Mark Baxter

We're actually just opening up windows in the brain so we can be better at the therapy.

So many people who maybe have experience trying recreational MDMA, those people would know that just having MDMA alone doesn't really do much for their mental health.

In fact, they might struggle a few days after and stuff if they're combining it with dancing all night and drinking too much as well.

And again, having a mushroom experience might be interesting or kind of like beneficial in some ways, but it doesn't automatically help with depression.

So it's the therapy component.

So what we're doing in the treatment is these are long therapeutic programs for like four months.

We have three preparation sessions where we orientate a person to what they're going to be expecting, what it is they want, what their goals are, what their intentions are for the therapy, helping them with certain skills and resources.

So when they're in the sessions, which are generally pretty difficult, they've got something they can use as kind of tools and getting to know them and getting to know us and building that trust together.

On the dosing days, these are all days and all day sessions, we give a person the psychedelic in the morning, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin.

And then we have this kind of elongated therapy session.

So for MDMA, a person's coming in to work on their post-traumatic stress disorder and what's showing up in context of their life.

The MDMA gives them certain qualities that they don't have in everyday consciousness, more self-love, more self-compassion generally, a little bit more energy, a sort of a reduction in fear so they can go towards memories or experiences that they couldn't do in normal consciousness.

And this ability to sort of really take perspective, to be able to see what's happening now, but also to zoom right out and see both the past and the present and the future a little bit more clearly.

That allows people to engage in the difficult trauma therapy with these kind of resources on board.

And there's two therapists.

So we've got two therapists in the room, each with different kind of temperament and skill set and relationship to the person.

And so a person will go between doing internal work with a prescribed playlist, so people have headphones on.

They're going in with a certain set of skills and resources, which we've helped them with.

And they're working on their own inner psyche, their nervous system, their memories, their history.

And then they'll pop out every now and again and engage with the therapist and do a piece of therapy working on that.