Idit Negrin would try anything to beat the trauma haunting her since attending the Nova Music Festival on October 7th, when Hamas massacred hundreds of civilian s. "We saw the terrorists, and they started shooting at us," she said. She ran for her life.

Afterwards, "I woke up every night, every night around 3 o’clock screaming and sweating and shaking. I think after a day, or two days after, I felt that I’m falling down, crying."

We met her this summer as she was two-thirds of the way through her 60-session course of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). It’s a treatment long used to combat compression sickness in divers, and wounds that will not heal. But at the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research, in Be’er Ya’akov, Israel, they’re now also treating a very different malady: post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Negrin described her experiences with PTSD: "You feel like you’re going crazy. I call people and scream, ‘There is a terror attack again!’ And then you understand that you have no control of your brain."

Negrin is trying to regain that control, along with about 650 other October 7th survivors suffering from PTSD who are being treated, for free, alongside military veterans at the Sagol Center – currently the largest hyperbaric center worldwide. At a hospital in Israel, they’re using hyperbaric oxygen therapy – long used to combat compression sickness in divers – to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Dr. Shai Efrati runs this clinic, where they’re treating up to 350 patients a day, and are on the forefront of this sort of medicine. "What we are doing is actually tricking the body," Efrati said. "Hypoxia, lack of oxygen, is the most powerful trigger to induce all the repair mechanism cascade."

Efrati says they’re inducing repair mechanisms in the body and brain inside these pressurized chambers, where it feels like you’re scuba diving down to 30 feet. Patients breathe in pure oxygen, which under such high-pressure conditions the body can absorb at up to 16 times the normal level. Then, masks are removed for five-minute intervals.

Efrati said, "The decline from very high […]

A promising new treatment for PTSD