Ben Sessa

Ben Sessa is psychedelics researcher, psychotherapist, advocate for legalization, author, co-founder of Breaking Convention, and Chief Medical Officer at AWAKN Life Sciences.

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He is an outspoken critic of the current system by which drugs are prohibited, he believes a more progressive policy of regulation would reduce the harms of drug use, increase access to services and provide more opportunities for psychedelic research.

He has published an overview of the psychedelics field in 2012 in The Psychedelic Renaissance. This book presents a holistic view of where the research stood at that time. His fictional book on psychedelics, To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic, is more in line with his view that psychedelics therapy should be made accessible, pronto.

He is a co-founder of Breaking Convention, one of the leading psychedelic conferences.

As Chief Medical Officer at AWAKN Life Sciences (which bought into his private practice ‘Mandala Therapy Limited’), he hopes to bring psychedelics-assisted therapy to the UK. He works closely together with many of the researchers of which David Nutt is the most notable.

Notable Research Papers

• A review of 3, 4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)-assisted psychotherapy (Sessa & Nutt, 2019)
• MDMA and PTSD treatment: “PTSD: from novel pathophysiology to innovative therapeutics” (Sessa, 2017)
• Is it time to revisit the role of psychedelic drugs in enhancing human creativity? (Sessa, 2008)
• Can psychedelics have a role in psychiatry once again? (Sessa, 2005)

Find more on Google Scholar or PubMed

Media

He has given many talks, these are some of them:

• HEALING TRAUMA WITH MDMA – Ben Sessa (The Third Wave, April 2020)
• Ben Sessa: Child Abuse, Trauma, MDMA Therapy and The Future of Medicine (NPV, 2018)
• Ben Sessa: MDMA Therapy – A Child Psychiatrist’s Perspective (Psychedelic Science, 2017)
• MDMA as an Antibiotic for Infectious Mental Disease – Ben Sessa (ICPR, 2016)

More media:

• Psychedelic Medical Start-Up AWAKN Life Sciences Enters the UK Market with Dr. Ben Sessa (press release, June 2020)
• Can MDMA help to treat addiction? (ICPR, February 2020)
• The future of psychedelic science: What the next decade holds (New Altlas, December 2019)
• Dr. Ben Sessa – Preliminary Results from MDMA Assisted Therapy for Alcohol Use Disorder (Psychedelics Today, September 2018)
• New Research Shows MDMA can be comedown-free (MixMag, September 2019)
• MDMA treatment for alcoholism could reduce relapse, study suggests (The Guardian, August 2019)
• Dr. Ben Sessa – MDMA in the UK (Psychedelics Today, February 2018)