During the large-scale terror attack launched by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, terrorists attacked the 3,500 attendees of the Supernova music festival. Over 360 festival attendees were killed, and dozens were kidnapped to Gaza as hostages. Several victims were reportedly raped before they were murdered or kidnapped. Thus, the survivors of the event experienced acute, life-threatening traumatic events. Furthermore, many attendees were under the influence of psychoactive substances, including MDMA, LSD, ketamine, psilocybin, and cannabis.

The exposure of a large number of civilians to such a horrific scale of trauma, along with the unique combination of psychoactive substances that were active during the exposure itself, has never happened before and has not been studied. Immediately following the event, Prof. Salomon co-founded a nonprofit non-governmental organization (NGO) named SafeHeart, aimed at assisting the survivors of the music festival. Over 2700 survivors from the festival have registered with SafeHeart, providing an extraordinary opportunity to study the processing of trauma experienced under the influence of psychedelics.

Together with Prof. Roee Admon, we have initiated a large-scale study with these survivors regarding the processing of trauma under the influence of psychedelics in the peritraumatic and long-term periods. In this project, we employ behavioral, cognitive, physiological, and neural measurements with the survivors of the festival to better understand the clinical trajectories and mechanisms of trauma experienced while under psychedelics. This knowledge is immediately utilized to improve the clinical treatment of the survivors.