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Robert Gallery thought he was losing his mind. Literally.
For years after his eight-season National Football League career ended in 2012, the former Iowa football All-American from East Buchanan High School was in extreme mental pain. His thoughts were foggy. He forgot names. He drank heavily. He went into fits of anger for no reason.
He had, in his words, suicidal ideations. He would tell his wife, Becca, that she and their three young children would be better off without him.
In the second half of his NFL tenure, Gallery had an emergency appendectomy. He broke his fibula. He got back surgery to fuse vertebrae, widen the spinal canal and clean out calcium deposits. What plagued him much more after his retirement, however, was an untold amount of head trauma from playing football at the highest level in college and the pros.
“Hundreds, if not thousands of concussions,” he said. “If you’d asked me 15 years ago, I’d have said I never had a concussion because I was never knocked out. A concussion is not just getting knocked out. It’s a blow that causes certain symptoms in your brain.”
A brain specialist told Gallery he likely had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease caused by repeated head trauma.
His NFL contracts earned Gallery about $46 million, and he says he was a good saver. So he was set up to enjoy the rest of his life with his family in comfort. Except that, like for so many NFL veterans, that wasn’t the case at all.
“We were afforded a lot of great things,” Gallery said last week from his home in California near Lake Tahoe. “I have a lot of great things from my career, making money and what I did. But it comes with a price.
“This is not a poor-me story. This is something that can help a lot of us, maybe people who don’t even think they have things going on that I may have.”
Nothing doctors prescribed him to take or suggested he do made a significant change. He continued to spiral until he went to Mexico in 2021 for a treatment using a psychedelic plant medicine called ibogaine.
Gallery said he felt markedly better immediately after coming out of the treatment and continues to feel good four years later. In a long phone interview for this story, his words and thoughts were as clear as Lake Tahoe itself and as purposeful as an offensive lineman trying to protect his quarterback.
Gallery, 44, recently became the cofounder and president of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization called Athletes for Care that promotes research, advocacy and solutions for athlete mental health.
“We’re mainly talking to retired, high-level athletes,” Gallery said, “but honestly we’re talking to all athletes about the things that can be done to help with their mental health. There are people that just have anxiety, or they have a lack of identity once they’re done with their sport. Or, they’re as far as I was with known brain damage.
“We want to help people get to a better place and have resources before they get to where I was.”
‘I’m not crazy’
Robert Gallery was lost in despair and desperation.
“A few years after I retired, I call it my rock-bottom,” he said. “I had all the things that a professional athlete or professional person has when they’re done with their job, the lack of identity, who I was and what I did. But then things started happening cognitively, emotionally. Things started to spiral as I was not thinking clearly. I was having trouble getting words out at times because my cognitive stuff was off so bad at certain times of the day.
“I got a brain scan, because I had a workers’ comp case with the NFL. It showed I had significant damage to my brain, areas that were not functioning at all. On the scan it looked like there was a hole there, which means there was no blood flow, no activity.
“So that for me was kind of a start, and it was actually a relief for me because up to that point I’d gotten so bad I thought I was losing my mind. I was hearing things, I was having suicidal ideations, things that would set off my triggers.
“So for me, the brain scan was an answer. Like ‘Oh, wow. This is why this is happening.’
“Becca and I went to the meeting with the neurologist and as she’s crying, I was laughing. She got upset with me and asked why I was laughing, and I said ‘Because I’m not crazy.’ There is a scientific reason why this is happening and it’s not just me being depressed.”
Gallery said one specialist told him ”Without seeing your brain, I can be pretty confident you have CTE.“
“I did everything I could because I wanted to try and improve in any way I could,” Gallery said, “because they told me if I did nothing, there’s a good chance I would be a statistic because of the amount of damage I have. And if you do nothing, if you keep feeding your brain alcohol, your brain deteriorates very rapidly with the amount of damage I had.
“If I had to go to an event. I would typically have quite a bit to drink. So I was a little bit social, but it was torture being there. People were like ‘Oh, you’re so great.’ And it was because I was half-loaded, and that’s how I coped to get through it, and then I go home and I’m sick because of that anxiety and all the things that came along with it.”
So, he followed all the physicians’ recommendations to try to alleviate his condition.
