By Dr Alana Roy

My name is Dr. Alana Roy and for those who know and love me, Lani Roy. I am the National Practice Manager of Mind Medicine Psychological Support Services and the Co-lead on CPAT (Mind Medicine’s ‘Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies’). I am a Social Worker, Psychologist, Counsellor, Researcher, Teacher, mother, and wife.

I am also an Ayahuasca dietero* a psychedelic and plant medicine advocate… And I am finally ready to share my story.

When I turned 30 years old, I was a decade into my career as a sexual abuse and suicide prevention therapist. …

By Peter Hunt AM

As a young person, I never thought that I would be an Australian. I lived in a country town in England and my family seemed secure and loving (even though relationships between my mother and my father were sometimes strained). Then when I was 13, without any warning, my father committed suicide. He hadn’t let on that his business was failing, and he dealt with the burden of impending bankruptcy by taking his own life. In his letter to my mother, he said that he thought taking his life was for the best. …

By Tania de Jong AM and Peter Hunt AM

Mind Medicine Australia (MMA) welcomes the Government’s commitment to mental health and its drive to improve the mental health of Australians and reduce suicide rates. The increased funding for the sector announced in the Budget is an especially important part of this.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in his Budget speech that suicide prevention was a “national priority”, however the enormous and largely unspoken “elephant in the room” is the lack of effective treatments for many Australians suffering from mental illness.

Too many Australians who seek help are not getting well simply…

By Scott Leckie and Tania de Jong AM

Following the American decision to bring their troops home from Afghanistan after some 20 years in that troublesome country, Australia will also soon do the same. After losing 41 Australian lives, 261 wounded in action, facing war crimes allegations and billions of dollars of expense, thousands of our country’s bravest men and women will soon be coming home. Sadly, many of the more than 39,000 soldiers who served in Afghanistan will have varying degrees of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is nothing unique to the ADF. All soldiers everywhere suffer from PTSD. …

By Ella Morter

The Psychedelic experience is inherently intimate. These medicines are not passive, rather they demand that we pay intimate attention to our inner world, confront it and allow ourselves to be transformed. Many people that work with psychedelic medicines in more traditional settings speak of the medicines as personified beings that come and work directly with them at the deepest levels of their psyche; if that is not intimate then I don’t know what is! [1] In a more modern therapeutic setting, what does it mean to work in an intimate way with a medicine? How do we…

By Annie Mason

I am writing this as a mother, in the hope that my words may open the closed minds of our politicians, the TGA and the RANZCP, who we rely upon to ensure every Australian has access to the latest medical therapies.

Our 26-year-old daughter suffers from treatment resistant PTSD and severe depression as a result of a trauma when she was only 11. Rape at any age is devasting, but for a child the impact is profound. We live with the daily fact that with the current treatment of anti- depressants and anti- psychotic drugs available to…

From Despair to Hope: Healing with Psychedelic Medicines

Simone Dowding

Here I was a successful entrepreneur living a millionaire lifestyle. I had made it! Or so I thought. But something was missing. I didn’t feel the happiness that I’d been promised by society. I felt lied too, that I’d been somehow tricked. The success, I had valued and strived my whole life for, had left me empty and in a marriage that had died in the process. I don’t think anyone can describe the loss of a marriage. The loss of the family you had always wished for, the loss of everything…

By Dr Eli Kotler

The Royal Commission’s report on the Victorian mental health system sent shockwaves throughout the State, one of which landed squarely on a patient of mine. They noted that Victoria’s mental health system is “not geared for…change”. Just to ensure we got the message, and despite a Federal Government TGA approval, my request to treat my traumatized patient with MDMA-assisted therapy was declined by our state’s regulatory authority.

To be clear, my disappointment lies not with the state government regulators, nor with the medical opinions suggesting MDMA-assisted therapy should not be used for treatment of traumatized patients…