This is an ABC podcast.

For several years now, there has been growing buzz around the use of psychedelics to treat mental health issues.

It's been dubbed the psychedelic renaissance and promises new ways of tackling illnesses like depression and anxiety,

using a little bit of psychedelic substance and a lot of psychotherapy.

This year, several large research trials have published results on the efficacy of these drugs,

and there are plenty more studies in the pipeline, including work here in Australia.

I'm Sana Khadar, and for this episode of All in the Mind, we've been looking at the latest research

in this space. And producer James Bullen has been sifting through the papers and analyzing the results.

Hi, James.

Hi, Sana. Yeah, I wanted to kick things off with one of the major

areas of promise for the use of psychedelics, which is in post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

Dr. Rick Doblin is the founder and director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic

Studies or Maps in the United States.

He's also the senior author on a paper published in Nature Medicine earlier this year,

a Phase 3 trial looking at the use of MDMA, sometimes known as Ecstasy, to treat severe PTSD.

And he recently presented at Mind Medicine Australia's International Summit for Psychedelic

Therapies.

Phase 3 is reasonably far down the clinical trial pipeline.

It means the treatment has been shown to be relatively safe and that it has some effect.

In phase 3, it's tested on larger numbers of people and often measured up against existing treatments.

Rick begins by telling me that this so-called psychedelic renaissance, the renewed research

interest in psychedelic treatments over the past two decades, continues to grow.

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