Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics today. Joe Moore here, joined by Kyle Buller, Michelle Janikian, and Benjamin Mudge.

I'm really excited. Benjamin Mudge, about a year ago, was part of an article Michelle wrote for us on including bipolar folks in psychedelic research.

And Benjamin, you're doing PhD work around this topic, is that right?

That's right. So I'm doing a PhD in the

psychiatry department at Flinders University, which is in Australia. Now I'm living in England.

And I'm also the director of bipolar disorder CIC, which is a not-for-profit community interest

company working for bipolar people's interests in developing new treatment protocols.

And my background, I'm not actually a psychiatrist, so my background is a creative person and a

political activist for all my life who has bipolar disorder.

So I've experienced manic depression since I was a teenager.

I was wrongly diagnosed at first and then diagnosed accurately when I was doing another PhD,

actually in a women's studies department. And I was prescribed the wrong antidepressant and

became manic, psychotic, got locked in hospital,

and went on a journey through the mainstream psychiatric system,

tried 17 different prescription pharmaceutical drugs,

and like SSRIs, antipsychotics, lithium and all sorts of stuff, they gave me some

really bad side effects. So I left psychiatry, tried to figure out my own way, tried a bunch of

herbs from herbalists and Chinese doctors. They didn't work. And then 15 years ago, I discovered

ayahuasco. And I've been off psychiatric

pharmaceutical drugs ever since then and I was given a scholarship by Flinders University

psychiatry department to do research to into the therapeutic potential

for bipolar people in general.

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