“I was doing everything I could for about a year and a half, got my hormones checked, blood work, IVs. I bought a hyperbaric chamber. I was doing all these things and I was a little better, but I was still struggling with the depression, struggling with the rage.
“Just my kids laughing would set me off. It wasn’t getting upset like a normal person, but an uncontrollable rage. And I knew it was for no reason. It didn’t make sense.
“I was never physical with my family, thank God. But you know, I can’t say the same for emotionally.”
A turning point
One day while Gallery was driving, he heard a podcast that he says was his link to restored health.
“I’d started listening to a lot of military podcasts during those times,” he said, “because they had stories that resonated to me. My dad was a Marine and I’m a huge supporter of our military. Listening to these guys, a lot of them had been special ops guys, Navy SEALS, Rangers, that were telling their stories. I thought it was me talking with the rage, the depression, the anxiety, the suicidal thoughts, all those things.
“I listened to all of Marcus Luttrell’s Team Never Quit podcasts. There was a gentleman named Marcus Capone and his wife, Amber, on there. He was a former college football player who I believe had a 13-year career in the Navy SEALS. He was talking, and I thought it was me.
“I actually pulled over and called Becca and said ‘You’ve got to listen to this. This is me talking, right?’ All the things (he had gone through with mental health difficulties), that was me. Then at the end of the podcast he talked about what helped him and what saved his life.
The Capones are founders of the VETS Foundation, which advocates for U.S. military veterans seeking psychedelic-assisted therapies.
“One of the older Navy SEALS took him to Mexico to do this medicine. He came back a different person. He and his wife decided after that they needed to share this with the rest of their community in the Special Operations, SEALS and all those guys. They started a foundation, and they started raising money and sending guys to Mexico to receive this treatment.
“Time after time, a guy went and came back a different person. I was at a point in my life where I’m like, ‘I’m not going to make it.’ It sounds so gloomy, but at that point, I didn’t know if I was going to because things had gotten so bad. I was using alcohol to cope. You put that on your brain, it’s terrible for it. So at that point, I needed to talk to them. And I reached out to his foundation, not thinking I would get an answer. And the next day, Marcus and Amber called me.”
Marcus Capone had a trip scheduled to take a few veterans to a clinic in Mexico for an ibogaine treatment, and invited Gallery to join them. It required a leap of faith, as well as pulling away from everything Gallery was doing under doctors’ advice.
“I’ve never done psychedelic drugs,” Gallery said. “I liked my beer and my tequila. So it was scary for me, but at that point I was like, ‘I need this to work for my family, for myself. I’ve got to do it. I’m in.’
“I had to get off all the medicine I was on, because ibogaine can react with antidepressants, sleeping pills and all these things and send you into cardiac arrest. It is a very powerful medicine. So I went cold turkey, which wasn’t what any doctor would recommend, but I went cold turkey on all my the meds that I was taking because I was not missing this opportunity in my mind and I needed it.”
Psychedelic drug ‘seems to be resetting the brain’
Ibogaine is a psychoactive substance extracted from the root bark of the iboga plant, native to the central African rain forest. It has hallucinogenic and dream-inducing effects. It is illegal in the United States and most of Europe, but is unregulated or allowed for prescription use in Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Brazil and South Africa, and available under special medical access in Canada.
Dr. Joseph Peter Barsuglia, a clinical and research psychologist who advises ibogaine clinics in Mexico, told the New York Times in 2024 that ibogaine “fosters the creation of new neurons and neuroplasticity” and “seems to be resetting the brain pharmacologically.”
Ibogaine is classified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule I drug, along with others that include ecstasy, heroin and LSD. The DEA says drugs with that classification have high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical treatment use in the U.S., and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.
Proponents of ibogaine disagree. They are supported by a 2024 Stanford University study that found the drug greatly improved symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in 30 special operations veterans diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.
The case for the legalization of ibogaine treatment in the U.S. took a major step forward last month when Texas’ state legislature approved $50 million in state funding for ibogaine trials.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been championing the drug as a treatment for substance use disorder and traumatic brain injury.
“I’ve become a complete believer in plant medicine, over the last five or six years in particular,” Perry said in January on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
“My job and our job is to be able to educate the public about this psychoactive plant medicine that absolutely is showing stunning ability to bring people back to normalcy, to reset their brains, to literally give them their lives back,” he said.
