MDMA: Could it have been designed with psychotherapy in mind? - Dr Ben Sessa

Ben will discuss:
•Psychedelic drugs in medicine – very brief history
•The history of therapeutic MDMA
•How MDMA works to enhance psychotherapy
•The scourge of PTSD
•Risks and relative safety of MDMA
•Challenges to the clinical use of PTSD
•MDMA, Politics and Medical Research
•The future for psychiatry

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lectures series presents:

MDMA: Could it have been designed with psychotherapy in mind?

Dr Ben Sessa

Ben will discuss:
•Psychedelic drugs in medicine – very brief history
•The history of therapeutic MDMA
•How MDMA works to enhance psychotherapy
•The scourge of PTSD
•Risks and relative safety of MDMA
•Challenges to the clinical use of PTSD
•MDMA, Politics and Medical Research
•The future for psychiatry
In Ben’s view this is not a controversial subject – such is the overwhelming evidence for the safety and efficacy of clinical MDMA use, but others may disagree. Please join the debate.

In the spirit of the modern, stream-lined NHS, Dr Ben Sessa will reduce costs by presenting his biography in salient bullet points:
- 1972 born to a left-wing libertarian Quaker family; encouraged to protest peacefully, shun television, sew and play the piano.
- 1987 suffered near-death experience on school rock climbing holiday and decided to strive to become ‘the world’s first doctor who didn’t hurt children’.
- 1994 completed psychology BSc at UCL.
- 1997 qualified as medical doctor in London in 1997 then went to Oxford to specialise in Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
- 2005 shocked by my profession’s apparent lack of knowledge about psychedelics published an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry – the first mention of medical LSD since the 1960s.
- 2007 join Professor David Nutt’s psychopharmacology department in Bristol and contribute to the now infamous Home Office review of Ecstasy, which eventually lead to David’s sacking as chair of the ACMD.
- 2009 become the first person in the UK in 40 years to be legally given a psychedelic drug, when injected by David Nutt with intravenous psilocybin as part of a Bristol University research project.
- 2011 co-chairs UK psychedelic conference Breaking Convention.
- Currently working clinically with the National Deaf Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service and continuing to research psychedelic drugs as medical treatments.
- 2012 plans to run UK’s first MDMA clinical study
- I am driven to promote the subject of Psychedelic Therapy by the observation that traditional psychiatric treatments are often failing my patients. We owe it to these people to do this research.

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