Benjamin Mudge is the founder of Bipolar Disorder CIC: a not-for-profit community interest company doing advocacy, education, mentoring and research work for people with bipolar disorder. He is nearly finished a PhD in Psychiatry at Flinders University, researching the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca ceremonies for people with bipolar disorder. He taught himself the science of bipolar disorder to cope with his own personal experience of it, while he was a psychiatric patient and working at neuroscience laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline. After psychiatrists prescribed him a series of 17 different pharmaceuticals (all of which had adverse effects), he walked away from pharmaceutical psychiatry and searched for his own medical solution to living with manic depression that is compatible with creativity, spirituality and exuberance. He has been managing his bipolar condition with ayahuasca for 18 years, without any need of pharmaceutical medication. His vision is to make sacred ayahuasca ceremonies available to bipolar people as an alternative treatment to pharmaceutical drugs and has a developed a unique recipe of ayahuasca and a special ceremony protocol that optimizes safety and efficacy for bipolar people. Mudge has a background of activism in peace, anti-apartheid and feminist movements and led the mission to the Parliament of the World’s Religions that succeeded in receiving the Parliament’s recognition of ayahuasca ceremonies as legitimate religious practices. His spirit is expressed via two music projects: Santa Estrela and Mudge FM.
Colloquium Presentation: To be determined
BIPOLAR DISORDER & PSYCHEDELICS:
CONTRAINDICATION OR TABOO?
Abstract
In the context of the pharmaceutical industry marketing ineffective, toxic, and soul-numbing drugs to bipolar people, we turn to psychedelic research for a sense of hope. Although people with bipolar disorder are the highest suicide risk population, we are usually excluded from psychedelic clinical trials, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and sacred ceremonies. Rather than helping us, the psychedelic research community excludes us because of the common belief that bipolar disorder and psychedelics are “contraindicated” and that it is of utmost importance to avoid doing harm. This presentation argues that the “contraindication” status is more of a cultural taboo than an evidence-based scientific fact, and that excluding us is both naïve and dangerous.
Firstly I acknowledge valid concerns about giving psychedelics to people with bipolar disorder by citing the mechanisms of bipolar brain chemistry and anecdotal evidence of bipolar people becoming triggered into manic episodes by ingesting psychedelics. Then I will deconstruct the “contraindication” status that bipolar disorder has in psychedelic research, demonstrating that the current standard procedure of excluding all bipolar people from all psychedelic clinical trials is simplistic and illogical. I will share evidence of bipolar people having positive outcomes taking psilocybin, ketamine, DMT and ayahuasca in research, ceremonial, and recreational settings, and explain the results with reference to sophisticated understandings of manic depression and psychedelic psychopharmacology.
I represent the voices of bipolar people that I work with, usually marginalized by the psychedelic research community despite being priority candidates for novel medicines. By sharing real-life stories, I provide an emotive explanation of how the community’s exclusion policy itself is having unintended consequences that are harmful, and sometimes deadly, for bipolar people.
I believe that bipolar people have the right to access psychedelic medicines, and I invite the psychedelic research community to engineer solutions which include and heal us. I will share a vision of how these solutions can be rolled out in scientific trials, psychotherapy clinics and sacred ceremonies.
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