W. Bryan Hubbard is the executive director of the American Ibogaine Initiative. He has worked with Perry and gotten to know Gallery. In a phone interview with The Gazette, he said the Texas legislation “absolutely has national repercussions that, in sum total, present the real potential to make ibogaine the Manhattan Project of our time.”
‘Everything was different’
Gallery said the ibogaine treatment, which typically lasts 24 to 48 hours, “is not a fun process. It is a very taxing on your mind, very taxing on your body. But the day after I got home, everything was different. I had zero anxiety, I had zero rage, I had zero suicide thoughts. I was actually happy to be alive.
“Something would happen that normally would have set me off into a fit of rage, and there was no reaction. My wife was confused, because there were things that normally would set off rage or depression, and there was nothing. It had been as simple as my kids spilling something at dinner and you would have thought the world was ending with my reaction.
“When I got home, I was on the floor tickling them and we were laughing, and I hadn’t done that in a long time.”
Gallery went back in 2023 after, he said, “things were creeping back in. It was nothing of the very dark stuff I had previous to the first one.”
He returned in 2024, ”for growth and not for survival. … I came out of it like I think I’ve done enough of this medicine. Never say never, but I’ve been in a very, very good place, and I’ve learned a lot of tools along the way to keep me in that place.“
He got back home to Tahoe last week after taking a former teammate to Mexico for a treatment.
“To get a text from his wife this week of how he’s different, how he’s not losing his mind on things … it’s the most gratifying thing that I think I’ve ever felt,” Gallery said.
It’s taken four years for Gallery, who always has been a private person, to feel comfortable discussing all this publicly. He has done a few podcasts, but now he’s ready to be even more visible. He’ll speak at a June 18 Denver gathering for “psychedelic research, medicine, policy, and culture.”
“I want to reach out and start doing some stuff in Iowa because I want to start where my core was and I think those are the people that care the most,” he said.
“In the past, I would not have done it. My friends that I’ve told, they were like ‘You could have called me.’ I know I could have. In the moment, I didn’t want to. I was ashamed. I hid this for a long time.”
“Robert is just an impressive human being, based on who he is naturally,” Hubbard said. “What has been remarkable to me is to listen to his personal testimony of restoration in terms of the condition that he was in when he came out of the NFL, the way he experienced and fought with that condition, the way in which the medical options we have within the United States were not responsive to that condition, and how he found restoration of his literal mind, his brain, as well as his heart.”
Gallery’s name will endure in Iowa. He won the 2003 Outland Trophy. Twenty years later, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and the UI Athletics Hall of Fame, and his name was included in the Kinnick Stadium Wall of Honor. Last year, he and his wife came back to see the Iowa women’s basketball team play. Becca Gallery was Iowa basketball player Becca McCann in the early 2000s.
“I can actually come back and enjoy it now,” he said, “like I’m not crawling out of my skin.”
‘There are consequences’ for football’s ‘gladiators’
Gallery said his wife will be an excellent voice in helping him tell his story, but she isn’t yet ready to do so. Their daughters, Hayden and Brooklyn, are 15 and 12. Son Lincoln is 10.
Gallery said if Lincoln wants to play football, he’ll support, encourage and even teach him.
“I think football taught me a lot of things. I think I am much more educated on safety aspects and what it can do to you. So we definitely talk about that. He’s not playing Pop Warner at 10 years old. I don’t think he needs to. I don’t think his brain needs that.
“He doesn’t need to be me. But if he wants to do it, I will help take him as far as I can. But there will be things that maybe 20, 30 years ago, we as society didn’t know or see. I did it myself, playing in the league, staggering off the field, and I knew I was concussed. I was like ‘I’m not coming out.’
“So there will be those aspects of things that we’ll keep an eye on.
“I’m very proud to be very present for my kids and I know they now know and understand that was not the real me before.”
Gallery says he has no regrets playing football because of all he learned and experienced from it. But unlike most spectators, he knows exactly what he’s seeing.
“This is real life,” he said. “Any fan, they love seeing their favorite players as gladiators on the field, but there are consequences that come. I don’t watch football much, but the big cheer when someone gets lit up, that’s different for me.
“My wife, she’s in tears because she knows what it’s doing to that person’s brain when he’s taking these licks.
“Sports is supposed to be fun and you’re supposed to cheer, but I think people hopefully as my story comes out, people will pick a little different light with how they treat athletes.”
Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com
