Veteran faces childhood trauma on psychedelic journey

On the west coast of Mexico, Michael Giardina, a Navy veteran, sat cross-legged on a cushion, and drank tea made with ground up psychedelic mushrooms.

Later, blindfolded and lying down, his body trembled when the effects of the psychoactive compound psilocybin kicked in.

"I went somewhere very dark right away... I was terrified," he told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.

"But I kept coming back to... 'what a beautiful experience I'm having... I'm finally able to deal with these things.'"

Organized by the nonprofit Heroic Hearts Project, the retreat Giardina was on hopes to ease the pain of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder using psychedelics, like psilocybin and 5-MeO- DMT.

60 Minutes documented the psychedelic retreat in 2024, interviewing and filming a group of veterans before, during and afterwards.

To qualify, the veterans needed to have "combat-related trauma." But 60 Minutes found that many of them, including Giardina, had struggled before their military service.

"We realized that a lot of the trauma that they had experienced occurred long before they ever got to the military. In some cases, that trauma, the experience, may have led them to join the military," Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.

In an interview before the first psychedelic ceremony, Giardina told Cooper his father, a military veteran, and an undercover police officer, was emotionally abusive to him and his siblings when they were children.

"He'd kind of explode and yell and scream," he told Cooper. "He had seen a lot of stuff, and I don't think he knew how to deal with it."

As a young teenager, Giardina used drugs to cope with the chaos at home. He eventually lost friends to drug overdoses.

When he turned 20, he wanted a change. He joined the U.S. Navy, serving overseas as an operations specialist in Oman and Bahrain. He said it was like being part of a "family," and he quickly climbed the ranks.

"I was told often, like, 'Hey, you're doing great.' And [I] went from, you know, E-2 to E-5 very quickly," he told Cooper.

Giardina said the transition to civilian life was "brutal." He said he was "living in a bubble" in the military and wasn't sure what to do when he returned to the civilian world.