Healing a brain injury with ibogaine will be incomplete if ibogaine providers don’t build their programming and environment in manners that are accessible to people with brain injuries.”

Her concern extends beyond accessibility in the conventional sense. She believes recovery needs to encompass rebuilding skills, regulating the nervous system, rediscovering identity and reconnecting with other people. All of them together. 

And that belief is now shaping the next part of her life.

Building Possibilities

Carlie is developing a nonprofit called Possibilities, through which she hopes to advance understanding of and access to what she describes as neuroplasticity therapies for people living with brain injury.

Her vision combines neuromodulation and psychedelic approaches with something she felt was often absent from her own rehabilitation:

Nature, community, mindfulness, agency and intentional practice.

Rather than recreating a conventional clinical environment, Carlie imagines a residential rehabilitation retreat where people can spend an extended period rebuilding different aspects of their lives together.

Her ambition has grown directly from her own recovery. She experienced conventional rehabilitation. She experienced being told she had plateaued. She spent years rebuilding cognitive and physical abilities. She explored neuromodulation, psychedelics and psychological therapy.

And somewhere during that process, the question appears to have changed from “How do I get my old life back?” to “What could recovery look like if we built it differently?” 

For Carlie, recovery has ultimately meant more than reducing symptoms or regaining skills. It has meant rediscovering the person underneath them. Six years after an accident dramatically changed the direction of her life, she describes ibogaine as huge part of that process.

Her phrase for what it offered her is perhaps the most fitting place to finish:

“Ibogaine helps you get back to your true nature.”

And for Carlie, that meant something remarkably simple. She began to recognise herself again.